Picture this: your top prospect is ready to change vendors. Is your company the first one they think of?
With research from Google and Bain & Co. Suggesting that 90% of B2B tech buyers ultimately select a vendor from their day one list of potential candidates, you need to be in front of buyers before they start conducting research.
If companies aren’t growing, they’re dying. They must constantly evaluate their tech stacks to determine if they’ve outgrown any current systems or need to find new vendors to hold valuable datasets. Internal stakeholders also change, bringing along new decision-makers who want to consider other vendors based on their past experiences with other tools and workflows. These internal changes, as well as external market forces, create unpredictability throughout the market—which means you need to focus on always being a contender for a spot on your target accounts’ day one lists.
According to Forrester, we’ve entered the buying group era— a time when key purchase decisions are made by a team of employees across different departments and seniorities who independently conduct their own research and come together to make the choice. It’s up to you to create a compelling reason that you’re the better solution and persuade a wide range of stakeholders—those using the product, those signing off on the budget, and those who could tangentially benefit from your product—to make a change.
An account-based approach is the most effective route to take with competitive displacement.
Your competitive displacement strategy sounds simple: Aim at taking customers away from your competitors to increase your company’s revenue and market share. There’s less focus on educating the buyer on the importance of having a solution in the first place. Instead, you need to drum up motivation to switch to your solution by telling buyers why they need to make the switch.
Read on for insights and guidance on the four key steps to build a competitive displacement strategy with an account-based marketing (ABM) approach to quickly foster trust with buyers, raise your brand equity across the marketplace, and impact your B2B marketing and revenue metrics so you can focus on providing premium customer service.
What Is a Competitive Displacement Campaign?
A competitive displacement campaign is a strategic marketing initiative designed to identify, target, and win over customers currently using a competitor solution. Beyond offering a specialized deal to entice customers, a competitive displacement campaign involves a targeted, proactive, and comprehensive approach encompassing market analysis, value proposition development, messaging strategy, and implementation tactics delivered through a full-funnel, multi-channel strategy.
The goal of a competitive displacement campaign is to position your solution as the superior alternative to the competition, effectively convincing customers to switch.
Successful competitive displacement campaigns help you:
- Expand market share. Because you’re winning customers from competitors, you claim more of the market.
- Increase revenue. Since some of your target audience may already be familiar with your brand, you have the potential for a faster sales cycle, which lowers your customer acquisition cost (CAC) and increases customer lifetime value. The account then becomes profitable and impacts your overall revenue.
- Enhance brand reputation and equity. Winning more market share positions your brand above your competition. Other target accounts and your customers will recognize your momentum and potential to offer better services, especially if you win over an account that’s a big name in their respective industry.
- Elevate the customer experience. Accounts won from a competitive displacement campaign have certain expectations based on their experience with your competitor. You can easily elevate their experience by quickly solving their key pain points and showing them why they made the right choice to switch vendors.
4 Steps to Create a Competitive Displacement Campaign with ABM
Successful competitive displacement campaigns require a deep understanding of the current competitive landscape and your level of brand awareness. A strong go-to-market plan, backed by data, maximizes your competitor displacement campaigns’ effectiveness of going after the right accounts and segmenting based on where they are in the buying process. ABM is an ideal approach for competitive displacement, as it focuses on building a more strategic approach through personalization, relationship-building, and measurable outcomes. By aligning sales and marketing efforts closely with business objectives, account-based marketing also allows you to maximize the chances of successfully converting accounts from competitors. Here’s how.
Step 1: Segment Your Target Accounts Based on Buyer Readiness
While you want to convert your competitors’ customers to your solution, you need to be tactical about your approach. Segment your target accounts based on their buyer readiness, which you can determine by analyzing your intent and engagement data to figure out who is actively looking for a new solution versus who isn’t ready to make the switch.
Analyze your intent and engagement data by segmenting it into three categories—high intent, moderate intent, and low intent—which helps you determine where accounts are within the buyer’s journey. Use the following three key categories to further segment your audience:
- Technology installs identify the accounts using a competitive solution
- Trending topics uncover the accounts researching a specific pain point
- Brands pull out the accounts specifically engaging with one or more brands
By layering these intent data sources, you’re honing in on the accounts that truly fit the profile of a competitive takeout initiative. You can then refine your segments based on their funnel stages, which gives you the ability to build hyper-personalized experiences and drive higher engagement from your plan.
