Your Competitors Are Talking to Your Customers

Problem:

So far today, how many competitors called, emailed, or made a social post read by one of your customers? The number is probably not zero.

What’s happening and why:

Your competitors are desperate for new business (like most companies), and many are willing to do whatever they need to get it. You can’t blame them; you should be willing to, too. And even though you can’t prevent it from happening, you can stop their efforts from having an impact. Sometimes you need to play defense with your marketing.

How to fix it:

Here’s what playing defense looks like… It’s creating blog posts and other content that provide useful information to your customers. It’s offering interesting short videos that teach them something they don't know about. This can include what’s happening in the industry right now or topics like how to improve their shipping operations. And it’s pushing this content out via email and social media to ensure they see it.

If your content messaging is better than your competitors’ and shows up in customers’ inboxes and feeds more consistently, you win.

And here’s a bonus – that same content can be used to target new prospects and your competitor’s customers, too. It’s a win-win!

There is a serious limitation to using AI for writing. The problem is, if you think about how LLMs work, AI can only write things that have already been written. So, if you are writing to show off your company’s expertise, AI has nothing new to say… literally. Do you really think the subject matter experts at your customers and prospects will be impressed? They won’t. So, use AI for small things like social media posts and research. Using it for “thought-leadership” will hurt your reputation more than it helps.

Keep Up Where the Market Is Going

Back to the Future: It’s easy in marketing to try to be too progressive sometimes. With all the focus on social media, some companies are losing sight of the basics, which is remembering that prospects are usually going to check out your website before they agree to a sales call with you. The same thing will happen if they read an interesting article you’ve published. The point is that the importance of websites isn’t diminished by your email marketing, content strategy, and social media presence. So sometimes it’s better to stay a little off-trend and not ignore your website. Marketing doesn’t work, and leads don't convert if your website doesn’t do its job, either.