In the dynamic and crowded B2B technology marketplace, gaining a competitive edge is crucial for businesses to thrive. Yet standing out doesn’t always mean you have the better product or service. Decisions to switch vendors often come down to who’s able to tell a better, more compelling story that gives them a reason to make a change.
To persuade buyers to choose your product over competitors, your content and messaging must compel them to see your brand as a strong candidate for their next growth phase. By delivering content that addresses their specific roles, challenges, and use cases, you demonstrate a deep understanding of their needs and show that you can provide superior solutions compared to other vendors. This approach helps build a meaningful relationship with potential clients, making them more likely to consider your offering.
When marketers work together with other internal teams, good things happen. Understanding how to leverage key insights from your product marketing, sales, and customer success teams gives you the resources and information needed to create more insightful and compelling ABM content. Keep reading to learn the steps needed to make your competitive displacement content more impactful and how to leverage it in a multi-channel account-based marketing (ABM) approach to foster trust with buyers, raise your brand equity, and persuade target accounts to switch from competing solutions to yours.
Step 1: Collaborate with the Product Marketing Team to Prepare Your Content Messaging
From white papers to blog articles, eBooks to webinars, you have ample content available to use across various campaigns. For competitive displacement campaigns, your content focuses on showcasing the unique value you provide that your competitors fail to deliver. Your product marketing team is the main point of contact to get competitive intelligence insights and solution-specific messaging, as well as assist you with designing competitive campaigns.
Product marketers are on the pulse of what competitors offer, how they advertise themselves, what customer complaints and praises for the product are, and relevant market trends and persona insights that may work in your company’s favor. Partner with your product team to understand your battlecards—an important piece of messaging that indicates how you and your competitors stack up against each other in terms of offerings, functionality, and pricing. Dive deeper into your sales data to understand your win and loss data around accounts who made the switch or decided to partner with a competitor but show signs that they want to make a switch.
The competitive landscape varies depending on your product, industry, and stage of growth. Your product team will help you identify and narrow down your competitive displacement campaigns to the competitors where you have a strong messaging around key differentiators and you’re able to speak to a specific pain point that clients experience with competitors and how your brand can address—and solve—that paint point.
Early-stage B2B marketing companies are most likely slowly building their marketing function out—some specific marketers, like content or product, may not be in house. If you don’t have a product marketing team, you can still dig into your marketing toolbox and knowledge about the marketplace to identify what competitors to displace. Review websites like G2 aggregate client reviews and rankings into scores and badges across a variety of categories to identify industry leaders. Gartner research reports provide deep industry insights and rankings across various industries and products. Search engine optimization (SEO) tools like Semrush and Ahrefs can also compare your website’s domain ranking and content statistics against competitors, which lets you quickly identify what competitors are within reach to beat, and where you have content gaps and opportunities to outrank competitors and claim more of the digital marketplace.
Step 2: Follow the Rule of Threes for Strong Storytelling
Your messaging will be one of the key drivers for engagement and conversations, as it heavily focuses on your ability to displace the competition. The strength of your campaign lies in your storytelling ability—of being able to identify how your content dives into the buyer’s pain points and what pieces of content convey messaging that causes a strong reaction for each committee member. Approach your messaging plan with a “rule of three” mentality for a strong foundation for engagement and compelling content.
While buyers won’t remember everything they read, they will remember how they felt while engaging with your content, and you want them to keep you top of mind. Buying committee members will keep an eye out for compelling reasons to change vendors, which is why you need to ensure you can position your brand as the superior alternative. End users will care about whether managers and stakeholders would be happy with the new solution, so they need content that describes how your product impacts day-to-day tasks. C-suite and decision-makers around department budgets will care about the return on investment (ROI) for the product.
As a writing principle, the rule of three notes that information presented as a group of three tends to be more amusing, gratifying, and memorable. As a campaign principle, you can follow it to create engaging campaigns. You want to identify three personas to target. From there, you can develop messaging that highlights:
- 3 pain points, and how your solution addresses them
- 3 strategic outcomes that highlight your solution benefits, including impact on ROI
- 3 use cases on how your solution addresses key pain points
- 3 proof points that reinforce the value your solution brings
As you build out your content groups, you must constantly check in to ensure you’re addressing buyer intent and clearly communicating your value propositions. Each target account and competitor solution needs messaging around how you fill the market gap—essentially, how you can offer more than your competitor offers. You must also be aware of the buying committee structure—of which buyers hold seniority and what type of influence they have on decision-making—so that you can accurately tap into their concerns and provide enablement pieces to help them persuade other committee members that you are the vendor of choice.
