Evolving your business shouldn’t cost the earth.
May 7, 2025/
Every couple of months, we delve into a topic using the power of social listening and analytics tool Brandwatch. This month, we conducted competitor analysis into Scotland’s growing wave and tidal energy sector, showing how this type of analysis can inform the development of a brand’s communications and content strategy.
The Scottish Government has described Scotland as a “world leader in the development and deployment of wave and tidal energy technologies”, with EMEC (the European Marine Energy Centre) in Orkney, “the world’s largest tidal stream array and the world’s most powerful tidal stream turbine”.
The sector comprises a diverse mix of companies, each developing, testing and attempting to scale their technological innovations to a rapidly expanding global commercial market. A key component of realising the ambition to scale an emerging product is the ability to effectively engage stakeholders through compelling communications, building awareness, trust, advocacy and commercial interest.
We used Brandwatch to take a deep dive (excuse the pun) into this sector, conducting competitor analysis on 11 businesses working in wave and tidal energy, with operations connected to Scotland. We discovered which are the strongest performers for coverage both in the press and on social media, as well as the stories and themes that were gaining traction. These insights can help brands who are performing less strongly to develop communications and content strategies that fit their purpose, brand identity and commercial ambition.
Analysing the share of voice between your brand and your competitors enables you to benchmark your performance, highlight where you are performing strongly (or missing opportunities) and determine if more could be done to help your owned content (i.e. content published by you as a brand) connect more strongly with your audience (earned content).
A share of voice comparison of owned competitor content enabled us to identify which competitors are best in class, getting their stories out there most strongly on social media and in online news.
This chart shows that the conversation is fairly evenly split amongst a handful of companies (CorPower, Nova Innovation, Simply Blue Group and Verlume) who are driving the highest volume. Companies with a lower share of voice include Quoceant, QED Naval and AWS Ocean Energy.
This could indicate that those with a lower share of voice could benefit from extra communications and marketing support in growing their part in the conversation, developing their social media presence, or promoting stories about their activities via online media.
However, when we analysed earned share of voice (i.e. conversation about companies that is not posted by the companies themselves), the picture was very different.
This chart shows some very clear differences in comparison with the owned chart above. Companies generating the highest volumes of earned content were CorPower Ocean, Orbital Marine and Nova Innovation, with CorPower driving 50% of the earned conversation in the entire dataset.
To provide context, earned content is considered positive because it represents organic, unpaid conversation, content, discussion (buzz) and publicity from third-party sources like customers, journalists, the trade, thought leaders and so on, all of which signifies genuine trust and credibility in the eyes of the audience, making it more impactful than paid advertising and generally perceived as more trustworthy.
This could signal that while some companies are generating more owned content than others, it isn’t necessarily engaging audiences as effectively as it could. For others, it’s a case of growing more quantity and quality into their communications outputs.
So, what type of content is resonating most? And why does CorPower have such a strong presence? To find out, we looked more deeply into the data to understand what content was driving conversational volume on social, or attention from the press.
The word cloud shows the key topics in the CorPower dataset. For CorPower, this was driven almost entirely by one story – a short video showcasing CorPower’s C4, a buoy-shaped energy converter. People online were engaging positively with content on exciting new technology and innovative design, presented in an engaging, understandable and relatable way. This is a great example of demonstrating the importance of finding ways to visualise storytelling around complex product innovations in an engaging and accessible way, and how this can have a hugely positive impact on the power of your storytelling.
Nova Innovation and Orbital Marine also drove earned conversational volume, although that volume was more consistent over the course of the year and was generated by multiple stories. For these two brands, we looked at the most shared content to determine which stories were driving attention, engagement and network advocacy.
For Nova Innovation, the most shared content included promotion of a piece in The National written by Nova’s CEO warning that Scotland isn’t “capitalising on our renewables potential and risking our future again” (quoted from the commenter sharing the piece). This key piece of coverage consisted of thought leadership written by the CEO of the company, commenting more widely on the sector’s situation in Scotland.
For Orbital Marine, the most shared content included a tweet noting that tidal power can continue to be generated even when its stormy, and another noting that “the Orbital Marine tidal turbine really earns its sci-fi aesthetic considering that it’s being powered by the moon”. The notion that this technology is “powered by the moon” is an engaging one that is connecting with the audience and could be capitalised on for further content creation.
Analysing content from your competitors that has generated attention, and engagement online can provide inspiration for your own content creation and strategy. It can enable you to identify themes, trends, use of language or topics that connect with your potential audience and then creatively apply that to the context of your own brand or product.
For organisations seeking to develop their content strategy, competitor analysis is a vital starting point. It can help you identify the gaps in your strategy or action, identify key topics and themes that are attracting attention and engagement, and tap into them in a way that is relevant to your own brand and story.
The data behind this blog was powered using Brandwatch, the exceptional social listening and analytics platform.
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