Stealing market share with competitive marketing: A step-by-step guide

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Competition is inevitable, and it turns every product into a commodity—including yours.

For early-stage companies, competition is taboo. The goal is to build a disruptive product that shakes up an existing category or, better yet, creates an entirely new one. As your company matures, you’ll need to directly compete with low-end copycats and large established companies that want a piece of your success.

For mid- to late-stage companies, a strategic framework for competition is required. In addition to tracking competitive moves, there are a number of new ways to win over your competitor’s customers and win back churned ones. In this article, I’ll walk you through the competitive marketing framework I’ve developed and implemented at Zendesk.

As we’ve transitioned from having a single product to offering a family of products, our competitive landscape has changed. Competitive marketing was once viewed as taboo but it has now become a growth advantage.

Ignoring your competition means keeping your head in the sand

Building and sustaining market share is getting harder as market competition intensifies. With open-source technology, it’s never been easier or cheaper to start a company and raise venture money. This landscape has created a new breed of competition that’s well-funded and ready to steal market share.

Like many companies, Zendesk focused on building a great product and providing best-in-class customer support. But our competitive landscape has changed dramatically since the company was founded in 2007. Copycats followed us into the market: Freshdesk in 2010, Help Scout and HappyFox in 2011, along with dozens more.

As the market leader with over 100,000 customers, we could easily ignore these competitors. But with a better product and higher CSAT score, we focused on choosing a product that can scale.

How we did competitive marketing

I spent most of my career focused on performance marketing and international growth at Orbitz and Expedia. The OTA landscape is highly competitive and dominated by two players: Priceline Group and Expedia Inc.

I joined Zendesk before it rebranded and transitioned to offering more products. My team and I needed to create a competitive marketing strategy, spell out the tactics, and assemble a cross-functional team to get it all done.

I started by looking at our own data for insights to understand how our customers decided between us and the competition. Here, we found a meaningful segment of customers that we call our “boomerangs”—the opportunities lost to low-end competitors that organically come back to our company.

We used qualitative insights from boomerang customers to show the team that competition isn’t really about us vs a competitor. It’s about empowering prospects to invest upfront and choose a partner that’s built to scale.

We learned three things from studying boomerangs, opportunities lost, and recent competitive wins:

1. It helped us build internal consensus around the need for competitive marketing.
2. It consolidated support to assemble a cross-functional team.
3. It seeded our hypothesis on competitive positioning and messaging for our company.