Where to Look

If you’ve ever gone fishing on a large body of water, chances are you noticed large gatherings of birds or ripples in the water that indicated large gatherings of fish. Seems like a good place to catch bigger fish that are attracted and come to feed, right?

 

In business these days, it makes sense to watch the surface of the digital marketplace for tell-tale signs of where the juicy customers are. Check your competitor’s social media profiles, noting whether they have significant followers, likes and reviews. If they do, take a close look at how they run their feeds and don’t hesitate to replicate tactics that have clearly improved their engagement. The idea is to catch up quickly so that your innovations can ride the momentum and propel you past the pack.

 

How to Convert

 

Your competitors’ websites, social media and pay-per-click strategies can tell you a lot about how they turn impressions into clicks into leads into customers. Look closely at their site, how it’s optimized (think “mobile”), where their PPC ads and organic search results rank and how they go about engaging followers in social media. What are they doing more efficiently than you? Is their messaging more compelling than yours? How can you distinguish yourself from them, play up your strengths?

 

Think about all these things in the context of creating an easy path for leads to follow to become customers. And revenue.

 

What Not to Do

 

We used to work on a major company’s SEO and PPC campaign. The company was such a major player in their industry, that their PPC campaign drove the cost of a specific keyword up until it was the 35th most expensive keyword on the entire Internet.

 

We eventually parted ways with that company and signed another in the same industry. Our new client faced a predictable problem. They wanted to compete for jobs most often found by searching that super expensive keyword. But they didn’t yet have the budget to go head-to-head with the heavy hitters. So we found a lot of other keywords that got used almost as often as the expensive keyword. Then we optimized our client’s website with the most relevant content on the Web for those keywords.

 

In this way, we deliver our client the same kinds of valuable leads and customers the major players are getting for about a fifth of the cost they’re paying. At the same time, we’ve created a much leaner overall campaign. So when our client reaches the size of their biggest competitors, their profit margin on their digital revenue growth investment will be much higher. Everyone will be happy. Except our clients’ competitors.

 

Citadel Digital: Where Do You Want Your Business to Take You?