Once you have your smaller, deeper target segments, you need to investigate the individual accounts to determine who is on the buying committee and what their concerns and needs are. Demographic data, such as company role, will help you determine the type of content you will share with these committee members to motivate them to move through the sales funnel, from considering your brand to deciding that you are their vendor of choice.
Prioritize the following buyer personas:
- Internal users involved in researching vendors or validating the performance impact of the solution internally, particularly any that have been flagged as unhappy with the existing provider. This group is also considered the end users, or the people who have the product license (such as a seat or login).
- Heads of departments and decision-makers that would have a role as a key technical or economic member of the buying committee. You can consider these people as the group who manages the product license.
- Additional personas from other departments who have an interest in the solution (such as a finance leader wanting to bring down spend, or the CEO who wants to see how the product impacts the company’s bottom line). Consider this group as those who bought the product license but will not be using the product directly.
Step 2: Personalize Outbound Media Campaigns
McKinsey found that over 70% of consumers expect personalization from brands—and get frustrated when brands don’t. Personalization establishes deeper connections between brands and clients—and the way to build brand awareness and trust is through personalized ABM content and messaging.
An effective multi-channel ABM approach proactively distributes content and messaging across the four marketing channels where buying committee members spend most of their time: connected TV (CTV), content syndication, display advertisements, and social media advertisements. Your channel mix will vary based on where your target accounts fall within your segments. Some accounts will require more brand awareness, while others may already be actively showing that they’re ready to decide on a vendor, which requires outreach with messaging that displays why you’re the partner of choice.
You need to ensure you can match accounts to where they are in terms of their buying stage. Knowing where your buyers are within the buyer’s journey helps you understand each persona and their specific needs on a deeper level, from how quickly they’ll move through information to what type of content they engage with, and how you can create a competitive campaign that keeps them engaged and motivated to explore your brand as a viable solution.
Each stage has a unique goal:
- In the awareness stage, your goal is to inform and educate your target audience about the challenges they face with their current solution and how your product can not only handle those challenges, but give them more opportunities, whether it’s with their day-to-day workflow, budget, or handling scalability and flexibility as their company grows. Even if they haven’t realized they have a problem yet, you want to create familiarity with your brand to stay top of mind when they’re ready to find a better solution.
- During the consideration stage, potential customers are actively evaluating solutions, making it crucial to provide detailed product information so buyers can easily distinguish your offering from competitors. Recognize competitor differentiation and help prepare buying committee members to make the case for your product based on their concerns. This could include concerns around quality, innovative technology, cost-effectiveness, fast delivery, customer service, or customization options that competitors may emphasize.
- At the decision stage, it’s imperative to equip buyers with comprehensive, digestible information that champions your solution as the optimal choice. They need to feel confident with switching to a different vendor, as the implementation process can take months from one solution to another (think of switching from Quickbooks to Netsuite, which takes months—and potentially longer—based on the complexity and cleanliness of your data).
- The retention stage is where you can make the most out of customer feedback to optimize future competitive campaigns. You want to dig deeper into their insights around what won them over and provide content that continues to affirm their choice to switch to your solution and avoid risking a switch to a competitor.
Market conditions and your target account’s industry play important roles in successful competitive displacement. Companies may have specific periods, such as annual budget and tech stack evaluations, where they have the opportunity to explore different tools. Particular industries and companies may have rapid purchase stages or slow periods. Keep an eye on market conditions and industry trends, and plan to retarget accounts for short- and long-term engagement to capture their attention at these opportune times.
Step 3: Nurture with Compelling Content
Converting buyers to your product, especially from competitors, requires content and messaging that motivates them to engage with your brand as a serious contender for their next stage of growth. When you engage buyers with content around their role, pain points, and use case, you can establish a relationship that shows you truly understand their needs and can serve them better than other vendors in the market.
Collaborate with the product marketing team to ensure your content and messaging focuses on showcasing the unique value you provide that your competitors fail to deliver. Depending on your product, industry, and growth stage, you may have a few heavy hitters within the marketplace. Your product team will help you identify and narrow down your competitive displacement campaigns to the competitors where you have a strong, differentiated offering 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. If you don’t have a product marketing team, rely on data from your CRM to see reasons for account wins and losses against competitors, as well as intent data to identify topics for your campaigns.
