E188 – Comparison Marketing

Here is the story that caught Dave’s attention Wix Negative Ads Against WordPress Generate Backlash and without it honestly Dave likely (and Mat) wouldn’t have even seen the video. Meanwhile if you too haven’t watched and want to see what you missed, here it is:

So now that the video and article that spurred this episode is out of the way, what about the rest of the episode? The guys focus more on the idea of going after your competitor and how to do it.

Also if you create something “controversial”, the possible free impressions and media coverage (like this podcast) could amplify your content and message for free. So you may make some people mad but get free coverage – the reward/risk to doing such a thing is up to you!

– Dave

If you are in the SaaS space and you are NOT creating compare pages go watch this video from Aleyda and her Crawling Mondays series. Matthew Howells-Barby from Hubspot and Jackie Chu from Uber dig into some of the content you need including compare pages. Go give a watch/listen later when you have a chance.

Comparing to The Big Fish

So while you may disagree with the execution in this case by Wix the fact that they are going after the big CMS is just something they should do. Think of the market leaders in any space and then think about where if you are an upstart or smaller fish, where is it easiest to gain market share? From the leader of course!

  • Google in Search (88% -ish market share in US). Bing and DuckDuckGo have to go after Google and often do over privacy or anything they can.
  • WordPress (30-74% market share depending on source) in CMS. Wix, Squarespace, Drupal, and everyone else are way behind.

Compare Pages

In most industries it does and will make sense for you to look at making pages that compare you to the big fish. If you are a CMS upstart creating Company X vs. WordPress. Company X vs Squarespace. Company X vs. Hubspot. Create a page that is Alternatives to WordPress. Alternatives to Squarespace and so on. People are searching for these types of things and they clearly are looking for whatever it is you sell or do.

Video or Radio Ads vs. Ranking in Search Engines vs. Bidding on Competitor Names

So now that you are convinced that you need to go after the market leader the real question is how best to do it. This episode was spurred on by someone doing a video but there are so many ways to go after the market leader in your space or just some competitor.

  • Bid on their keywords or brand with PPC.
  • Rank higher on 3rd party sites by paying or having more/better reviews.
  • Creating vs. content or “alternative to” content and going after them through SEO
  • Create radio, TV or other audio/video content to make the comparison.

In the end how you compare yourself to them is up to you. Do you highlight their flaws? Do you highlight how you are better? Do you do both? Do you start a price war or just stick to features?

How you do that is up to you but be weary of how some might see your videos and ads as is the case with the Wix ad in this case.

Full Episode Transcript

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited to have you join us on another one of these businesses, digital podcast episodes, and we are going to jump into it right now. How’s it going, Dave?

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:20] We are, I don’t know, ask us

positive or negative five days after what’s today. We’re uh, I actually say we’re recording this on Thursday. All of this stuff just happened this week. Is this one’s going to go live in three days. So ask me again Monday. All right.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:41] So everybody, what we’re going to jump into today. Um, we’re

Dave Rohrer: [00:00:46] going to talk about that.

You didn’t ask us to talk about. Which is fine.

Matt Siltala: [00:00:48] We’re just gonna do it. It’s fine. Um, so yes, there’s a little video going around in the SEO. That’s kind of, uh, angered that some SEO’s and, and whatnot, you know, [00:01:00] putting

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:00] buttons.

Matt Siltala: [00:01:02] Yeah. Wix and a WordPress against each other. It’s a little commercial that, uh, that wicks put out kind of a bashing WordPress and, uh,

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:13] which is your competitor to be fair.

Yeah, it is too, to a certain extent. And that’s what we’re going to talk about.

Matt Siltala: [00:01:19] And we both watched it and, you know, our comment was, we don’t really get the old man. Um, you know, we watched it in our thoughts. We both agreed, well, we don’t really get the old men comment, but I mean, it is, it is like it, I didn’t have a huge problem with it.

I thought it was kind of funny. I mean, you got the old clunky, outdated, whatever, or old press and here I’m the new kid on the block, but. Again, what we were talking about before we started recording was they, they fell to, um, bring up the fact that, you know, their platform is horrible from an SEO standpoint, but,

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:54] uh, if it’s as horrible, but I don’t know that it’s great.

