What is conquesting, and how does it relate to marketing and advertising?

In digital marketing, your goal is to dominate the keyword searches and audience attention most likely to become your leads. You want to offer just-in-time content that will be interesting, persuasive, and show up on top of your competition so that customers consider your brand or click on your website first. This is the nature of advertising competition.

Conquesting is when you ride out to take the audience of competing brands. Competitive conquesting began with PPC bidding wars over high-demand keywords. It became a much more vicious fight when brands began to bid on their competitor’s brand and product names, trying to gain the top search result or ad presence even when customers specifically searched for the competition by name.

Competitive conquesting in advertising is when you seek to win this battle, placing your brand above others, even in their own space and among customers with a specific interest in competitor brands. But there are more ways to achieve competitive conquesting than (costly) keyword dominance alone.

What is Competitive Conquesting?

Competitive conquesting is when you seek to dominate a competitor’s keywords and ad space, stealing customers who have already shown a specific interest in the other brand.

Examples of Competitive Conquesting

• A sporting goods brand with “Nike” and “Adidas” as target keywords.
• An electric bicycle company that shows display ads next to articles that mention “Tesla” and “Prius”
• A university that targets students and applicants to other schools on social media
• Microsoft Edge asks you to stay when you search for “Google Chrome Install” in an Edge browser

What are the Pros and Cons of Competitive Conquesting?

Pros

• Increase visibility among audience members with your customer profile
• Ensure leads consider your brand during the research phase
• Ride on your competitor’s name recognition to gain visibility
• Potentially steal customers from your competition
• Insight into new marketing directions
• Creative lateral campaigns for cross-brand visibility

There are a lot of advantages to competitive conquesting, but the disadvantages are significant enough to consider. When conquesting another brand’s digital presence and product keywords, you have the chance to piggyback off of their brand visibility to build your own. Customers in the research and decision-making phase are more likely to consider your brand alongside the brand you are conquesting, and you have the potential to steal customers if you offer comparable products at better prices or other points of convenience.

Cons

• Low relevance association with off-brand keywords
• Risk of higher bounce-rate
• Higher cost when competing with larger brands for keyword dominance
• Lower chance of direct ROI from customers with brand loyalty

However, any conquesting over another brand name or product names will also have low relevancy to your own content. You risk higher cost-per-click expenses, greater direct competition for your target keywords, and a higher disengagement or bounce-rate from those customers who do click through. These things should be considered carefully as you build your conquesting strategy.

What are the Different Types of Conquesting Campaigns

There are four primary types of conquesting campaigns based on the platform and method you choose. The original type of conquesting campaign, of course, is paid

SEO/SEM Conquesting

The first and original type of competitive conquesting is colonizing other brand names and product names. You can also target their favorite keywords learned through competitor research. This allows you to appear in searches that feature your competition and sometimes even to offer useful information. In a pure inbound marketing context, offering product comparisons and reviews can allow you to use your competitor’s brand names legitimately and even earn clicks for users trying to research the competition.

You may also use keywords in your competition’s tag-lines and product descriptive terms without officially posting about their products.

Paid Search Conquesting

More intense conquesting takes place in paid search competition. The original conquest marketing started in PPC paid search bidding in which brands bid to appear in search results targeting the competition. Old Navy, for example, might pay to appear in Levi’s searches, just to create a competitive landscape in each user’s search results.

Paid search conquesting, however, is also the most potentially costly because you are not only competing with the other brand for their signature keywords, you are also asking Google to recommend your pages for non-related keywords in which the competitor’s product might not appear once on the linked page, which increases your cost per click (CPC).

Display Prospecting

Display prospecting is a more lateral approach. In this method, you target your display ads to appear in relation to competitor content like brand names and product names. This is called contextual targeting, and is extremely common when used directly or laterally. For example, a water bottle company might show their ads next to content about running and running shoes. A bicycle helmet company might target a range of bicycle brands as anchors for their display ads, and these are practical lateral marketing strategies.

Display conquesting, however, is when Toyota shows Prius Plugin ads next to content about Teslas, or when you see iPhone ads when looking up Android devices. These are direct attempts to influence the viewer’s decisions by colonizing the ad-space of customers who are already showing interest in a competing brand.

Paid Social Conquesting

Lastly, paid social conquesting is when you take this tactic to social media. Social media targeting gives you the option to target audience members who like, follow, or engage with specific other accounts and topics. Targeting your competition in this way using social media sponsored posts or banner ads can be considered paid social conquesting. For example, if sponsored ads from Burger King start appearing after a user follows Wendy’s snarky Twitter account, that would be paid social conquesting at work.

Conquest a Larger Market Share with AdCellerant

At AdCellerant, competitive conquesting is just another card in your deck. If you have direct competition, their market share is a beacon to potentially grow your own audience. By targeting the brand, product, and customers of your competition, you can potentially conquest some percent of your competition’s market share for your own. Hone in on your conquesting strategy with AdCellerant.