Tag Archives: Advertising Tips

What To Do If A New Competitor Enters Your Market

What To Do If A New Competitor Enters Your Market

When a new competitor steps into your market, it can feel like a threat to your established place in the industry. However, with the right approach, especially in your digital marketing and SEO strategies, you can not only maintain your position but potentially even improve it. At Zenergy Works, we specialize in transforming these challenges into opportunities through expert SEO and digital ad management.

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Understand Your New Competitor

The first step is to thoroughly understand who your new competitors are. What products or services do they feature?  What are their strengths? Where do they lag behind? Use digital tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to analyze their SEO strategies, and social media engagement metrics. 

Evaluate Your Current Position

Before you can outmaneuver a competitor, you must assess your own standing. Are you prominent in the marketplace for the products or services that are most popular with your customers? 

Enhance Your Digital Marketing Efforts

Improving your SEO and digital marketing is crucial. Focus on:

Effective digital advertising can place your brand in front of the right audience at the right time.  Whether it’s Google or Microsoft Ads, social media ads, or retargeting campaigns, our strategic ad placements ensure you stay ahead of the competition.  In addition to providing traffic to your website and generating leads, paid advertising can also render valuable insights into popular search terms and messaging.

Engage and Retain Your Customer Base

With a new competitor in the market, retaining your existing customer base is more important than ever. Implement tactics like personalized email marketing, loyalty programs, and active engagement on social media platforms. Show your customers that they are valued and that your brand continually strives to meet their needs.  Don’t restrict your efforts to digital strategies, but also think of the personal touch in the form of a phone call, card or visit to a place of business.

Facing a new competitor in your marketplace is a challenge, especially if you are a local business facing a larger company, but it’s also an opportunity to refine your digital marketing and SEO strategies. The advantage of being a local business is the freedom to be innovative and  agile in marketing strategy and tactics.  Contact us today to see how our expertise in SEO and digital ad management can help your business to maintain your competitive edge.

For a free site scan for your website, please reach out and we will spend some time evaluating your placement in your marketplace.

Instagram’s Native Advertising Experiment

We’re only a few scant weeks into Instagram’s very limited first run of advertisements. The popular visual media site introduced ads from select vendors, and they’ve been very careful with their approach. Similarly to Tumblr and Twitter, the social site is attempting to create a more “natural” advertising experience by including these images directly in users’ feeds, rather that requiring them to follow the advertiser.

The results have been… unsurprising. It seems no matter what approach companies take, many users loathe advertisements on principle. When they see the now-familiar “Sponsored” stamp, they rebel. It doesn’t matter whether they already follow the brand, whether they love the brand, or whether the ad is exceptionally well done. It’s an ad, and it’s in their previously ad-free space. They don’t want it there.

Instagram Advertising

It’s an interesting conundrum. Instagram has intentionally hand-picked specific advertisers who they feel are already members of the community, who have substantial followings that they built on merit and the quality of their offerings. Their goal is very much in line with Tumblr’s approach – they want to use the culture of the community they built to provide the most natural, unobtrusive experience possible for their users while also monetizing in order to create a successful business model. Tumblr does it with GIFs, and now Instagram’s doing it with high-quality photography.

The first official advertisement, a Michael Kors image that can be viewed here, seems like it should be an absolute no-brainer. It’s creative, simple, high-quality, and is completely in line with Instagram’s theme. It’s a photo the company posted to their own profile, which is already followed by 1.4 million users. The only difference is that pesky “Sponsored” stamp, and the fact that it’s showing up for users who aren’t necessarily following the brand.

But, as the article I linked earlier astutely points out, although the commenters are largely negative nellies, the amount of positive user interaction (hearts/likes, in this case) skyrocketed. As of this posting, 230,000+ users have liked the photo, which is many times more than the business’ average post. So, what does this tell us?

Unfortunately, without access to the analytics of the advertisement (particularly the negative feedback left by utilizing the “Report Inappropriate” option), it’s difficult to say what the effect of the advertisement truly is, and whether the positive outweighed the negative. However, I’d wager that it did.

Instagram Ben & Jerry's

This is the constant struggle with social media and online advertising – the public views these as “free” spaces, and they buck against the idea that they must put up with advertising in their “personal” space. No matter what you do, someone isn’t going to be happy about it. However, the approach is becoming ever-smarter. Going the route of cultivation, creativity, and niche targeting is the next stage in advertisement. Visual media is always becoming more relevant to search engines, particularly with regards to sharability, which is often tied to quality.

Users will never enjoy being advertised to, but we can at least aim to be interesting, engaging, and relevant. Just because it IS an ad doesn’t mean it has to FEEL like an ad. Gone are the days of the low-quality SALE! SALE! SALE! ads. The future is now. What do you think of this experiment in native advertising?

Stephanie Wargin is the Social Media Strategist at Zenergy Works, a web design and SEO company located in Santa Rosa, California. Her friends like to brush her hair into her eyes whenever she talks about Facebook.

Video Resources

One of the most popular questions that our clients ask is how to use video in marketing their business. Other than the usual advice to keep videos short, make sure that whether you use YouTube, Vimeo, or a video player that is part of the website that videos load quickly and play only when requested by a website visitor. Also, don’t feel that you need to be all business in your video approach. Light-hearted videos show the human side of your company in addition to being fun to produce. The video advertising tips are listed below will help to point you in the correct direction.

video in marketing

Share Your Video Content on Social Media.  Posting Videos on your YouTube channel and sharing that content on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Pinterest allows you to send your message to a wider audience than just your website.

Find Ad Platforms Beyond Your Website:  According to comScore, 11.3 billion online videos were viewed by users in the United States in December 2012. Video ads tend to be viewed by consumers who are in “decision mode” because a potential customer must hit play in order to view the advertisement. Google and LinkedIn offer video ads, and video ad networks like BrightRoll, Live Rail or Adap.TV .

Written Reviews are Great, Video Reviews are Better. Video platforms like Authntk , EXPO TV and Bravo  allow merchants to provide user-generated video content on their website. Videos allow consumers to view the true emotion of the reviewer, and to empathize with how a business can provide solutions to their problems.

Product Videos Can Be Easy(Easier?). Treepodia is designed to turn entire product catalogs into product videos. All videos are based on existing product images, descriptions, prices, user reviews and merchandising rules and videos are created using Image Reviving Technology, which creates video from still photos. Videos are kept up-to-date with new video versions that automatically reflect changes in products, inventory, etc.

Bottom Line: It is important for every online marketer to identify and implement the strategy of video in marketing. Even a quick video to introduce potential customers to your firm by having the Owner or Manager discuss the Unique Selling Proposition for the business is a start. Videos that educate, entertain or demonstrate products and their uses are valuable for any entity.

Eric Van Cleave is a Partner in Zenergy Works, a Santa Rosa, California based Online Marketing, SEO and Website Development Firm.

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