Competitive Displacement: The Future of Marketing and Sales is Here
In today’s world, your ideal customers already have a version of what you’re selling. They already have a solution to their problem.
Which means your job is no longer to sell them a solution… it’s to sell them a better solution.
This involves creating fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) and dis-satisfaction for your competitor’s product.
From email marketing to cloud hosting, the biggest fish have already been caught.
This means you’re now in the business of competitive displacement.
If you don’t think you are, your competitors sure do. Just google your company’s name and see how many Google Ads campaigns are set up against your company name and keywords.
Why is competitive displacement heating up? Beyond why, how can you weaponize B2B data to execute smarter competitive marketing campaigns to displace your competitors?
What is competitive displacement and marketing?
Competitive displacement is the act of convincing companies to make a shift from their existing solutions to yours.
Organizations utilize competitive marketing tactics and campaigns to shift loyalty. Competitive marketing can be everything from deploying a cold email campaign to companies who use your competitors to hosting industry events and inviting your competitor’s customers.
To find success today, you must deeply understand who your competitors are and why your solution is better. If you can’t, you’re doomed to fail.
But…how do you get started with or lean further into, competitive displacement?
The Role of Data in Competitive Marketing
Data is the epicenter of competitive displacement and competitive marketing. Why? Just like an athlete watches their competition’s old fights, you have to know your enemy’s moves, weaknesses, and abilities.
What types of data should you be collecting about your competitors?
- Competitor and Customer Discovery: Get an excellent understanding of all competitors and their customers. Who’s buying from which customer. Is competitor A more suitable for SMB while competitor B is doing well with enterprise customers.
- Product Features: If you don’t know what your competitor’s product looks like and their latest product updates, how are you going to convince a prospect your solution is better?
- Organizational DNA: Every company has an organizational DNA and it helps if you can identify their DNA programmatically. Are they an engineering-focused company or more focused on marketing? Understanding the types of employees and how teams are composed at your competition can help you position how you market.
- Intent: Plotting the intent data for competitors can help understand the share of wallet and provide an early preview of any shifts in market trends.
- Marketing Campaigns They’re Running: Want to get granular in your understanding of a competitor’s positioning? See what ads they’re running across every channel.
- Company News: Did your competitor just hire a new executive? Did they lay off a large chunk of their staff? Take action on your competitor’s news before they do.
- Key Hires: Keep track of increasing investments in different aspects of business, new teams being created but also key execs being hired to drive the business and how it impacts the Organizational DNA.
- Keywords or Phrases Used: Substantial change in content keywords or phrases indicate a shift in positioning or entry into new vertical. This can easily be tracked using automation.
Executing on Your Competitive Advantages
We’re in an all-out war for keeping customers and stealing them from competitors. Every great leader knows that you should never compete on other people’s strengths. By diving deep and using data to understand your competitors, you can easily understand how to best position your organization against your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
Data is information and information is power. But, in this fast-paced world, your competitors are moving fast. To scale your competitive marketing, you need to leverage automation and a programmatic approach – sitting on a foundation of always-on, continuously updated competitive intelligence data.
While it can be difficult to obtain competitive intelligence triggers to drive competitive kill campaigns to steal your competitor’s customers, it’s not impossible. LeadGenius focuses on crafting custom and programmatic data solutions that enable you to understand your competitors, know their product features, and get clear insights into their customers.
Beyond finding a data partner for your competitive intelligence and marketing, you should always be doing internal competitive intelligence like having someone in the company utilizing or keeping up to date with a competitor’s tools and tech.
