You might see your competitors as major obstacles to your business, but in fact they can be used to perfect your marketing strategy.
Google offers many ways for you to find and learn from your competition. Being one of the only marketing channels that shows your ad directly next to your competitors, Paid Search can be a great way to get your brand in front of users. The most basic way to target your competitors on Paid Search is to bid on their brand keywords. While you cannot use these terms in ads, you can still show up when users are searching for them. This puts your brand in the user’s mind every time someone searches for your competitor.
Another strategic way to tap into your competitor’s audience, is to bid on their keywords specifically for your Remarketing campaigns. This is a feature that AdWords offers that allows you to specifically target users who have previously been to your website. With this level of targeting, you can change your marketing strategy from driving awareness about your brand, to driving conversions. Since these users have already been to your website once before, they have shown direct interest in your offering and are more qualified. By bidding on competitor keywords, you can recapture this audience and remind them of your brand when they are searching for an alternative.
There are many ad platforms that give you the ability to refine your targeting to this granularity, one of them being Gmail. Gmail ads have some of the lowest Cost Per Clicks in the industry, and much higher click through rates than regular banner ads. Gmail also gives you the ability to show your ads right when a user opens a competitor’s email. Sometimes it is all about showing your ad at the right time, in the right place.
Lastly, if you are trying to “steal” your competitors’ customers, it is critical to have a suitable landing page for that experience. Let’s say that you search for “Goodyear tires” and an ad for Toyo Tires comes up. Now this result isn’t initially what you were looking for, but you decide to check it out anyway. Once you’ve clicked on the ad, you’re going to want to be told why Toyo is better than your initial thought of Goodyear. One way to do this would be to include testimonials or reviews, to showcase other customers who have bought from Toyo Tires and what their experience was like. If you don’t have a lot of these on hand, another strategy is to include something enticing, like a deal or promotion. This shows them something you have, but your competitor does not.
You should never ignore your competitors when it comes to developing your marketing strategy. Study them, learn from them, and see what you can adopt from them. Conceptual Minds can ensure that you are learning as much as you can from your competitors, and help you incorporate them into your marketing strategy.
