When the dean of Fairfield High School called my mother on that beautiful spring morning I am sure she was surprised. The dean had never called my house in regards to me. My older brother, however, was a frequent topic of conversation, but never me. The dean informed her that I had not shown up to school that day. That made perfect sense. It was senior skip day, and I was on my way to an amusement park with friends. When my mom questioned me about it that night I explained that skipping school on that day was a tradition that went back decades and I had to do it. She then offered up that all too familiar parenting cliché, if your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you follow?
When you’re looking for new marketing ideas or business direction it’s tempting to take a look at the competition. What are they doing to market themselves? What new products are they offering? What’s their secret? The fear is that the competition may be one step ahead of you. Maybe they know something you don’t know; or have access to vendors or technology you don’t know about. This is all possible, but gaining this intelligence can be a fruitless endeavor. You may even be following your competitor over a bridge.
Obviously it’s beneficial to stay on top of what’s new in the marketplace and how you’re doing in comparison to others in the market. However, the benefits of this information has its limits. Your competitor may be doing the exact same things, looking to your business for ideas and direction. This can create some bizarre circular reasoning and is no way to keep a business moving forward.
What prompted this blog posting was a solicitation I received for a whitepaper. It was titled, “Know what your competition knows”. Then, while browsing DM News I happen to see an ad for Compete.com. The headlined teased, “Monitor your competitor’s online strategies”. This just doesn’t seem right, though I suppose in our new Facebook’ish world of limited privacy this is par for the course.
Google has long been praised for their dynamic advertising network, Adwords, which opens up Google to businesses of every size. In fact, Adwords makes up more than 80% of Google’s annual revenue. One major problem with the ad network is its keyword selection feature. If you’re trying to find keywords for your campaign you can type in a word like “furniture”, and it will make recommendations of other similar keywords. This can make the process of launching your campaign very quick and easy. However, the data that provides the “similar keywords” comes from what other advertisers are using. So as a result you can end up selecting the same keywords as your competitor which causes the cost-per-bid to go up. Bidding on the most popular keywords can be a costly mistake for online advertisers. The keyword selection tool seems to be helping businesses compete directly with each other instead of each campaign creating their own unique strategy.
It’s a new year and a new opportunity to evaluate your marketing and business strategies. Try and resist the overwhelming amount of information that is available on your competitors. I don’t want to say, “be a leader not a follower”, because that’s just corny and who the heck am I to say that? But, in reality, the follower can never get ahead of the leader so long as he is sailing behind, trying to ride the same wind. I have a long-expired sailing license to back that up.
