Online Espionage

September 18, 2006 8:38 pm by Jarom Adair

How to Choose an Online Marketing Strategy Based on Your Competitor’s Weaknesses

You’ve got competitors. Those competitors are using a number of marketing strategies to find their customers. What are those strategies? Are they having success? Sun-tzu, the Chinese General and Military Strategist, says “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” In this day of technology it is actually easy to scope out your competition. If you know who your competition is and what they’re doing to market their business, you can find the best way to compete.

Scoping Out the Competition

We’ll start with you competitor’s web sites. There are a ton of things you can learn from a competitor’s web site, and I recommend you look over several of your competitors. Some of the things to look at and learn are:

• The Message

  How is your competition marketing their products or services? Look through their site and note the language they use to sell. If they’ve been around for a while, they’ve likely tried many different versions of their sales copy. If several competitors are using the same words and phrases, it’s likely that it works well. Build on their experience.
  

• The Home Page

  The home page should tell you what the most important aspects of a competitor’s business are. One glance at that should give you a good idea of what their top products are and what their sales pitch is.
  

• Information

  If all your competition has a “home” page, an “about” page, and a “contact” page, you’d better have those too. After seeing several sites, customers come to expect that certain types of information will be available. If all your competitors have a “portfolio” section, leaving that out would likely annoy your web site visitors. In addition, if you see something you like (or something is noticeably missing) on your competitor’s sites, make plans to add that to your own site.
  

• Appearance and Layout

  Take note of how your competitors look online. Generally speaking, standing out from the crowd is good but being way different is not. It’s always a good idea to create a site that looks a bit more professional than your competition, but if all your competitors look like this, you’ll alienate your visitors if your site looks like this.
  

Once you’ve looked over your competitors sites you’ll have some idea of how they’re marketing their business. If your competitors are doing something well, you should take notes and emulate them. If they’re weak in a particular area, you’ve got an area where you can surpass them. Either way you learn from their experience, saving you time and money.

Internet Marketing Tools

Now you’ve got a general idea of how your competition is using their web sites to sell, and it’s time to dig deeper using tools that are right at your fingertips.

Instead of making up a fictitious example, let me tell you how I arrived at my current marketing plan. You can do the same thing I did in deciding how to market your business.

Overture

I began by looking at my competition as I explained above, and I noticed that the local web design firms used the term “Utah Web Design” a lot. I went to the “Overture Keyword Selector Tool” to see if that was a phrase that is searched for regularly. To show you what I found, watch a short clip about Overture (a pop-up video).

I found that many companies wanted to be at the top of the search engine for “Utah Web Design”. Considering many of these companies are search engine experts, it’s not surprising many of them are competing for that popular phrase.

You generally want to find a key word or phrase that people are searching for that doesn’t have a lot of competition. How do you know if there’s a lot of competition? First, download this power point presentation I made on Search Engine Optimization (note: right click on the link and choose “save link as”. Also know that this presentation was first given to executives at a religious institution, so religious material is present.) If you type in a phrase in Google (i.e. “Utah Web Design”) and the sites that pop up follow the suggestions in these power point slides, chances are you have some stiff competition for that phrase (hint: to look at the code on your competitor’s site, right-click your mouse on their web page and choose “view source”–this will show you their site code and whether they’re following the information in the “Search Engine Optimization” power point file). If they’re not doing a good job in optimization for that phrase, there’s a good chance you can come in near the top on search engines if you optimize your web site for that phrase. That would mean a lot of free traffic would come your way.

Incoming Links

Here’s one other short clip on how to find who’s linking to your competitors.

If I were to work on getting more incoming links to my site, the first place to look is at those site that are already linking to my competitors. Some of these sites are directories that list many web sites, some are sites I can submit articles to and they’ll link back to my site, and some are complimentary businesses to my business. Many of those sites will allow me to place my link on their site for free. Some have requirements that I must meet first. Some will charge a fee. These sites won’t only boost my search engine rank, but may also bring traffic to my site as well.

Alexa.com

Another site you can use to analyze your competitors is at Alexa.com. This site, created by Amazon.com, tracks site statistics using information from people who have downloaded their browser toolbar. There are many helpful things to be found here that will give you ideas about how your competitors are doing their marketing online. See a short clip on using Alexa.

Google’s Keyword Tool

I found I couldn’t compete with the existing Utah web design firms in search engine optimization. My competitors were too strong in that area. It would take a lot of time and effort to get a good rank for the phrase “Utah Web Design”, and nobody searched for the other phrases I looked into (”provo web design”, “utah valley web design” etc…). That being the case, what if I wanted to do a pay-per-click campaign on the phrase “Utah Web Design”? That would help me get in front of those same customers immediately. So how would I research a pay-per-click campaign? After finding some good key words and phrases on Overture, I’d visit Google’s Keyword Tool. Here’s a clip on how this tool works.

I realized I couldn’t handle the amount of traffic getting on the first page of Google would bring me. I couldn’t serve upwards of 300 people coming to my site each month asking for bids on their projects. I can really only handle two or three projects a month, and I spend a lot of time bidding on projects as it is. I decided I would work on the quality of the contacts I made, not the quantity.

Different Strategies

Depending on what you learn about your competitors, there are a few different competition strategies that are worth noting.

• Open Warfare

  Should you go after your competitors directly like Pepsi does with Coke and Miller does with Budweiser? Finding out where your competitors market and meeting them head-on can work as long as you have the funds and time to compete.
  

• Lie Low

  Should you sit in the background and follow the moves your competitor makes like Dial Corporation does with Proctor and Gamble? If you keep tabs on your competitors you will see over time what works and what doesn’t. You can then do something similar and pick up customers with less risk and money involved.
  

• The Road Less Traveled

  If you don’t want to compete directly, serving a set of customers your competitors don’t may fit the bill.
  

• Trail Blaze

  Perhaps going a completely different direction in marketing is the way to go. You may even be the big competitor in the arena and you need to innovate to keep your competitors guessing.
  

I chose not to compete directly, but decided to innovate in an area where my competition was weak. I found that none of the local web design firms were using email newsletters and blogs to attract customers, so I began writing articles like the one you’re reading now. It’s worked spectacularly for all the reasons mentioned in the blog and email articles I’ve recently written.

Knowing your competitors marketing strategy and formulating your own strategy accordingly beats blind marketing any day. I hope you’ve found a couple tools above that will help you keep an eye on, and get a jump on, your competition.