Why You Should Feature Competitors on Your Website

If giving your competitors a place on your Website sounds like heresy, you’re right. It is. But customers have become so empowered by the Internet that B2B marketers need to start thinking like heretics, says Gord Hotchkiss, President and CEO of Enquiro, a B2B search engine marketing company.

ITSMA:By now, everyone is aware of using keyword search to drive traffic to Websites. Is there more that marketers should be doing with search to take it to the next level?

Gord Hotchkiss: Most companies that are doing search really haven’t approached it from the perspective of the person doing the search. They approach it from the other end. They say, “Well, we know what keywords convert to leads.”

They haven’t flipped that 180 degrees and said, “Okay, who are my prospects? How would they be using search?” The analogy I use is a shopping mall. The first thing I am going to do when I walk into a shopping mall is to look to see if the mall is carrying what I am looking for. Humans being humans, we don’t want to see just one result. We want to see a few results that reinforce that this shopping mall offers me not just a selection of possible solutions but also the solutions I am expecting to find there. For example, if I am searching for CRM software, I expect to see Salesforce, Oracle, and Siebel. That reinforces the sense that I am in the right place.

ITSMA:What happens when people click through to the providers’ sites?

Hotchkiss: When they click through to your site, you have to give them the sense that you are the best store in the mall, because we rarely click through to a site and remain there. There is a lot of what we call pogo sticking on the search engine. We click through, we take a quick look, and then we pop back to the search results page and check something else.

ITSMA:How should you set up your landing page to dissuade people from bouncing back to the search engine?

Hotchkiss: Well, you have to understand where in the buying cycle people might be using search. Earlier in the buying cycle, people are exploring their alternatives. You need to match the buyer’s intent by giving them alternatives. So if you go to Dell’s enterprise server page, for example, you’ll see a range of different types of servers and you’ll be able to check prices, which is another key component. You need to know what the pricing range is going to be.

ITSMA:Do you recommend that providers feature their competitors’ products on their pages as well as their own?

Hotchkiss: Absolutely. Marketers get very territorial about their sites. But when you think about it from the customers’ perspective, that’s what they are looking for. Understand that buyers are going to compare alternatives. They would probably be fired if they didn’t. So understanding that that’s going to happen anyway, doesn’t it make much more sense for that research to happen as much as possible in your space, where you can control the messaging, control the brand awareness, and get into the position of being the wired vendor?

ITSMA:Sounds dangerous.

Hotchkiss: Yes. If you go down this road, you have to be authentic about it because people can pick up something that’s not authentic a mile away. This can’t be one of those typical comparison charts where you say, “Oh, look we have checkmarks in all our boxes and our competitors don’t have any in theirs.”

But if you are honest and you say, “Look, this is where our stuff shines and here’s maybe where we don’t stack up so well,” you will gain a lot of credibility and hang onto search visitors better.

But that’s an incredible leap of courage from most marketers. It’s completely against everything they have learned in traditional marketing, and that’s the problem. Traditional marketing rules don’t apply in a new consumer-empowered marketplace. The rules have changed. It’s just that many marketers are slow to realize that the power now rests with the buyer, not them.

ITSMA members will receive more specific search marketing advice from Gord Hotchkiss in an upcoming Viewpoint and on 18’s blog (http://chriskoch.wordpress.com).

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