Not as good. [00:02:00] I can not speak to it lately because I have not messed around with it too much.

Matt Siltala: [00:02:07] So

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:10] I guess I can say that. I’m

trying.

Matt Siltala: [00:02:14] I just trying to think about the last time that I used it, so I could be fair to it, but, um, it has been a few months, but the last time, whatever version I used or looked at, um, was nowhere near as friendly as anything I’ve ever used with WordPress.

Of course, I know all the plugins and I know all the updates and things that I have to do. And so there there’s that side of it as well. But go ahead.

Dave Rohrer: [00:02:37] Sorry. No, it, it, I think it just goes to the point. Of when I talk to a client and I know John Henshaw, um, Roger martini Buster, um, had an article in STJ and he quoted some people Mr.

Roger, Monty, um, we’ll link to it for you. Roger. Don’t worry. Um, editorial, Lincoln, all, um, [00:03:00] links, baby. You’re welcome, Lauren. Um, how was it? Where’s our money.

Matt Siltala: [00:03:05] Just kidding. We don’t do

Dave Rohrer: [00:03:06] paid stuff like that. There, uh, what was it? Henshaw? Was it John? Yeah. Bye, bye. Crapping. I can say crap. I’m on WP, but that’s what you do.

And I think for us, this was kind of the, the lightning bolts or the, the powder keg that got this idea going. But I have so often created, he did pages and I know there was a video or a little late last year with the later. Where she had some sass people on, um, share her crawling Monday video series. And one of the, one of the things they do is they go, you want to rank for compare, like there’s compared like Wix versus WordPress is Wix better than WordPress is Shopify better than Magneto is woo commerce, better than, you know, any of those things.

So, you know, Ford versus Chevy Tundra [00:04:00] versus Silverado people search like that, people compare. And how you go about ranking for those compares, um, paying for the, you know, the bidding on those keywords, trying to steal shelf space, trying to steal market share from your competitor who maybe has a similar, or maybe not similar offering.

Um, you know, Wix and Shopify are, um, in Squarespace are CMS is, but they’re not at all. Like. Uh, Drupal and WordPress in my eyes. Like I can not do anything with Squarespace or Wix. Well, you can in Shopify, but you need developers.

Matt Siltala: [00:04:46] Well, and I also think, you know, cause I’ve worked with people like w who have a big enough following that they legit.

And I, and I know there’s going to be like negative feedback about this or whatever, I don’t care, but there’s just some people that just don’t care [00:05:00] about the SEO side of it. They already have. The following and they already have what they need through social media. They just need a simple platform. And Wix is that very simple platform or whatever, it’d be Shopify.

And that’s what they’re using. And they don’t care about SEO because that accomplishes everything that they need at this point. Now, at some point, maybe they’re going to get into some issues that they wish they had, but, you know, for the most part, anyone that I’ve worked with that’s been in that situation has never gone back or needed it or even cared dude.

Dave Rohrer: [00:05:31] So. No. I, I think the, the ad in that we’re talking about, you can go after your, you have to go after your competitor because they have the market share. Ben goes after Google, everyone goes after Google. When they talk about search, duck, duck, duck, duck, duck, go, what do they do when you’re talking about search, they point out the flaws.

They point out the issues that, you know, Google sells your data. Now how you go about it with an ad, you [00:06:00] know, a video commercial. You know, do you use positive, negative? Do you put yourself better? Do you, you know, how do you slight them? How do you make yourself look like the better alternative I think is all in the execution, but one way or another.

You need when you’re a small upstart quote, unquote, going up against someone that has, I think, you know, in this case, WordPress has a ridiculous amount of market share. Um, I forget Yoast Yoast updates it every quarter or every month, every quarter. Um, it’s ridiculous market share word press. I was going to

Matt Siltala: [00:06:33] say, isn’t the number like 80% of all

Dave Rohrer: [00:06:35] people.

Yeah, it’s ridiculous. And you know, in most countries, Google has 95, 99%. So duck, duck goes and bangs have to come out swinging. Yeah. And that’s what they did now. You can not like the execution. That’s totally fine. Um, but anytime I’ve been in a SAS or anytime I’m in anything like that, where my client or my employer is up [00:07:00] against, like when I worked at the payroll company, we were a small upstart going against ADP and Paychex.