Creating your multi-channel nurture strategy serves as an opportunity to optimize your storytelling so you can quickly move buyers through the funnel. You want your messaging available across various content, from product and competitive pages on your website to your sales enablement collateral. And remember: Each piece of content doesn’t need to address all three pain points at the same time. You want to create various entry points for buying committee members to engage with, as they may know about one problem and begin their research, only to discover another problem—and yet you offer solutions to solve one, the other, or, ideally, both.
Step 3: Implement a Multi-Channel Strategy to Stay Top-of-Mind
Your competitive displacement campaign should apply a multi-channel ABM approach so you can identify your target accounts and engage them with the right content and message where they are at the right time. While you can build nurture flows into your content strategy, you need to find ways to stay top of mind as target accounts may lose track of your brand due to their day-to-day priorities or because your competitors are also trying to get their attention. Use display advertising and LinkedIn Ads as a retargeting strategy to increase the frequency of touchpoints.
You want to avoid overpacking your content and every bit of messaging into your nurture flow—it will become overly complex and muddles the story you’re telling. This can confuse buyers and cause them to disengage. Instead, start small with your strongest messaging and content that you can expand on later in other touches.
When you’re ready to create more advanced email nurture flows, adding a level of personalization to your messaging can result in more engagement and more sales-ready accounts. Try:
- Industry personalization for broad targets
- Trending topic personalization for middle targets
- Competitive-specific product personalization, objection to purchase, and/or pain point specific messaging for the narrow target
Step 4: Align with Your Sales Team on Content and Messaging
Engaging with your campaign’s assets is one thing, but you lose out on the momentum and engagement from your marketing efforts if your target accounts don’t make it to a sales conversation. Marketing and sales alignment requires constant conversations around competitors, win and loss data, and what accounts show promising engagement that will yield those important conversations that help convert competitors’ clients into your customers.
Give the sales team visibility into account penetration and engagement with media channels. Accounts that are heavily engaged can then be prioritized for outreach. And while you may not run into this as frequently with competitive displacement campaigns, the sales team still needs to ensure that marketing understands the qualification and scoring metrics sales use to ensure buyers that your product can serve the buyers’ needs better. Account scoring can help with automating the handover process with sales, but you still need to align with sales on any specific accounts they’re looking to break into or verticals they’d like to focus on. Knowing what accounts are on the sales team’s wish list allows you to quickly flag these accounts when they engage with marketing collateral.
You should also align with the sales team on a unified messaging strategy across your competitive displacement campaign and sales conversations. Playbooks are a great way to ensure messaging remains consistent across teams while keeping marketing and sales strategies top of mind. Playbooks incorporate your value proposition, key benefits, audiences and their needs, objection handling, unique differentiators versus specific competitors, and an outline of related assets that sales can use as enablement content to effectively speak about your solution versus other competing solutions. Marketing can also help sales team members craft engaging, personalized outreach messages with trending topics, competitive research, and key talking points on why buyers are having problems rather than asking buyers what those problems and pain points are.
Finally, include the customer success team alongside the sales team in conversations about winbacks from inactive customers or customers who went to a competitor. Find out why the customer left or became inactive so you can craft a nurture campaign with the right mix of content that will compel them to engage with your brand. Sales and customer success members active on social media platforms like LinkedIn can also post company and product updates and deals that may catch the eyes of previous clients and garner interest as well.
Expand Your Market Share with Content that Converts
To convert buyers from competitors, your content and messaging must not only capture their interest but also clearly differentiate your product as the superior choice for their growth. Crafting content that speaks directly to their role, addresses their pain points, and aligns with their specific use cases helps establish a connection that demonstrates a deep understanding of their needs. Additionally, incorporating comparative insights that highlight your unique advantages and how they directly address current and future buyer needs can further position your brand as the more compelling option. This dual approach ensures that potential buyers see both the immediate benefits and long-term value of choosing your solution over others.
Madison Logic provides an ABM platform that integrates your datasets into a unified view, enhancing your target audience segmentation and enabling data-driven content with ML Insights and optimizing your measurement capabilities with ML Measurement.
ML Insights harnesses intent data from over 20 million companies globally, allowing you to confidently identify the buying committee and persona demographics and tailor your content and messaging accordingly. Our proprietary engagement data provides behavioral insights across four key media channels and our third-party B2B research intent data offers a deeper understanding of product research, content engagement, and account-specific details. This enables you to effectively refine your competitive displacement campaigns, capturing buyer interests and crafting content that resonates with them.
Ready to amplify your competitive displacement game? Download our Winning the Battle: Leveraging ABM for a Competitive Edge Blueprint for key steps and insights you may have overlooked. Contact us to learn how we can help you gather data and insights into your best content for these campaigns today.
