Listing Your Competition
- Image by Search Engine People Blog via Flickr
Potential customers arrive at your page with a mug full of suspicion. It’s your job as a copy writer to remove that fear. I’m trying something a little different with PDF Scan Pro.
I thought about what might prevent someone from making that initial purchase and becoming a customer. I think some of it is going to be because they’re not sure if your app is the one for them. Is it right? Is there another app out there that is better/faster/cheaper. A traditional approach might operate a little like this:
“Don’t bother checking out the opposition, we’re the best.”
I think people are so used to this approach that they’re immune from it. I’m not going to spend my time developing an application I didn’t believe in – so I know my applications’ USPs, I know there strengths and their weaknesses, I know where they sit in the market. So why not spend a little time telling your customer about your competition, so they can see where your product fits in?
I’ve not tried this before, but I’ve added a section to PDF Scan Pro’s Trial/Moneyback page listing the competition. I’m hoping that this approach might show a little confidence, and might alleviate fears that ‘the perfect product’ might just be a Google search away.
Anyone else tried this or anything similar?
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I never seen a list of competition on a product website, but what I have seen is the separate website and domain created where similar products are listed and rated (mostly open source competition, probably because of possible legal issues). One example is http://www.agile-tools.net published by creators of TargetProcess. The website was created to score well for searches such as ‘which agile tool’ and ‘agile tools comparison’. I think that this approach is better than listing your competition directly on your page since the later may cause your prospects to loose momentum and navigate away from you to research more about others – something you don’t really want.
Cheers,
Jarek
I’ve actually seen this on a competitor’s site of mine. It has a form of a feature matrix inside a wiki page, so anyone can modify it. Legally it’s probably ok, at least in EU it is. The page itself has good ranking and I receive some traffic from it too so generally I don’t have much against it, but still I keep wondering. Lots of useless features are listed for some products and many great features that can’t be just summarized into have/don’t have are missing. So I’m not such a fan of those comparisons if it’s not done in some article with further explanations of areas in what each product excels.