Capitalising on the death of competitors

February 12, 2009 Website Strategy 1 Comment

We’re in a recession.  No big surprise there, but in the spirit of the vulture, there are always opportunities to be capitalised on.  One such opportunity is the phone numbers of competitors who have gone bust.

In recent months I’ve picked up on numerous competitors of clients who have found it all too much and have gone to the wall.  This highlights an important area of web strategy that many companies are unaware of – monitoring competitors and looking for opportunities.

Most companies are aware that it’s not rocket science to have a page of their website that basically says “there are many companies in this sector – you may recognise the following companies …”, followed by a list of company names and then: “we think we stand out from the crowd because we …” (launch into USP to encourage them to contact you as a preference).   Such a page can often be picked up via natural search engine results and, thanks to Google relaxing the rules on using competitors names in PPC, potential clients can even be actively attracted into that page of the website via PPC advertising.

Going beyond those basics though, there are few companies that keep an ongoing record of their competitors details, and monitor the progress of their competitors.  This doesn’t have to be complicated – it can simply be a list of:

• Competitor name
• Competitor telephone number(s)
• Competitor website address

The intelligent part is in having a process whereby someone in the company is keeping an eye on those competitors to see how they’re doing, whether they’re in trouble, and when they die.  This is where you can capitalise on being prepared.   Here’s the scenario:

Widgets Ltd sell widgets but they’ve gone bust.  Their website may live on for awhile but in theory, their telephone number suddenly becomes available.  You, as a rival widgets company, find out that you can buy their phone number and have it redirected to you.  From that point onwards anywhere that their phone number exists will result in calls coming through to your widgets company and you can therefore capitalise on the sales opportunties.

Taking this further though, you could ramp up your PPC visibility under the name of that competitor and attract searchers into a specially created page of your website that notes the competitor has gone bust but that you, as a strong widgets company, are in the position to service their requirement.

Finally, it goes without saying, that if the opportunity arises, you buy their url’s or even url’s similar to them, and have them redirecting to your own website or create a mini-site specifically for the purpose of picking up on the traffic that the dead competitor should have been having (perhaps from various online directory listings that they may appear in).

This is all a bit vulturistic (a made-up word but it seems to fit) but business is business and in a recession, companies need to make the best of a bad economic environment and capitalise in any way they can.