Drive Your Competition Crazy, Drive Your Site To Success

Written by Pablo Palatnik on December 28, 2007

I was reading Entrepreneur magazine and came upon a one page post on the “Insights” section of the mag. It read, “Bring It On…drive your competitors crazy while driving your company to success.”

I cant help think of anything but what we do as online marketers competing against the hundreds if not thousands of online competitors we have in our niches wether it be optimizing for natural search, pay-per-click, social media, etc.

1. Know Thyself. Understand what your company stands for. Once you know exactly the message you want to send our or users to perceive you have an upper hand, why? Many sites or companies just throw up a site and sell something without conveying a message.

2. Know Thy Customer. Truly understand your customer. Once you know what they want from you and what they DON’T want from you, you can get a better hold of their loyalty towards your brand/site/company. Understand where they are searching for your product/service.

3. Know Thine Enemy. When have we built a site or campaign and not looked into what our main competition is doing? If you haven’t DO IT NOW. Know who they are targeting, what they are selling, where they are selling, how much, etc. The more you know about your competition, the better you’ll compete.

4. Focus on The Customer. The customer/visitor is our first priority. Get their attention and that will take their attention from the competition.

5. Turn Customers into Evangelist. This is a huge one. It’s not very easy but if you can get your customers to rave about your company/site and what you have to offer, the best marketing is word of mouth. People trust other people who have 0 interest in your company and I mean that monetary wise.

6. Make Good By Doing Good. If you have a site of lets say Home Depot type stuff, it may be a good idea to get involved in a charity for victims of natural disasters, etc and announce that on a site. I.E. 4% of your sale will go to hurricane victims to build homes.

What do you do for your sites to beat the competition and grow your website?