What is marketing whitespace, and how do you find it in a crowded category?

Marketing whitespace is a message, audience, customer need or content format that the competitors in your category leave unclaimed. You find it by labelling everything your rivals publish, counting how often each label appears and how many brands use it, and then checking that the gap has real audience demand behind it. A gap with no demand is not whitespace. It is empty space.

Key takeaways

• Whitespace sits inside an existing category: it is an unclaimed position in how brands communicate, not a new market.
• For every need, tone, audience and format, measure two things: its share of all posts and the number of brands that use it.
• Separate true whitespace from territory one competitor already owns and from space nobody responds to.
• Validate demand with signals the competitor set cannot create on its own: within-brand engagement, search interest, audience moments and a small test.
• In SOMIN's analysis of 1,740 organic posts from 16 social-listening brands, the centre of the category was crowded, while trust, hopeful tones, testimonials and case studies were left thin.

What is marketing whitespace?

Marketing whitespace is a position in a category's communication that buyers would respond to but no competitor holds. It comes in four kinds:

• Message: a claim or story nobody makes, such as talking about proof when everyone talks about speed.
• Audience: a group that rivals rarely address directly, such as one job role inside the buying committee.
• Need: a customer need, such as trust or control, that the category's content seldom speaks to.
• Format: a type of content few brands use, such as case studies, customer testimonials or tutorials.

Whitespace is smaller than a blue ocean. W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne's Blue Ocean Strategy in Harvard Business Review is about creating uncontested market space instead of fighting over existing demand. Whitespace works inside existing demand: the buyers are already there, but the brands talking to them have converged on the same few things to say.

Two things look like whitespace but are not. Owned territory is a position one competitor has made its own; it looks empty when you count brands, but buyers already link it to someone else. Dead space is a position nobody uses because nobody responds to it.

Why does whitespace matter in a crowded category?

Because when every brand says the same thing, buyers cannot tell them apart, and the best-known or cheapest option wins by default. Crowded categories drift towards sameness for understandable reasons, which we explain in why ads in one category all look the same. Whitespace is the practical counter: a place where your message does not compete with ten near-identical ones.

It also makes creative work easier to judge. A brief that says "own the trust conversation nobody else is having" is easier to write to, and to evaluate, than one that says "be more engaging".

How do you find whitespace, step by step?

Label the category's content with one codebook, count share and breadth for every label, then sort the gaps.

1. Fix the competitive set and the window. List the brands a buyer would compare you with and pick a period long enough to smooth out single campaigns: at least a quarter.
2. Collect everything they publish. Take organic posts from their social profiles and ads from public libraries such as Meta's Ad Library and Google's Ads Transparency Center. Keep organic and paid apart, because they behave differently.
3. Label each piece the same way. Tag the customer need it speaks to, its tone, the audience it addresses and its format. SOMIN does this automatically for every post; by hand, a shared codebook and two people coding a sample work.
4. Count share and breadth. For each label, record the share of posts that carry it and how many brands use it at all. Share shows volume; breadth shows whether the position is contested.
5. Check the largest brand's share. If one brand produces most of the posts on a label, the label is owned territory, not open ground.
6. Shortlist the gaps. Low share plus low concentration makes a candidate. Validate demand before anyone writes a line.

If you sell in several countries, run the count market by market; our guide to competitor ad analysis by market covers the local version with ads libraries.

What does whitespace look like in a real category?

We ran the method on a category we know well: social listening and social media management software. The SOMIN workspace tracks 19 brands, SOMIN and 18 vendors including Meltwater, Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Brand24, Emplifi and Sprinklr. Between 1 July and 17 October 2026, 16 of them published 1,740 organic posts, and 1,730 carried readable labels. SOMIN's models infer the labels, and one post can carry several, so shares add up to more than 100%.

Source: SOMIN analysis of 1,740 organic posts from 16 social-listening and social media management brands, 1 July to 17 October 2026 (shares of the 1,730 labelled posts). The PR row merges two labels that mean the same thing.

