With every meeting i have with either an advertising agency or direct clients, this question pops up “How do we win over our competition?”.
It’s no a secret that the competition is getting tougher by the minute, whither you’re a telecom company, car dealer or even a food blogger. To be honest, there is no one straight answer for this question.
However, as a digital marketer, I’ve recently been able to come up with ways and strategies to help brands (especially those who are late in the game) to find unusual ways to win over their competitors in the advertising and audiences reach zone.
Here’s a list of four strategies you can make use of:
1. Create Content Outside Your Niche
Creating content outside your niche is basically just like introducing a side service to your shop. Let me give you a live example of what I mean.
In Egypt, streets are filled with kiosks (they usually sell defined items like chips, biscuits, soda and etc…), few ones decided that they want more customers, so they started providing photocopying service, bought a photocopy machines and waited for the massive amounts of students wanted to photocopy the lectures and books for their study.
Image credit: Al-AhramWhen the photocopying machine was introduced, it hasn’t only introduced new line of business for the Kiosk, but it has boosted audiences. The audiences often drink a soda or eat some biscuits while photocopying their documents.
It’s basically the same for writing content outside your niche. When you create content outside your regular audiences you’re reaching out to new audiences that your competition might have not reached yet, even if you didn’t instantly see massive results, you’re still basing these audiences for future.
2. Increase your content frequency
In 2013, Facebook recorded 2.5m posts per minute, Twitter recorded 280k tweets per minute, while WordPress recorded 817 blogs per minute.
2016 Facebook recorded 3.3m posts per minute, Twitter recorded 500k tweets per minute, and 1,212 WordPress posts per minute.
A huge boost in Google indexed pages, as it has grown from 1 trillion to 30 trillion in the last 7 years.
In Google indexed pages about future is more content, he talked about “The Post” strategy of increasing their articles per day, The post now posts 1,200 articles per day and they saw 28% increase in their traffic, this tell us that it’s no longer about the quality -as we always thought- but rather about the quantity too.
Worth mentioning is Content Shock – a term that was coined by Mark Schaefer who believes that there is a limit to the amount of content a person can take in.
3. Target Your competitors’ keywords
You should not stop at targeting your very own keywords only, use your competition’s success by targeting their keywords or products names.
Here’re 4 strategies on Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter
GMAIL
Email marketing is one of the highest lead generation sources, your audiences are receiving and opening marketing emails from your competition, Luckily, on Gmail, you can advertise within Gmail itself, by targeting your competition’s keywords, your product can be displayed for the reader while reading your competition’s Marketing email. Make sure to subscribe to your competition’s newsletter to get an understanding of what they send. Find more tips about cracking the code for GMAIL ads
YouTube
Similar to Gmail, you can target your audiences who are watching competition’s videos on YouTube, use their keywords to interrupt their videos. Your goal is simply whenever someone searches for your competition’s video, your ad is displayed on that video.
On Facebook, you can’t use keywords targeting, but In many cases, Facebook treats our pages as interests, use the interest-based targeting (by searching for your competitions brand name or URL) to target your competition’s audiences.
Twitter is very dynamic and public, I’ve written a separate article to 5 hacks you can use right now to improve your Advertising Strategy on Twitter. Basically, Twitter allow of exporting public lists and followers list, these lists are valuable information for you, you can export your competition’s list and targeted them using Tailored Audiences.
4. Try different media forms with your own touch
How many of us got super excited when they were just getting started in this business and got their content featured by a well-established company of account.
When I was starting in building my followers on Instagram (which I still am) I thought of new format that would catch these brands attention and maybe get my content featured by them.
Before I got my rover, I was thinking of by a 4×4, living in Saudi Arabia, the 1st car came in mind was the FJ Cruiser, while searching for the car picture, I stumbled upon one particular photo that I liked, the digital marketer in me and with my little knowledge about Photoshop, I decided to put identity on the car I was about to buy and made this design of the car, which was later on reposted on Instagram by @ToyotaALJ (Toyota Saudi Arabia)
https://www.instagram.com/p/BDq81VxgRiq/
They had posted the same exact photo, but I took the photo and added my own effects and identity (made it a bit cartoonish) and that made it stand out and my post was featured.
What I’m trying to say, your content must stand out in order to gain on your competition.
