How to Steal Your Competition’s Customers: What You Need to Know
If you want to turn your competitor’s customers into your own, you must be prepared to play a complex game of strategy, love, and war. To be effective, not only will you need to get their attention, you will also have to prove that your product or service is a worthwhile investment.
Interested in targeting a customer base that’s already interested in the services that you offer? Keep reading to learn the steps that will help you identify and steal customers from your competitors.
When dealing with strategies of the heart, you must gain a deeper understanding of what makes your targets tick. Begin by asking the following questions:
• What products or services does your competition offer?
• How do their customers feel about this product or service?
• Can you find a better solution to their problems?
• Can you provide them with a greater value?
• Can you make it more convenient for these potential customers to get what they want?
At first glance, finding the answers to these questions may sound difficult. But, with the advent of social media and online tools, getting the solutions you want are easier than ever. For instance, Mention is a tool that will help you measure the volume of social media mentions and customer sentiment. You may also want to check out online review sites like Yelp, Amazon, and even Facebook, this is especially helpful if your competitor owns a local business. Another tool, Synup, will help you easily keep track of these multiple touch points.
Surveys are another essential tool that you should add to your toolkit. Use them to ask your existing customers questions that will help you determine why they chose your establishment instead of the alternative. The information gleaned from this source will pinpoint the steps you need to take to appeal to both your existing and potential customers as well as differentiate yourself from your competition.
The next thing you must do is capture the attention of your competitor’s customers, but subtlety is key. If the customers know that you are actively trying to lure them from your competition, it’ll make you seem predatory.
The best way to engage with your target demographic is through the use of social media marketing. Target the fans and followers that are on your competitor’s social media pages and use the information from the first step to create content that speaks to their needs and wants.
Twitter and Facebook make it extremely easy for you to lure away your competition’s customers because they provide tools that are specifically created to target other accounts. For instance, Facebook has a tool called Lookalike Audience which helps you directly target the fans of other businesses. Twitter has a similar tool, called Follower Targeting, that categorizes audiences based on the specific thought leaders and businesses that they respect.
3. Time to Court
After your potential customers have clicked through from your ad, your focus should be on retaining them for the long term. To achieve this goal, you will have to woo them, not bombard them with sales copy.
So, how do you go about wooing these customers? The answer is relatively simple – give them a free and genuinely valuable offer that they can’t refuse. You will also need to create a landing page whose express goal is to get these customers into your marketing funnel.
When you create your landing page, there are some psychological features that you should consider:
• Strive for clarity and functionality over cleverness
• Make the reader feel a little uncomfortable
• Persuade your potential customers that you can remove this feeling of discomfort
• Increase conversions with color psychology
There are a variety of landing page tools that are available for your use, but it’s important to find one that directly integrates with your email provider. For instance, GetResponse is a landing page tool with a squeeze page generator that lets you create aesthetically pleasing and responsive landing pages in just a few minutes. GetResponse also comes with email marketing software that you will need to complete other steps in this guide.
Even thought you’ve gotten the attention of your competition’s customers and your landing page is working like a charm, your job isn’t over yet. It is time to create valuable content that will help your customers decide if you can live up to the promises that you’ve made.
To get your hooks into your competitor’s client list, you must convince them that your site is a vital source of information or entertainment, dependent on your brand image. This will help create a positive association with your company both now and in the future.
At this point, it is once again important to note that, your goals are not to sell to the customer. Instead, your focus should be on getting them to show interest in your product or service. To determine the content that works best for your target demographic, revisit the information, like common FAQs or complaints about your industry or product, that you researched in the first step. Make sure that you address their needs, without obvious self promotion, or you will risk creating a negative perception of your company.
Instead of giving your audience the content that you think they will like, start off with content that is already popular in your niche. SearchReddit will help you get started, all you have to do is enter your product and niche into the corresponding boxes and take some time to work through the popular entries in the “top” tab. Following these steps will help you find the keywords, headlines, and content that your customers are interested in. You may also want to consider reading the comments on the original posts and Reddit to determine what you can do to make your content even better.
Email marketing is the most effective online sales channel available today. In fact, a recent survey by Econsultancy, showed that email had the highest ROI, or return on investment, when compared to other digital channels. So, if you aren’t already using this tactic, it’s time to hop on the bandwagon.
Use personalization to maximize the revenue that is generated through emails. A whopping 70%of brands don’t use this tactic, even though personalized emails deliver transaction rates that are 6 times higher. Take advantage of this statistic to separate yourself from the crowd and to create a better relationship with your new clients.
For optimal results, Shopify, the e-commerce juggernaut, also recommends that marketers and business owners use A/B Testing to optimize click-through rates, you can accomplish this with the squeeze page generator mentioned earlier. Also, since new customers tend to add items to their online shopping cart without completing their purchase, consider using auto-responders that can retarget those who’ve abandoned their carts.
5. Retaining Your Clientele
Believe it or not, after you’ve secured the sale, your job is still not over. You must leverage excellent customer services to retain your new customers.
You persuaded them to use your product or service by being better than your competition, but this doesn’t mean that you have their loyalty. You can lose all of your new customers if you decide to slow down your efforts now and don’t follow through on your promises. Loyalty programs are a great option here, especially if they offer continuous rewards for every purchases.
