How to Beat Your Competition in the Advertising Game

It’s often said that competition is good for your business. It pushes you to be your best. Think Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi, Visa vs. MasterCard, Xbox vs. PlayStation, or Apple vs. Microsoft.

Of course, part of the fun of rivalry is stealing customers from your rivals. You can do that with the help of advertising!

Competitive Advertising Strategies

Today you’ll learn five brilliant competitive advertising strategies you can use to get in front of your competitors’ customers and (with a little work) turn them into YOUR customers instead. *Evil laughter*

1. Target Facebook Users Whose Interests Include Your Competitors

Facebook Ads doesn’t offer keyword targeting for your ads and you can’t specifically target people who have liked your competitors’ pages. However, Facebook offers something called interest-based targeting.


On Facebook, interests range from extremely broad (e.g., business or entrepreneurship) to very specific. In this case, your competitor’s name is the specific interest you want to target, because Facebook allows you to choose to target people based on, among other things, brands and products they like.

Type in your competitor’s website URL. Or, if that doesn’t work, you can type in your competitor’s brand name or try a few keyword combinations to figure out best option for reaching their target audience – which is now your target audience!

Make sure your Facebook ads are awesome and your competitive campaign will be off and running.

2. Disrupt Your Competitors’ Videos with YouTube Ads

Recently I was on YouTube searching for an AT&T ad. Before I could watch the ad I was looking for, I had to sit through another ad – I know, that’s modern life. But the genius part was that this ad wasn’t for AT&T, but for its competitor, Sprint.

In this ad Sprint explained why it is a better provider than AT&T and highlighted an offer to switch carriers, before I could even see the ad for the brand I had searched for.

To execute this competitive advertising strategy for your own campaigns, create the most watchable TrueView ad you can, adding in how much you’re willing to spend.

There are many targeting options to choose from (e.g., demographics, interests, keywords, remarketing). But today we’re feeling competitive!


You want to target your video ads so that whenever someone searches for the YouTube videos of your competitor that they’ll see your ad first. If you play it right, they might not even watch your competitor’s video!

For best results, make sure your video ad is memorable.

3. Use Your Competitors’ Emails Against Them with Gmail Ads

Another brilliantly sneaky competitive advertising tactic you should start using now is targeting people who have recently shown interest in the things your competition sells.

With Gmail Ads (those ads that appear at the top of the Promotions tab of users’ personal email accounts), you can do keyword targeting on your competitors’ brand terms.

As you read this, people who are in the market for your competitor’s products are getting emails from your competitors – and those emails mention your competitors’ brand terms. For example, if you were competing with Sephora, you could target its brand name as part of a Gmail ad campaign so that every time a Sephora newsletter arrives in someone’s Gmail inbox, your brand ends up in its inbox as well. Obviously, your email should tell Sephora subscribers all about your great competing site and product and why they should check your out.


So if you want to try to steal some sales, target the trademarks of your competitors. Make sure you use an email subject line that will have users clicking your Gmail Ads in droves. Use only the best-performing subject lines, the ones with the highest open rates – your unicorns. As an added bonus, because these people are already in the market for a competing solution, it’s likely that more people will click on your ads, which reduces your costs.

4. Reach Your Competitors’ Audiences through the Google Display Network

Google has some great display ad technology. But if you want to beat up on your competition, you need to use Google’s custom affinity audience feature.


Affinity audiences let you target a predefined audience, one that should be more receptive to seeing your ads.

To make this work brilliantly, and avoid wasting your ad budget, you’ll want to target the home page of your competitor. AdWords will then figure out the brand trademarks and the behavior of the people who visit and are interested in that domain name (or search for content on related topics).

Let’s use MailChimp as an example: MailChimp is a publication that’s geared toward businesses doing email marketing. So if I’m running a similar business geared toward email marketers, MailChimp visitors would form the basis of our “ideal customer” we want to reach with our own display ads.

This will start the process of getting the right people familiar with your brand and the products or service you provide. And hopefully, with the right message, you’ll start stealing business away from your competitors and experiencing breakout growth.

5. Download and Target Your Competitors’ Twitter Followers

There are tools that allow you to download a list of every Twitter follower for any account, such as BirdSong Analytics. You can use these to download a list of all your competitor’s Twitter followers. Costs generally start around $35 and go up the more followers the account has.

Once you have your report, you can use those Twitter handles to create a list that you’ll then upload to Twitter Ads. Make sure to select the option to “add tailored audiences.” Uploading the list will take about 3 hours to process.

You can then create ads to get your business in front of the Twitter users who are already following your competitors and are likely in the market to buy or switch to a similar product or service. Genius, right?

