In the quest for growth it is often that medium-to-large businesses hit a roadblock and cannot scale their volumes beyond a certain threshold.

Typically the reasons for this are oversaturation and cannibalization. When marketing a specific product or service to an audience you can be sure of several things:

1. External Competition - others business will often be doing the same thing
2. Internal Competition or Cannibalization - throwing more money into marketing is not always a good thing. If the exact same thing is being done as before, but on a larger scale, it often ends up that various campaigns start competing against each other.
3. Audience burn out - when a specific audience sees the exact same ads over and over again, the ads will begin being ignored, almost instinctively. This is often referred to as “frequency” and a high frequency of ads for a specific audience renders the ads obsolete over time.

Beyond constant campaign optimization, there are a number of small things that can be done to reduce the aforementioned effects.

Refreshing your creatives will help mitigate burn-out and well placed, relevant creatives will help your business to be pushed ahead of the competition.

Finely tuned internal campaigns that are well segregated from each other, will help reduce cannibalization. However, this tactic is pretty difficult to pull off without leaving opportunity on the table, so we don’t recommend it.

The best, all-in solution to the above is creating campaigns that don’t compete with other businesses and at the same time target your desired audience.

This is much more difficult to do than it may seem. The key is developing a marketing funnel where the messaging is such that it doesn’t directly compete within a given vertical, but at the same time does a good job of pre-qualifying a prospect and generating a lead that is relevant to your business.

A simple example of this can be as such: consider a service that waterproofs basements.

A marketing funnel that is utilized might carry the message of “Leaking basement? We can help”, which is pretty much guaranteed to exist in the same marketplace as all the other similar businesses, ensuring high competition and, therefore, cost.

However, if the marketing funnel’s messaging is adjusted to be “Mouldy smell in your house and how to beat it”, then your funnel will exist in a completely different marketplace as you have no mention on “waterproofing” or “basements” and can then educate the prospect on the reasons for the smells and possible solutions, offering your services in the process.

Intuit Marketing specializes in creating funnels that don’t compete with others externally or internally and still produce high volumes of leads with emphasis on quality. Click here to find out if we can work together.