Comments on: Friday Q&A: How Do You Reach Your Competitors’ Customers?

By: Dmitry Dragilev

Dmitry Dragilev — Tue, 10 May 2016 18:46:44 +0000

This is an awesome tip Alex, thanks man! Following your advice put some simple pages for our service:
https://justreachout.io/cision-alternative
https://justreachout.io/meltwater-alternative
and a number of others.
Curious – have you seen feature checklist tables on these comparison pages work better in terms of conveying the info to your visitors?

By: Brandon Landis

Brandon Landis — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 08:40:48 +0000

Great idea, and surprised I hadn’t thought to do this before considering that sites like ‘AlternativeTo’ and other external listings sites do exactly this, and we see high-converting traffic from them already!

Nice idea, and something I’m keep to implement!

By: Volo Kovalenko

Volo Kovalenko — Sun, 03 Apr 2016 11:30:34 +0000

That’s interesting! Do your competitors reach out with complaints saying that it’s not legal, ethical, or whatever? Just curious

By: James McBryan

James McBryan — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 19:09:59 +0000

I have a competitor who has alot of customers but that competitor is no longer innovating anymore and has pretty much stagnated. However, the customers on that platform aren’t being proactive in searching for alternatives ( or as proactive as I want them to be, of course! 😛 ) Should I just set up some landing pages when they are ready to poke their heads out of the sand, or should I try something more aggressive, like sending out mailers or running CPC when you search for that client? or are those tactics just not worth it in general?

By: ryan kulp

ryan kulp — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 16:05:33 +0000

A quick and dirty glimpse into your competitor’s customers — see who they follow on Twitter. And if they’re small enough, without much of a brand, see who follows them.

It’s trivial to write a scraper or use a tool to download all the handles that follow a company, and you can then do some data mining, auto following, tweeting, etc to get their attention. Just make your bio “The #1 alternative to _____” and when prospects click through to your profile, you’ve just sent them to a code-free landing page.

By: Gaurav Gulati

Gaurav Gulati — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 16:04:58 +0000

Great question, Chris and an Excellent strategy for solution, Alex. I almost asked you the same question, but got sidetracked. Nevertheless, I got the insight that my questions would have requested. Thanks again for sharing, bud. Cheers!

By: Grigoriy Kogan

Grigoriy Kogan — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 15:59:34 +0000

I call them “alternative pages” because “[competitor] alternative” is usually the keyword for which you want to show up in search results. I wrote about their results and how to set them up: http://www.gkogan.co/blog/alternative-pages/

By: Joe Putnam

Joe Putnam — Fri, 01 Apr 2016 15:55:43 +0000

This is a really interesting approach, Alex; I love the idea. I’ve also seen a lot of businesses who advertise similar pages to the ones you guys use as a way to snipe some of their competitors traffic from a paid perspective and not just SEO. Let’s say you create these pages but aren’t ranking yet. Then you can always use Google ads to target terms like “alternative to X” in order to reach people who are shopping around. You can see an example of this by going to http://www.ispionage.com and typing in bigcommerce.com. Once you’re looking at the competitor data within iSpionage, you’ll see landing pages that are targeted towards sniping Shopify and other competitors’ traffic.

Another approach I’ve heard about are Gmail ads. You can set up your Gmail ads within AdWords to target people who’ve received emails from your competitors. This means they may already be using a competitor or may just be receiving your competitor’s newsletter which is a great time to reach them. I haven’t personally used this approach yet but learned about it on a webinar we did with Wordstream recently.

Much thanks for sharing your awesome tip which I’m planning to steal, and I look forward to reading more tips from other blog readers.