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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