Well, every chance we get, you know, we’re gonna have our compare page and we’re going to show. Every review site that has us better. We’re going to show every feature that we have, that they lack. We’re going to show how we make your life easier. And they don’t. Yeah, we’re cheaper. We’re better. We’re faster.

We’re stronger. We’re quicker. We’re actually have a mobile app, whatever it is, we’re everywhere. We beat them on that page. I’m going to basically just hammer you over the head and that’s what this ad was. And this is what we’re, their attempt was.

Matt Siltala: [00:07:43] Yeah. Like I said, I mean, I didn’t really take issue with it and I thought it was kind of funny, but I understand that they’ve

Dave Rohrer: [00:07:51] got to come out, swinging against the big guy and everyone knows it.

And also whether you like that ad or not, if for those [00:08:00] people that, you know, I don’t even care if you liked it or not. For anyone that’s worked with WordPress and has had something break after you update, you know, every three weeks. Oh yeah. Or how often do you like updating WordPress?

Matt Siltala: [00:08:13] Oh, I don’t, I it’s funny because I mean, as I’m, as we’re talking about this, I’m thinking about how well, not that, how, how many, how much painstaking efforts I go to make, ensure that I have a good backup in case something breaks.

When I hit the update button, I’ll never just go straight to the update button. It’s always a process of making sure that you have a backup of everything in case something breaks. So.

Dave Rohrer: [00:08:40] In most clients that I work with that are on WordPress, the most, especially the, the smaller, the business often the very first question is, do you know WordPress developers?

Yeah. Well, I’d have to say the new site, you know, WordPress developer, because all of the technical stuff that you just suggested that, um, I can [00:09:00] do some stuff in WordPress, but once it starts creating or changing lots of core, or if you have lots of really, um, Deep plugins. I don’t, I’m not going to break it cause I don’t want to spend my entire weekend trying to fix your site that I just screwed up.

Even if it’s in staging, I was going to say,

Matt Siltala: [00:09:15] I usually just follow our friend checking. We can put a link to, to him. But, uh, I usually just, you know, when he says, Hey, it’s okay to update from this version is when I usually for a long time I paid attention to him because he would be the one that would like, just be

Dave Rohrer: [00:09:31] okay if you have custom plugins, it can break stuff.

For sure. And it is a pain point and that’s what they went. They went after the largest pain point. There’s a reason my agency website and my personal website are static PHP sites. Guess what I don’t ever have to do for those sites update anything, unless, unless I want to, but I also know how to write PHP.

I know how to write HTML CSS. I went in there [00:10:00] customized my own theme. Created statics created plugin or created, um, uh, include files for the header footer. So it’s all, you know, departmentalized or compartmentalized. And I don’t have any issues, you know, as long as my servers updated and I updated to new PHP, guess what?

Nothing broke unless I broke it at some point and forgot, but you know, when you’re going to. Go after your competitor or you want to take market share, get from your competitor, or you want to take shelf space for the keywords. Like if you aren’t already looking at compare keywords for, you know, what’s the best basketball shoe or what’s the best, whatever did I just click on it?

I didn’t click on anything. YouTube. Good grief. It just took me to go go power Rangers or something. Um, click

Matt Siltala: [00:10:58] anything. I blamed

Dave Rohrer: [00:10:59] DJ. [00:11:00] He’s not even here. That was a grandparent’s house. Um, and the cat’s sleeping, so I don’t know who it is. Um, but whatever your business is, look at creating compare pages, look at how people compare your product or your service to others.

And if there is a by far leader in your space or in your neighborhood or industry, Having a compare page. You know, if you go and, you know, go look up some search traffic or bid on it and see if people are really searching for it. But if there’s any sort of traffic there, I mean, especially if you can tag your name with it, you can always send your own prospects there and say, Oh, you know, who are we up against?

Oh, them. Oh, well on our site go to this page and you know, I can explain all of it to you, but we break down all of the faults or all of the shortcomings of their service or their product. And we talk about how we actually do that. So you were just talking about that thing. Yep. We do that, um, that we have their page on it.

