This sounds like an absurd question. You would have to be pretty foolish to have links from your web site to your competitor’s site. It would have to be a significant oversight if you named your competitor(s) in any web copy. But just because you don’t have a direct link to your competitor’s web site doesn’t mean you aren’t sending your prospects there.
In this day and age of Google search, your prospects don’t even have to be that savvy to identify your competitor(s). If your competition’s marketing team is any good, both of you are showing up in the top 10 Google results list. But that isn’t what I am talking about here.
When a prospect arrives at your web site, you have the ability to both reduce the time a prospect spends on a competitive web site as well as to stop them from going there altogether. What would it be worth for you to be able to stop your prospects dead in their tracks on your site?
Marketers are always looking for the mechanism that will make their web site sticky. Often we turn to the use of gimmicks in the attempt to keep the attention of prospects and customers. Home pages are full of moving flash animations, “what’s new” company news sections, flashing corporate headlines, offers, deals, and advertisements. We can be so busy creating these mechanisms that we are missing the single, most effective sticky attraction.
That attraction is comprehensive, well-organized, effectively presented information.
Prospects arrive at your web site looking for information. Depending upon the prospect, he/she may start with very little or a lot of knowledge about your product, technology, and services. The job of your web site should be to help them discover what they don’t know but need to know. Your web site should be the one stop shop for all information regarding your solution, its technology, its value, and its applicability. And this information should be organized in such a way that it is easy for your prospect to locate, consume, and return to resume their exploration where they left off.
I know marketers and sales managers who want to keep information close to their chest. I used to be one of them. We may do this because we fear disclosing too much information to our competition via the public forum the web presents. (This begs the question of how weak is the competitive advantage our product and organization offers.) In other cases, we want to “force” their prospects to come directly to us (call a sales rep) so that we can feed the prospect our valuable information and control the conversation.
Either way, when a prospect’s information needs aren’t answered via information on your web site, you are inviting them to visit a competitor’s web site.
That is how you drive your prospects to a competitor’s web site.
But you say, if they are interested and their questions aren’t answered, the prospect will contact us and start that conversation. Think again. For most prospects, it is much easier and a lot less threatening to continue the search for their answers via the Internet (after all that is how they found you) than to call you and start a conversation.
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