After setting your budget comes the real fun. It’s time to get creative and compose your tweet copy. Here are some quick and (relatively) easy ways to produce creative for your Twitter ad and make it stand out from the crowd.

Don’t Let Your Competitors Have All the Fun!


Remember, all these competitive advertising strategies are putting your business in front of users who are interested in your competitors, which means they’re much more likely to be in the market for your product/service. You just have to show them that what you offer is better than what your competitors do!

Image Credit: Shutterstock
Source: http://smallbiztrends.com/


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
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Three Big Myths About TV Viewing And Advertising

It’s become a popular notion that “digital is going to make TV obsolete,” and in some circles it’s cool to say “I don’t watch anymore.” But is it true?

You certainly can’t be blamed for thinking it is, given all the headlines about the growth of Internet properties. They sound so big. For instance, Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg has repeated the phrase “We have the Super Bowl every day on Facebook Mobile” so many times it’s taken as truth in certain circles.

But is it? The short answer is no. It can only be made to seem that way because the Internet and TV report audience in different ways – ratings, views, streams, etc. – which by themselves are incomparable. We looked at Internet and TV through the lens best applicable across them for a new report, Any Given Minute, and found that the average audience in a given minute on Facebook Mobile is more than 4 million people, vs. 95 million people for the Super Bowl. In fact, in any given minute, Facebook would only rank as the 161st largest TV show.

As a common currency enabling true cross-media comparisons, average audience exposes three big myths about TV:

TV is dying. The reality is that in any given minute, 95% of video viewers are watching TV. And twice as many people are watching TV as doing anything on a computer or mobile device. We’re actually in the platinum age of TV. There are more great shows than ever, and more kinds of people are engaging with TV content every way they can. When TV networks pull together the far-flung numbers on activity across digital platforms, they invariably find the audience for their popular programs is up.

Millennials don’t watch TV. The numbers simply don’t bear this out. TV is 88% of what Millennials watch in any given minute. No wonder they average five hours/day. Last year, after reports that its Millennial ratings had fallen, ABC added up all the digital viewing of its shows and found its younger audience had actually grown significantly.


Cord cutting is eroding TV. Consider that 80% of adults prefer subscription TV while cord-cutters predominantly stream TV content, and streaming becomes an and rather than an or proposition. It gives viewers flexibility, programmers distribution, networks revenue, and marketers (ultimately) new engagement options.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/


ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is a business networking association dedicated to helping small businesses and entrepreneurs develop, expand and grow. We offer affordable opportunities to help create a positive impact and advancement in your business interests and personal quality of life to take you to the next level.
Stay Connected with WNFP!

The New Era Of Advertising: What Agencies And Clients Must Do Differently To Succeed

The shift to analytics-driven marketing and technology-enabled business growth has changed the nature of advertising agencies. The era of “Mad Men,” where advertisers primarily focused on TV, radio, and print advertising is gone. In its place are specialists who focus on social media, digital media, and traditional media. And, there are behemoths who attempt to pull all disciplines into a single house.

On top of it, the traditional agency model was built on a revenue generation approach that included media placement; while there were different models, the most common one was based on a percentage of the media placed (e.g., 15% of the value of media placed). That model is being disrupted as programmatic media buying takes hold and clients push for changes in the agency compensation model.

With expectations of agency performance increasing (i.e., linking agency performance to client in-market performance), the agency compensation model being disrupted, and new, leaner competitors cropping up, one could argue that the golden years of agencies are over. To better understand this shift, I recently talked with Alexei Orlov, Global CEO of Rapp. What makes Orlov’s perspective interesting is that, having spent most of his career on the client side (was the CMO of Volkswagon, China prior to Rapp), he provides unique insight on the future of agencies, what agencies need to do to better meet client expectations, and how clients can get more out of their agencies.

Kimberly Whitler: How are advertising agencies changing?

Alexei Orlov: The actual model is changing. As recently as roughly eight years ago, advertising ruled everything; it was the golden era of cinema and TV. Clients would start with a budget and then ask agencies to develop creative that would be spent against that budget. Now the world has changed. The power has shifted from brands to people. Today, brands need people more than people need brands. The challenge for brands is delivering real benefits in real time such that you create a discreet experience. And you have to do this every day, bit by bit, minute by minute, that aggregates over time to a holistic view that the consumer has about the brand. This has caused a fundamental shift as agencies now have to develop deep, meaningful insight from data that can take a brand and catapult it to another place. This takes precision. Companies that succeed will be able to take a nuance of data that is real, meaningful, and unique and then shape the insight in a way that makes people stop.