They’ll link [00:12:00] to it, you know, go take a look at it and it’ll break it down. I was going to say

Matt Siltala: [00:12:04] by far, you know, and just thinking about this, going back and looking at, um, the infographics that we’ve put out by far, the ones that do the best are Dick surprise, the comparison ones. And so. Yeah. Most of them that we did, it’s the comparison ones that get shared the most and, and people do do that.

Dave, they actually use those. Yeah. We we’ve sold that as a service where people, you know, instead of having to always explain something, it’s very easy for the customer sales rep or whoever to just send them a link saying here, this will answer your question. So it’s great content

Dave Rohrer: [00:12:39] too, so well it’s great content.

Yeah, it can be, you can set it up as an FAQ. You know, type of page where it’s like, do you do this? And you can, you know, put an X next to your competitor and say, Nope. As of, you know, June 1st, whatever, or last time we checked, they don’t have [00:13:00] it. Um, we used to. Put up all of the ratings from all of the different services until we got a cease and desist at one company I worked for, like, they sent their lawyers to tell us that we, that we cause we had things wrong and miss, you know, not updated enough, uh, which, which to us meant we are kicking their butts because if they are getting their butts kicked enough that they spend time and money and energy and having literally lawyers send you paperwork.

For us to make a change on a website that took us literally five minutes. Okay. Yeah. It’s like we comply, we changed it. We were still kicking your butt. We still show the page, kicking your butt, the page ranks for your name when they compare against us. Or if someone, you know, searches for something, we have it showing up.

We’ve optimized it. And it’s annoying you and good when

Matt Siltala: [00:13:52] for us,

Dave Rohrer: [00:13:53] when for SEO. Um, but yeah, like. There’s a reason why the  [00:14:00] and all of those types of comparison sites, when you go down on the bottom left, it used to be, I don’t know if it still is, but they have compared of, you know, Oracle versus Salesforce or, you know, HubSpot versus Salesforce for CRM or whatever the other CRMs are, um, sugar or something, sugar CRM.

Yeah. You know, you compare them, they have compare pages. Those pages are built because people search for it. So, I mean, if you’re not out there taking swings at your competitor, I think the biggest thing is, is how do you execute it? Do you do it with organically? Do you do it with ads on there? You know, you do bid on their brand names.

Do you create, you know, commercials and videos, how you do it is up to you, but you know, whether you go positive or, you know, do a negative attack ad not politics type, but yeah. You know how you go at them? I think it’s up to you, but there’s really no reason not to at least, [00:15:00] well, the big guy.

Matt Siltala: [00:15:04] Yeah.

Dave Rohrer: [00:15:06] So for the market share is,

Matt Siltala: [00:15:08] so I guess what, you know, I guess just in wrapping this up, Um, definitely guys go watch the video that we’re talking about.

So, you know what we’re talking about throughout this episode, but, uh, any final thoughts about the video or anything that we’ve talked about

Dave Rohrer: [00:15:22] before dig up the video that Elaina did, um, that walks through how they, um, the two people that were on it, I forget who they were honestly. Um, but they walked through the compare pages and stuff in general.

And I think whether you use a positive spin, negative spin, you do, you know, a commercial TV ad radio ad, just organic bidding on keywords, whatever it is, just think through how you beat them and how you can set yourself up to look good or better than your competitor in doing it. I don’t, I don’t know why you wouldn’t, especially if someone has 98% market share like Google [00:16:00] or.

80 or 75 or 90 that WordPress has. If you’re an upstart or if you’re fighting against them, you got to take swings at him, whatever the market is. I mean, Tesla, Tesla took big swings at all of them. Big automakers. Yeah. Yeah. He’s, he’s always done that. Ilan always takes swings at them,

Matt Siltala: [00:16:19] even if a

Dave Rohrer: [00:16:21] CC smacks him down,

Matt Siltala: [00:16:22] even if it’s fun.

That’s enough. All right, well guys, um, Thanks for listening. I do appreciate it. And as always make sure that you go check us out. We’re we’re everywhere. Um, you know, Spotify, iTunes, Google play, wherever, wherever you find us. Um, give us a five star rating. We are where all the cool kids are for sure. So for Dave ward, with Northside metrics, I met Sophia with avalanche media.

And thanks guys for joining us. We’ll see you in the next one. Bye.