Are you tired of your competitors hogging all the attention, even though you know you have a superior product?
Are you losing customers because your competitors are slashing prices and you can’t afford to do that?
Do you wish you had an ethical way to steal your competitor’s customers without burning a hole in your marketing budget?
This article is your solution as I’ll show you how you can set up a system that will run on autopilot and will move ready-to-buy customers away from your competitors… to you, without you needing to maintain a constant oversight.
Buyers have a habit of comparing products before they finalize one and your goal should be to simplify their research process by presenting an honest and comprehensive comparison between you and your competitor’s product.
This is the idea behind competitor comparison landing pages that highlight the differences between two or more competing products in the market.
Who Can Take Advantage of Competitor Comparison Landing Pages?
The comparison pages are more prevalent in the SaaS industry because it is simpler to objectively compare SaaS products based on a set of tangible features. However, they can also be used in other industries and sectors, like:
telecommunication: a mobile network carrier comparing their monthly/yearly plans against their competitors
healthcare: medical device manufacturers can compare their products
renewable energy: solar panel manufacturers can compare their products
insurance providers: can compare different kind of insurance schemes available in the market, etc
electronics (computers & gaming): can compare different laptop models and even gaming consoles.
3 Reasons Why You Should Create Competitor Comparison Pages
#1 – Filters out bad customers: customers who choose you over your competitors have their priorities aligned with your USP.
#2 – High conversion rates: because these pages target customers who are at the bottom of the funnel and ready to buy a solution.
#3 – Long-term SEO value: as your product becomes popular, more people will look for a comparison between you and your competitors and thus, a comparison page optimized with the right keywords can easily rank on top for important queries like [you product] vs [competitor’s product].
How to make competitor comparison pages more effective?
#1 – Create multiple comparison pages
Creating one landing page per competitor gives you more SEO opportunities. Toast POS is a good example, they created a comparison page for every competitor and collated all of them in a hub of comparison pages.
#2 – Incorporate trust-building elements
Trust-building elements can be in the form of customer testimonials, case studies, awards, customer logos, security seals or any other element that establishes social trust. Two strategies that you can use here –
Take inspiration from Basecamp and instead of blowing your own trumpet, let your customers speak for you by creating a landing page similar to Basecamp’s before and after page.
Use targeted testimonials from customers who switched to your product from that specific competitor, like Toast POS does on its comparison page with Square.
#3 – Don’t promote competitors unwittingly
Navigate this double-edged sword carefully. To avoid promoting your competitor, keep the following pointers in mind:
Don’t use your competitor’s logo, instead just use their name.
If a brand name is trademarked, use ® symbol and avoid getting sued.
Specify the date of comparison so the reader knows how up-to-date or outdated the comparison is. It saves you from being called a liar.
Eliminate your own bias by providing proof. Link to third-party websites like G2, Capterra, etc that support your claim. Sendinblue does this well on their comparison page against Mailchimp.
#4 – Use comparison tables
Comparison tables are the simplest visual tool to present the most comprehensive comparison. However, if your product lack features, the comparison table may end up helping your competitors instead. You can model your comparison table on any of the following approaches:
Short & concise table like Toast POS: Toast uses a standard comparison table with 5 key pointers. But the pointers change with every competitor based on their strengths and weaknesses. Example – Toast vs TouchBistro and Toast vs Revel Systems
Multiple contextual tables like Hubspot: Hubspot categorize features based on user lifecycle stages and presents multiple comparison tables, easing the cognitive burden on the reader. Example – Hubspot vs Marketo comparison page
Price comparison table like Sendinblue: If you have an advantage on pricing, highlight it using a price comparison table, as Sendinblue does on the Sendinblue vs Mailchimp page.
#5 – Address the 4 forces of product switch
According to The ReWired Group, there are 4 forces that affect customer’s decision making when they are switching to a new product. Your goal is to align all the 4 forces in your favor.
Look at this diagram
As the diagram shows, two forces are aiding users to make the switch and two are pulling them back. Let’s see how to address them all…
Force 1 – Problem(s) with the current product
To strengthen this force, highlight the problems of your competitor’s product. This can be tricky because bad-mouthing your competitor reflects badly on you too. So instead, use PAS copywriting formula as Campaign Monitor does in the section “Mailchimp’s 2019 Updates to Their Terms of Use” on Mailchimp vs Campaign Monitor page. Alternatively, you can also use the screenshot of a review from a third-party review website like G2, TrustRadius, etc. Example of a review screenshot.
Force 2 – Attraction of the new product
To strengthen this force, you’ll need to effectively emphasize the USP of your product. This is partially covered by PAS copywriting formula, if you decide to use that. Alternatively, you can use the approach taken by Formstack on their Formstack vs SurveyMonkey page.
Formstack knew that competing with SurveyMonkey on its core feature of building surveys would not be a winning strategy. So instead, they targeted customers looking to create more than one type of form and the ones who needed additional features around survey builder, which is what Formstack excelled at. So instead of targeting everybody, Formstack presented the situation in which their product will work much better than their competitors.
Force 3 – Anxiety and uncertainty of change
To overcome this force, you’ll need to assure people that transition will be quick, effortless and free. The simplest way to achieve this is by directly integrating a migration feature in your product so it’s quick and easy for users to import their data. Just like Notion.io has an impressive Evernote importer.
Force 4 – Existing habits and allegiances
To overcome this force, you’ll need to overcome the force of inertia and the user’s desire to remain in the status quo. You can use a logical fallacy like Appeal to Vanity to achieve this outcome. It appeals to a person’s vanity, pride or self-esteem, in order to get the person to buy something or do something or give up something.
Apple used this strategy to encourage people to buy Mac over a PC by depicting PC users as uncool compared to Mac users.
L’Oreal has its slogan based on this fallacy – “Because you’re worth it.”
How to steal your competitor’s customers on autopilot?
This is the final part. Once you’re done optimizing your comparison pages, SEO will take its own sweet time to kick in but you don’t need to wait.
You can bring your comparison pages directly in front of potential customers by running a Google Adwords campaign to target your competitors’ brand keywords in Google Search Ads. Keywords like:
[competitor product name]
[competitor product] reviews
[competitor product] alternatives
[your product] vs [competitor product]
similar to [competitor product]
Every time someone searches for one of the above keywords, your ad will show up right at the top, even before your competitor’s organic listing. Exactly what you need.
After initial testing and optimization, you can leave your campaign on autopilot with a fixed weekly/monthly budget and it will continue to bring ready-to-buy customers to you.
Examples of businesses targeting their competitors’ brand keywords:
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Note 1 – This is the trimmed version of my original 3500-word article that contains plenty of images and examples. Read the original version here »
Note 2 – You can also download a bonus ebook containing 79 examples of competitor comparison pages on the original post.