Converting the Competition

Convert had the chance to conduct a webinar with Max Teitelbaum, co-founder of WhatRunsWhere, a company with exciting technology that helps up conversion rates in a unique way.  For Teitelbaum, the key to running a campaign that will get you the ROIs and increased conversion rates you’re looking for has to do with one thing: buying effective paid media though the advantage of competitive intelligence.

That seems like a mouthful, but it boils down to a deceptively simple idea: keep track of your competitor’s online campaigns to get the upper hand. For Teitelbaum, there are some questions that every site should be asking themselves about the media they’re buying across the internet. And, his company – WhatRunsWhere – helps to provide answers in inventive ways that will take your campaign further.

Where Do You Buy Your Media

It’s a bit baffling that most campaigns, especially for smaller companies, turn exclusively to Google for buying media. It’s true that it can take longer, seem more expensive, and riskier to contact sites directly or go with other services, but Google should really only be a first step in building your campaign. Especially if your competitor has had a lot of successes using other services.

[Tweet “Most companies never buy media from services other than Google. #DigitalMarketing #PaidAds”]

What Are Your Competitors Doing

This is a great place to initiate your research about your competitors. The following questions will give a good idea about their paid ads campaigns and their media buying priorities.

• Their media presence
• How long it’s been there
• What kind of traffic categories they use
• What tools are they using to test their sites

The answers to these questions can give you an idea of their vulnerabilities, and also help you learn a lot about your own target audience and what’s been successful for other companies. After all, your competition wouldn’t continue using a service or idea that wasn’t working, right? In general, even if you don’t go after all of these aspects of your competitors campaign, it’s worth studying their copy to start thinking about your own. What is your specific message? What sets you apart? What does your product really offer? What problem does it solve and how does it do it better? Great ads will answer these questions with positive triggers, engaging calls to action, and incredible branding.

How Can Your Optimize

The answers to the above questions usually lead to site optimization through A/B testing. But, his company offers a unique approach to this process that can bring about a new way of looking at testing:

So, when you’re testing, why not look at what your competitors are doing? You can further classify this by researching what your competitors are testing, what seemed to work and not work for them and how do they measure that. This reserach could ultimately save you ton of time learning from competitors mistakes.

Testing requires so many broad questions to be addressed before you can get to the little things such as the placement of graphics, Calls-to-Action buttons, colors, and even perfecting ad layout. Of course, these ideas don’t just apply to your competitors, you can also widen the search to include other businesses that are going after your key market as well.

The next step in optimization is about knowing what to do once they get to your landing page. make sure that if you create an engaging add that blows your competitor’s out of the water, that you have clear, landing page. This means connecting the copy, colors, and layouts of your site to your new ad. So, in that way, looking to your competitors for optimization of a campaign can also mean the optimization of your entire site!

What About Mobile

At this point, stressing the importance of mobile seems beyond redundant for those familiar with online marketing strategies. Mobile isn’t just the wave of the future anymore, the future is here. That’s why it’s great that all of Teitelbaum’s ideas still apply. It’s important to look to your competition to see if they’ve made the glaring error of not optimizing their campaign or site for mobile or apps. If not, you have a huge opportunity on your hands for gaining an advantage with a lot of customers who are on the go or simply ahead of the tech curve–just another one of the ways that looking to your competition can take your campaign to better conversion.

For more about the webinar, you can watch it entirely here.