It’s often said that rivalry is good for business. It drives you to be at your best all the time. Think Walmart vs. Kmart, Starbucks vs. Dunkin Donuts, Red Lobster vs. Joe’s Crab shack, or Home Depot vs. AC Moore.
Unquestionably, part of the excitement of rivalry is stealing consumers from your competitors. You can do that with the help of very keen marketing and advertising! In this blog you will learn a couple of wonderful marketing strategies you can use to get your business in front of your competitors’ consumers and turn them into YOUR consumers instead.
Use Your Rivals’ Emails with Gmail Ads
A brilliantly, yet tricky competitive marketing tactic your business should start using now is targeting folks who have recently shown interest in the things your opposition sells. With Gmail Ads, you can do seo keyword targeting on your rivals’ brand terms.
Even as you read this, individuals who are in the market for your rival’s products are getting emails from your opponents and those emails mention your competitors’ industry terms. For instance, if you were contending with Burger King, you could target its brand name as part of a Gmail ad campaign so that every time a Burger King Newsletter arrives in somebody’s Gmail inbox, your business ends up in its inbox as well. Clearly, your email should tell Burger King Subscribers all about your great competing website and product and why they should check yours out.
So if you want to try to pinch some sales, target the trademarks of your rivals. Make sure you use an email subject line that will have customers clicking your Gmail Ads in hordes. Use only the best-performing subject headlines, the ones with the maximum open rates. These will be your unicorns.
Pro Tip: because these folks are already in the marketplace for a competing answer, it’s likely that more individuals will click on your Gmail ads, which reduces your costs.
Interrupt Your Opponents’ Videos with YouTube Ads
Not long ago I was on YouTube searching for a video to show me how to use my new Samsung phone. Before I could watch the video I was looking for, I had to sit through another ad. But the brilliant part was that this ad wasn’t for Samsung, but for its competitor, Apple.
In this ad Apple described why it is a better provider than Samsung and emphasized an offer to switch carriers, before I could even see the video for the brand I had searched for.
To implement this competitive advertising tactic for your own marketing campaigns, craft the most watchable TrueView ad you can, totaling in how much you’re willing to spend. You want to target your company’s YouTube ads so that whenever somebody searches for the YouTube videos of a competitor they’ll see your company’s ad first. If you do it correct, the user might not even watch your competitor’s video!
Copy & Target Your Rivals’ Twitter Followers
There are tools that let you to download a list of every single Twitter follower for any account. One such tool is known as BirdSong Analytics. You can use that to download a list of all your rival’s Twitter followers. Costs usually start around $35 and go up the more followers the Twitter account has.
Once you have the report, you can use those Twitter handles to craft a list that you’ll then upload to Twitter Ads. Make sure to pick the option to “add tailored audiences.” It is important to know that uploading the list may take a few hours to process.
You can then produce ads to get your company in front of the Twitter users who are already following your rivals and are likely in the marketplace to buy or switch to a comparable product or service. Sounds smart, right?
There are many targeting possibilities to select from (for instance, demographics, interests, keywords, remarketing).
After understanding what your marketing budget is going to be, then comes the real fun. It’s time to get inspired and compose your copy.
Don’t Let Your Rivals Have All the Satisfaction!
Remember, all these competitive ad approaches are putting your business in front of customers who are interested in your opponents, which means they’re much more likely to be in the market for your business. You just have to demonstrate to them that what your business offers better services and products than what your competitors do!