Keep in mind that your competitive displacement campaigns don’t have to contain everything. 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. Follow a rule of threes—three personas, with three specific pain points, outcomes, use cases, and proof points—to create more engaging campaigns.
Next, implement a multi-channel ABM approach to stay top of mind by delivering the right message at the right time. You don’t want to try and pack every piece of content and every bit of messaging into your nurture flows—it becomes too complex and muddies the story you’re telling, which causes buyers confusion and a reason to disengage. Instead, start small with your strongest messaging and pieces of content. You can always expand later.
Finally, align with your sales team to understand account scoring and signals of accounts moving from one stage to the next within the buyer’s journey. Sales may also have target accounts in specific industries or verticals they’d like to focus on. Find out what’s on their wish list so you can keep an eye on the accounts’ engagement with campaign collateral.
Step 4: Track Key Metrics to Accelerate Conversion
Measuring metrics goes beyond simple win or loss numbers. You need to identify the metrics that matter to your business and help you discover proactive, strategic insights that lead to actionable optimizations that lead to better-performing competitive displacement campaigns.
For accounts in the early stages of switching to another vendor, you want to keep an eye on how much they interact with the sales team, as it’s a strong indicator of account penetration and engagement. And for the accounts that are about to decide on a vendor to switch to, you want to investigate the impact of the deal and track it against the opportunity. What does the opportunity look like to convert that account, and what impact will their business have on your company’s goals?
Comprehensive analysis against competitors comes down to figuring out how you can track market share. Here are the key metrics that help identify where to place yourself against competitors:
- Win Rate: The percentage of deals won divided by your total deals. You can dive deeper into this metric by tracking your competitive win rate, which looks at the number of deals you gained against specific competitors. You can also find which competitors you won against through client notes and intent data.
- Competitive Content Engagement Tracking: Review what content is driving the best engagement with your target accounts. Look into your click-through rates (CTR), impressions, email opens and clicks within emails, number of asset downloads, and sessions to see what content is driving engagement.
- Competitive Deal Support Requests: Requests from your sales and customer success teams are leading indicators of your competitive displacement program and who needs assistance. Track what type of content is requested and optimize how you can give these teams better access to answers or enablement materials. Alert your product marketing team if you need to develop new messaging or update battlecards so everyone remains on the same page.
Get Into Fighting Shape Against Your Competitors with ABM Campaigns Powered by Madison Logic
You and your competitors may have the same target accounts in mind, but there’s another bridge that connects your companies: Sales cycles are constantly affected by economics and the state of the marketplace. To seize more of your market share, despite these conditions, you need to ensure that you can continuously stay ahead of your competitors. One way to do that is through continuous competitor research, constant analysis of intent and technographic data, and cross-collaboration between your sales and customer success teams to ensure your competitive displacement campaigns benefit from proactive optimization.
To get into fighting shape against your competition, you need to be able to access your customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platform (MAP) data as close to real time as possible. Your historical data around your win and loss rates tells one story—and it’s your job to dig deeper to find out which competitors’ clients are within striking distance.
Madison Logic offers an ABM platform that not only brings your datasets into one holistic view—it powers your target audience segmenting abilities up through ML Insights and your measurement capabilities through ML Measurement. ML Insights leverages intent data from over 20 million companies worldwide so you can quickly identify the demographics on the buying committee alongside the content and messaging that will speak to them. Our proprietary engagement data uncovers behavioral insights throughout your targeted accounts across the four primary media channels: ABM Content Syndication, ABM Display Advertising, ABM Social Advertising with LinkedIn, and ABM Connected TV. And our third party B2B research intent data gives you deeper insights into product research, content engagement, and account data, so you can quickly optimize your competitive displacement campaigns to capture your buyers’ interests and create content that speaks to them.
Ready to claim more market share? Download our Winning the Battle: Leveraging ABM for a Competitive Edge Blueprint and contact us to speak to a representative to learn how we can help you create a more proactive, data-driven, multi-channel ABM competitive displacement campaign today.
