Inbound Marketing Competition - How To Rise Above Your Competitors
Posted by Jeff Machado on Wed, Feb 10, 2010
N
ow that the news of the effectiveness of Inbound Marketing has spread across the business community, competition is going to become even more fierce whether it be from similar regional small businesses or large multinational corporations. It's not going to be enough to just know about Inbound Marketing and hope your knowledge will push you forward. Instead, it's going to require massive action and effort to make your business stand out.
But let's start from the beginning...
How Do You Define Inbound Marketing Competition?
When I think of Inbound Marketing competition, I take into account that there are a limited amount of keywords that bring in high traffic and convert into leads and sales. Considering there are only 10 spots on the front page of Google, you're facing stiff competition if you're in a niche that has even 11 businesses in it. Of course we know that there are many more businesses than that in any given niche.
Competition also means that other sites are better optimized than your own. If one site has plenty of call to action buttons and is giving away massive amounts of free and value added content, a site that is lacking in these is not going to get the leads and customers that it wants.
How Can I Rise Above My Competitors?
Fortunately you don't have to throw in the towel and call it a game just because your competitors know the same strategies that you do and seem to have an upper hand. There are always ways to find your place on the Internet.
Here are 3 strategies to consider for executing an Inbound Marketing strategy that puts you a step above your competitors. :
1. Make Content A Priority
Find the story of your business. Most businesses don't start just because of vanity. They usually start because a problem was noticed and a solution was created. When you're focused on your solution, you can create endless content. After all, usually when you solve one problem, it seems that 10 other problems seem to come up.
To do this successfully, don't just look at content as 'that thing I have to do but really don't want to.' When you look at it like that, you're not going to want to put in the effort (and it does require lots of effort) to produce the type of content that makes you stand out.
Think of content as your business livelihood now. Videos are not optional. Webinars are not optional. Blogging is most decidedly not optional. These are all as important as staffing your office with people to answer the phone or having a website. Most likely, your competition has committed to their content creation and you can only overcome them with quantity and quality of content - not just sheer desire.
2. Work On Important Relationships
If you know anything about link building, you have probably heard that commenting on blogs is a good strategy for building links. Unfortunately, your company may not have the time to pour into commenting on blogs all day long. It's unfortunate too because you can bet that your competitors at the top have allotted for this type of activity.
You can make your blog commenting time that you do have an investment rather than just a hopeless attempt at getting a link. When you can engage with the blogger and spark great conversations with him or her, you start to expand your network of blogs that you can comment on and potential links you can get.
These relationships will help you get noticed in high quality ways rather than just being a link in the crowd.
3. Go For The Long Tail
When you fire up your keyword tool of choice, you're probably looking at the same exact keywords that your competitors are looking at and trying to get ranked. Even if you were to spend 12 hours writing the ultimate blog post to beat all blog posts, your labor of love could still find itself in obscurity which is anywhere past page one of Google in most circumstances.
Finding yourself against well optimized competitors means you have to challenge yourself to create content continuously on topics that don't get the high traffic - the ones your competitors have deemed to have a poor ROI.
Make these long tail keywords a part of your blogging campaign. Get as specific as possible when choosing these keywords and don't give up. "Blogging on the long tail" means having persistence and being aware that you're trying to create momentum to attract more visitors to your site.
Have you overcome any challenges when facing Inbound Marketing competition? How did you handle it? Let us know in the comments!