#16 – How To Use Your Competitors' Weaknesses To Your Advantage

My name is Khalil Slade, and I love to talk about conversion rate optimization.

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Kind of lessons can you learn from competitors?

There are two different schools when it comes to competitors in conversion optimization and marketing in general. There is the theoretical school that says you should ignore your competitors completely. And I think really is theoretical because you have the other school, which is what most marketers do. They look at their competitors and they copy them. And that's the reason you look at marketing campaigns from one company to the next company. You don't even know which company started the campaign and which one copied it from the other. Marketers are really good at copying their competitors, and that's one of the reason we have this uniform markets in every aspect. Everything looks the same. Everybody's copying everybody else. There's no excitement when everybody's copying from everybody else. Then you're competing on specific product features that your competitors probably have. It becomes a sea of sameness that we deal with as conversion optimizers. I subscribe to the idea that I should be looking at my competitor. I should be learning from them, and I might be inspired by some of the work that they do. I don't want to copy it. I do steal it, and I get inspired by it and I say, huh? This is really interesting that they've actually released this feature. I wonder how my specific markets and the people that I'm going after, how they would react to it, how do I test it? How do I improve it? How do I actually make it better? When you do that, you end up with new features that people love. I always believe that as marketers, we have to have two rules, and I think that's kind of a secret to success. One is you want to have a lot of consistency. And by the way, when you say consistency, that implies two things, best practices. And that means we're doing what our competitors are doing. So that is consistency. But how do you stand out then? You need to sprinkle a little bit of differences, a little bit of excitement now and then where people say, oh, I did not expect this. This is actually really cool. Now think about this. How often do you deal with a company where you think to yourself and like, this is actually pretty cool. I'll give you an example. Move to a new house. And of course, with moving to a new house, guess what comes, which I didn't think through. Furniture. We need furniture now. There are thousands of furniture companies online, and some of them, actually some the top ones we work with. You reach a point where it's almost difficult sometimes to tell the difference between those furniture companies, because I think the same furniture manufacturers basically offer the same items with different companies online. What was interesting is we ordered from Wayfair, which is one of the larger furniture retailers. Experience was seamless, very straightforward. There's nothing special about it. But I tell you where Wayfair is very special and where they surprised me as a consumer and how they won me a few years back and how I continue to be a consumer. I had ordered a book case similar to the bookcase that I have behind me comes in. I'm not a handyman. I mean, you know, while it might take somebody an hour to put this together, you know, for me it's like a four or five hour ordeal. I'm putting it together, following the instructions. I reached the final point. I'll put in the back. You have to hammer the back. Just kind of typical. And lo and behold, the back does not match. So I keep on changing it left and right and it's just really not aligned. Okay. Nothing special until now. I reach out to Wayfair and tell them, hey, guys, there is a problem there. The back is really not matching. What do you think their response to me would have been? To the point that I'm actually mentioning them on our live broadcast.

Maybe give you like a manual on how to put together.

They send me a new one. Oh. They're like, oh, don't worry about it. Here's a new one. I'm like, no, no, no, dude, I don't want anyone. They're like, no, it's okay. And I'M like, what do I do with this one? They're like, you can keep it. Okay. My brother in law goes and orders this fancy dining room from them, $5,000. And they're trying to put it together and one of the screws did not work. He calls them and they're like, oh, here's another coming to you. And he calls me like, do you want a dining room? I'm like, dude, I don't want the dining room. He's like, it's free. We just got this extra dining room that's $5,000. Many furniture retailers can learn from Wayfair. Now. It requires a lot of commitment, requires a certain size to be able to do something like that. But you can always look at competitors and say, okay, here's what they are doing to surprise their customers. What can we do to surprise our customers? When I moved, guess where I ordered a whole bunch of my stuff from? From Wayfair. It was not even questioned, but I ordered it knowing that if I don't like something, they'll either give me half the money back or they'll send me a new one, no questions asked. They got me. And not only do they got me, they got my family. And I talk about everywhere as I speak in conferences. There you go. Customer evangelism, that's a whole other level.