Every Friday, we’re answering your questions about business, startups, customer success and more.
Happy Friday!
This week’s question comes from Chris, who asks:
I’ll share one thing that has worked really well for us.
But first, I’ll say this: I’d be very hesitant to make this my only approach. The customers that you want aren’t the ones who are going to defect from your competition really easily (especially if your big differentiator is price or something else that’s simple to copy). Because those types of customers are equally likely to defect from you when someone better comes along.
The best approach to get valuable, long-term customers is to invest in building relationships with them and delivering tons of value. We do that with our blogs and our customer support, though there are other ways, too.
We play the long game, and we want anyone using Zendesk to think long and hard about whether or not they’d rather be doing business with Groove. And if they carefully consider it and decide that we’re a better fit, we’re thrilled to have them.
I suggest you approach this the same way.
With that said, there’s a strategy that we’ve used to steal hundreds, if not thousands of customers from our larger competitors. One important thing to note here is that this strategy only works on customers or prospects who are already looking for an alternative, or who are feeling the pain of their current solution.
It’s not uncommon for those customers to search for things like “Zendesk alternative” or “alternative to desk.com.”
And for those customers, we’ve built targeted pages that appear at #1 or #2 in Google’s results for nearly every variation of those searches.
We have one for Gmail users, too.
Not only have these pages improved conversions (visitors who visit the Zendesk Alternative page are around 15% more likely to sign up), but the pages have had massive SEO benefits as prospects search for alternatives to the software they hate.
We don’t try to snipe at existing users of competitors. But we work to make sure that when they’re looking for a better solution, that we’re here with open arms.
I’m curious to hear how others approach this challenge; let us know what’s worked (and what hasn’t) in the comments!