Additionally, agencies need to understand that co-creation is happening. Gone are the days when companies threw everything at an agency and the agency was expected to come back with a final product. Clients want to be involved in creating the end product. Often, they want the consumer, or other critical stakeholders to be involved as well. Agencies have to open up the process and let clients in—the black box era of creation is over.

Whitler: How does this impact the structure and organization of agencies?

Orlov:  There is a big change in the architecture of great agencies. First, there are fewer creatives as the head of advertising agencies and more creative communities. These communities include graphic designers, copywriters, analysts, strategists, and big thinkers. It is an integrative team brought together to combine left and right brain thinking into superior strategy and creative. Second, there are less account managers/executives and far more practitioners at agencies than in the past. The reason for this is because clients understand how to monetize technologies, leverage cross-channel personalization, and actually how to connect with the clients better.

Whitler: What struggles are agencies grappling with as they adapt to the new model?

Orlov: One of the biggest struggles agencies face today is making sure to have the right conversations with the right people. To have the right conversations, it starts by ensuring that agencies can speak openly and candidly, even when the idea may not be what the CMO or CEO wants to hear. However, this can’t happen if agencies are afraid to speak the truth and in some cases, there is a currency of fear.

When agencies are afraid of losing a client, the quality of work is at risk because agency representatives will be afraid to challenge, push back, or even speak honestly. What ends up happening is that clients talk at agencies. What used to be a partnership and discussion has in some cases turned into a company-vendor relationship.

In addition, there are other factors impacting the advertising agency world. Conversations today are far more data driven, which is fantastic. CMOs are more focused on mattering rather than marketing. This presents an opportunity for advertising agencies to do more meaningful work, embedded in purpose rather than selling.

Additionally, there is a big shift on the horizon. If agencies aren’t careful, consulting firms will continue to encroach on our domain. Companies like Deloitte Digital and Accenture Digital are starting to expand beyond strategy to think about the delivery model. Increasingly, there are strategy players migrating into delivery. Additionally, big companies may begin to create their own internal agencies that create in-house IP.

Whitler: You talked about having the right conversations with the right people. What do clients need to do differently to make this happen?

Orlov: At the beginning of the relationship, you have to set the ground rules. If a client wants advice from an advertising agency versus simply the delivery of output, there must be an agreement up front about the give and take of discussion and that the agency will have the freedom, actually the responsibility, to speak up and share thoughts.

Today, many C-level leaders are younger than they have been in the past. This is terrific because they bring a data-driven mindset. However, while most people talk about intellectual capital, it’s actually an abundant resource. EQ, on the other hand, is a skill that tends to be earned over time, across a number of life experiences. Experience only comes with time, scars, and learning.

For great work to occur, sometimes you have to throw your knowledge away and shut up and listen to the other side. Sometimes, people believe that because they have data, they have the whole of the data. Insight often lives between and across data and great work requires more than data. Clients should treat their agency partners like employees (rather than vendors) and be more gracious.

The best work I’ve ever seen and done is when there is a pause—and opportunity to slow down, breathe, and think.

Whitler: What do agencies need to do differently?

Orlov: Agencies are actually pretty appalling at selling their work; the reason, I believe, is related to the point I mentioned earlier—the fear that they have. While clients need to help alleviate that fear, agencies need to do more careful research and should argue not from emotion, but from fact. When the two parties are having difference discussions, one from fact and one from emotion, it’s easy to miss each other’s points. Agencies need to learn to speak and understand the language of clients to be able to have the right sort of conversations.

Additionally, while clients need to listen, agencies also need to listen and to ask the right questions. I’ve found that typically, when you lose a pitch, it’s often because you don’t ask the right questions. Agency folks often don’t understand the importance of the client’s KPIs (of creating objectives and meeting them) and need to ask about, understand, and center work on delivering against the KPIs. Finally, agencies need to live up to what they sell. Tell the client what you will do for them and do it well. You don’t need to shower clients with a ton of ideas. Often, less is more. Share the best ideas and explain why.

Whitler: Any last tips you can provide clients to generate better engagement and work from agencies?

Orlov:
• Be clear about requirements,
• Be open to opinion, advice, and thoughts,
• Understand that there is a big difference between when you want something done (usually ASAP) and when you can get something that is high quality
• Collaborate on the planning process (don’t hide the timing – it doesn’t help anybody). Have conversation around activities.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/

ABOUT WNFP
Westchester Networking for Professionals (WNFP) is an organization consisting of professionals and entrepreneurs which focuses on the success of our Members. We help our Members establish lasting relationships and generate new business opportunities towards the growth of their business.
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