Reach the Competition’s Audience
Digital marketing tactics offer sophisticated targeting to reach your audience. One of the audiences you may want to reach is your competitor’s customers and patrons. You can easily advertise to the competition’s clients both online and offline using digital marketing targeting tactics.
Reach the Competition’s Website Visitors
Google Advertising, Custom Audiences
Using Google Ads, you can advertise to visitors of specific web pages, including the websites of your competitors. You start by making a list of web pages that have the traffic you want to advertise to. Then, create a Custom Audience in your Google Ads account using this list of competitor URLs.
To make sure you are reaching the most relevant audience with this tactic, it is recommended to select specific and intentional pages on a website. A website’s homepage may not be the best page to include, as often it receives a mix of traffic and not all of it is relevant for you. For example, if a business wants to reach people who are exhibiting at a conference, it would re-target the visitors of the Exhibitor Sign Up page since this is the web page that is most targeted to exhibitors.
Reach the Competition’s Patrons to a Physical Location
Geofencing Advertising
Build an audience using a competitor’s physical locations with geofencing targeting. With geofencing, you develop an advertising audience by creating a “geofence”, or a virtual boundary that wraps around a building, like the competitor, for the purpose of capturing mobile devices and serving them ads. Geofencing uses GPS to identify and capture cell phones you can advertise to. The location and mobile device user do not know they have been geofenced.
One benefit of geofencing competitor locations is that you get a sense of the competition’s foot traffic. You can count how many devices are captured and measure trends across different locations. In a nationwide campaign geofencing roofing distributors, one advertiser very quickly determined which retail locations had the highest foot traffic, and targeted their marketing efforts accordingly.
Focus Ads on Competitive Advantages
When advertising to your competition’s customers, it is important to focus your advertising messaging on your organization’s benefits versus the competition. Make sure you answer the question, “Why choose you?”. Highlight those things you do better than the competitor or ways that you are differentiated. Feature a promotion to incentivize prospects to try you out.