The centre of the category is easy to see. Most posts are informative, confident thought leadership about knowledge and growth, addressed to business owners and entrepreneurs, and almost every brand works there. No brand produces more than about a fifth of any crowded label, so nobody owns that ground either. It is shared and undifferentiated.

The gaps split three ways. Trust appears in fewer than one post in ten, and the 170 posts that carry it are spread across 11 brands with no clear leader, which is what open ground looks like. Hopeful tones, testimonials and case studies are similarly thin. SOMIN's own profile posted 9 of the 26 case studies, so we read that format as open for the other brands rather than for us.

Some low-share labels are not open at all. The Buffer Analyze profile posted 22 of the 23 posts with a transparent tone and 83 of the 154 posts about autonomy, and Meltwater posted 58 of the 72 posts addressed to PR professionals. Copying those positions means walking into someone else's territory, where buyers will credit the original.

How do you check that a gap has real audience demand?

Use signals that do not come from the competitor set alone. A gap in what brands say tells you about brands, not about buyers.

Compare engagement within each brand

Raw averages mislead, because big accounts get more engagement whatever they post. Compare each brand's posts on the candidate label with that brand's own average instead. Of the six brands with at least seven hopeful-toned posts, four saw those posts beat their own average: Buffer Analyze (2.1 times), Emplifi (2.5 times), YouScan (2.3 times) and Sprinklr (about twice). That is a promising signal for a tone used in only 5.9% of posts.

Trust is less clear. Of the eight brands with at least seven trust posts, four beat their own average and four fell short. Engagement neither confirms nor rules out the gap, so the demand case has to come from somewhere else.

Look at the audience side

Check whether buyers look for the need. Search interest is one source: Google describes Trends data as a sample of real searches, normalised and scaled from 0 to 100, so use it to compare terms and periods rather than as a count of searches. Audience moments are another. In the same workspace, SOMIN's moments model produced a search moment for a strategist persona: "I'm frustrated with traditional metrics like follower count that don't accurately reflect influence anymore." It is generated from published content, not said by a real person, but it points at the same need: numbers buyers can believe.

Run a small test

Before you build a campaign on a gap, test it. Pre-score two or three creatives that use it against your usual approach (see what creative clickability is), then run a small paid test with a fixed budget and one success measure agreed in advance.

What are the common whitespace traps?

• One brand drives the average. Posts tagged with the need for esteem averaged 59 engagements, against 31 for all posts, which looks like a gap worth taking. But Buffer Analyze's 17 esteem posts averaged 285; without them, the other 94 averaged about 18, below the category average.
• Owned territory counted as empty. A label with a low share can still belong to one competitor, as transparency does here. Always check the largest brand's share.
• Dead space. Empathetic posts were rare (22) and averaged 5 engagements. Rarity may mean buyers do not want empathy from this kind of brand, or that it was done badly. Test before concluding either way.
• Small numbers. A label on a dozen posts can swing on one viral post. Treat anything with fewer than about 20 posts as a hypothesis.
• Label noise. Machine-inferred labels split synonyms: "PR professionals" and "public relations professionals" appeared separately here. Merge them before counting, and read a sample of the posts behind every label you act on.
• A gap you cannot fill. Whitespace only helps if you have the proof to occupy it. A trust position needs evidence, such as a published method, customer results or data people can check, not just the word "trust".

How do you turn whitespace into a campaign?

Write it as a brief: who the audience is, which tension the gap answers, what you will claim and what proof makes the claim believable. Our guide to turning a social listening insight into a brief walks through that step with real data, and the creative brief template gives you the fields.

Then re-run the count every quarter. Whitespace closes once competitors notice it, and the measurement that found the gap is the same one that tells you when it has gone. SOMIN Strategy keeps that competitor map current, with every label traceable to the posts behind it.

FAQ

Sources

• W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne, "Blue Ocean Strategy", Harvard Business Review, October 2004.
• Google, FAQ about Google Trends data, Trends Help.