Just as there are many fish in the sea, there are many people surfing the internet. Your website (indeed, your whole SEO and marketing campaign) is your “fishing net” so the question isn’t if your site’s purpose is to “catch fish”, the question is does your “net” has any holes! In fact, every website is meant to “catch fish” - that’s why all the websites make up the “Internet”!
Oftentimes, some websites “out-catch” other websites - the goal is for your site not to be the one out-caught. Therefore, the goal is to capture more of an audience than your competitors. Outside a winning PPC campaign and a great SEO campaign (which we can help you with), what can your website do to be a more effective net? How do you patch any “holes”? I’m going to show you 3 Ways to Capture Your Competitors’ Audience.
1. Differentiate Your Net
One of the most important and effective ways to differentiate your website is to make your UVP (Unique Value Proposition) one of the first things on the homepage. In other words, what makes your site/product/service so special? What have you got that your competitors don’t? Sometimes websites will place this UVP covertly in the tagline/slogan, the introductory information, or within the benefits. Another effective method of showing off your UVP is to create a “Comparison Table” that shows your product/service’s benefits and features in comparison with your competitors’. (It should go without saying that this should only be done if your product/service outweighs the benefits/features of your competitors’.)
2. Weave a Tighter Net
There are two things that make your “net” tighter than others: 1. Lower Price, and/or, 2. Better Quality. Is your site purely informational/non-profit? Then give your readers/followers better quality information or better quality “freebies”! If you’re a business, do you have a lower price than other competitors? Show it off. Are your products/services of a higher quality than your competitors? Make it known. Are your products/services BOTH better quality and less expensive than your competitors’? DON’T BE SHY ABOUT THIS! Doing these things will make certain that less of your audience “slips through”. There is one caveat, however: If your product/service is less-expensive, make it clear that it is not at the expense of quality!
3. Make Your Net More Engaging
Finally, a very important aspect of capturing your competitors’ audience is to outperform them when it comes to 1. being interesting, and 2. being interactive. With regards to being interesting, take a look at your competitors’ sites. Now look at yours. What could be done on your site to make your site more engaging and interesting than theirs? Does it require an (expensive) overhaul? If so, what are some smaller things you could implement to at least increase the quality of your site? Some ways that other sites have done this are with videos, interactive tools, infographics, and more. As for being more interactive, it is important to keep a line on each of your audience members.
The most commonly used method of doing this is by requesting email addresses. Whether it be through newsletters, free reports, daily/weekly/monthly news, free demos/trials/downloads, there is no shortage of reasons for requesting an email address. Once you have them, it’s important to keep in touch with them on a reasonable basis as a gentle reminder that your website exists and that there are sales/deals/coupons/updates constantly added. So as you can see, all of this is less about stealing audience from your competitors as it is about making your website more compelling and convincing than your competitors’. Aside from a great PPC campaign and/or optimizing your site for organic traffic and SERP rankings, this is how you can capture the widest audience possible. Don’t let this be your site’s biography:
