MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

If you have a direct com­peti­tor in the mar­ket, here is one very effec­tive strat­egy to cap­ture some of their poten­tial busi­ness and win some of their poten­tial cus­tomers. This strat­egy is per­fectly legal but it will only work if you truly have a strong point of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion and a unique sell­ing propo­si­tion to win these cus­tomers. After all, these vis­i­tors are not look­ing for you, they are look­ing for your competitor!

So, how does this work?

First, iden­tify your com­peti­tors and see if any­one is directly look­ing for them. In the online mar­ket­ing space, we have plenty of com­peti­tors. Some of them are inter­net mar­ket­ing experts such as Stephen Pierce. So, here is what we did. We sim­ply buy the key­word Stephen Pierce and tell prospec­tive vis­i­tors “Read this before you buy Stephen Pierce.” Of course we also write a head­line “Stephen Pierce Exposed” that gets a lot of atten­tion. This ad copy has worked for us across many indus­tries and across many com­peti­tors and every sin­gle time the same ad copy greatly out­per­forms any­thing else that we have been able to dream up so far.

Here are the results:

In this case, both ads did very well but the ad with the sim­ple and straight for­ward copy that says “Read This Before You Buy [Enter Com­peti­tor]” works extremely well. This makes per­fect sense because you are telling the vis­i­tor that before they make a pur­chase they should come and check out your web­site. If you can fol­low this up with an incred­i­bly solid pitch, you might just have an oppor­tu­nity to demon­strate to this vis­i­tor that what you have to offer is really what they want.

PS: Of course the above tech­nique only works if the names that you are enter­ing are not pro­tected trade­marks since Google does not allow you to use trade­marks in the copy of your ads.

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike Reining

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