How to convince your site visitors to buy a product using competitors? Part 2

In the first part of this material, we talked about one of the ways to deal with competitors with the help of themselves. In the second part, we want to talk about another way, how to persuade doubting visitors to your site to buy, by following what your competitors' customers are thinking about.

Method number 2. Survey of customers of your competitors in the "wild"

Surely you have heard about the "espionage" of competitors using social media, but have not tried it?

According to a survey conducted by Marketing Sherpa, 72% of companies reported that competitor analysis is not so important to them.


source

In a 2013 study by Millward Brown & Competea similar trend was discovered: tracking competitors took last place in the list of popular optimization methods (A / B testing took second place).



In fact, collecting information about competitors is not at all difficult. Here's what I’m doing if I’m going to "spy" on a competitor:

1. Tweet on Twitter to search for all @ customer responses on the competitors' main account, as well as monitor it using TweetDeck .

According to an Accenture study , 66% of users stopped using company services due to poor quality service.



2. Set up an alert using Mention , with the help of which you will be informed about mentions of competitors' products on the Internet, both positive and negative.

3. If they have a forum where customers communicate, register there and watch out for complaints and thanks.

4. Read reviews and reviews of similar products.

This is necessary in order to find customers with experience in the selection of such products. Using this information, you can:

• improve your own business, product quality;
• emphasize your advantages over competitors.

Also, instead of monitoring the main channels for promoting competitors, you can see how they communicate in “hidden” communities.
You need to drive the query “[competitor's company name] intitle: forum” into Google, and you will see not only the questions asked in hidden communities, but also where the discussions take place.

MarketingSherpa has a great article that talks about other ways to “track” a competitor, not only online, but also offline.

We beat competitors in their sore spots.

Spying on competitors and gathering information about them allows us to understand what their customers are talking about, and also to learn about the weaknesses of your rivals.

For example, this post on the 3dcart forum describes several weak points in the design of 3d Cart products and their customer service strategies.

If a competitor in creating baskets for online stores wants to draw attention to itself, it needs to analyze its disadvantages by emphasizing its following advantages:

• high speed and personalization;
• improved customer support;
• easily accessible switching to their service.

At the same time, it is reasonable to believe that after some time they will appropriate a part of 3d Cart clients.

Look at a more mainstream example of a company that used customer feedback to outperform competitors. In most cases, these were real consumer reviews about the well-known Get MacBook campaign, which increased Apple product distribution by 42% in its first year of operation.



Perhaps this is the most important element of any rebuilding from competitors in your campaigns. No need to try to defeat a competitor in a rude way, you need to do it with style.

Groove does this very competently right on the home page of his website, calling himself "A Simple Alternative to Zendesk." Perhaps this is why many Zendesk users switched to them, appreciating the feedback cycle that they offered to their first customers.



If you are not ready to talk about your competitors on the main page, you can visually emphasize your advantages compared to them using a tablet somewhere in the back of the site.

Here's how SugarSync does it :



Conclusions

How can you assess the importance of competitor research?

According to the results of the Marketing Sherpa & Millward Brown study, spying on competitors is not popular among marketers, however, according to Accenture estimates, the total annual revenue from customers who change their company is about $ 5.9 trillion.

If you show determination and are not afraid of dirty work, the probability of success is very high.

Source: conversionxl.com/customers-will-never-buy/?hvid=4L08rO