I like it when our competitors copy us
Date: November 23, 2015Category: Author: David Hall
Yes, I like it when competitors copy us. Well, to an extent.
Some things that we do differently are closely guarded secrets. Other things are by their nature out there for everyone to see. I don’t want competitors copying our closely guarded secrets, which is why we have a strictly worded confidentiality agreement for all of our team. But on the more public things, I’m truly flattered.
When I started Infinity Dental Web, I was motivated by ideas that I had that appeared to be different from anyone else in the online dental marketing industry. I made a determination at that time that I wouldn’t hire anyone from any other dental website company because I wanted all our ideas to be fresh, generated from and based on my experience at successfully marketing my own dental practice online. The result has been that I could rattle off a dozen or more of our online marketing innovations. And yes, some of those innovations have been copied. I’d like to tell you about one that happened recently.
It was on September 29, just 8 weeks ago, that I had an idea I believed no one else had thought of, at least not in the dental website industry. As a way to lower the entry barrier for prospective clients who had an existing, poorly performing website, we could
calculate a trade-in value for their website and credit that toward the purchase of their new website from us. We happened to have a team meeting scheduled for the next day. We discussed this idea, it went over well, and we decided this was an idea worth keeping a little quiet about. We confined ourselves to mentioning it to a couple of prospective clients.
So much for that idea. In a couple of days we got an email from a prospect who mentioned that she had heard that we had a website trade-in program. Then, two weeks later, we noticed that a pop-up began appearing on the Sesame Communications website, offering a trade-in credit of $1000 for new clients who would “trade in” their existing website. It made us wonder if they got the idea from us. Anyway, the cat was out of the bag and we decided to just go ahead and mention it on our home page. Then on November 3, our issue of Dental Economics had a cover ad from Officite offering a trade-in. Were they copying us, too? And are others copying the idea? We don’t know.
On thinking about it, I wasn’t really upset at all. Two reasons. First, I was flattered at the idea that maybe we were being copied. After all, we are a small company, a boutique website agency, if you will. This could be great respect that our competitors are paying us.
Second, they don’t appear to have been able to copy it effectively. The way they were each doing it seemed gimmicky. They can’t really do it the way we do it–as a serious discount on the up-front cost of a website. The reason is that our business model is such that we can afford to sacrifice our profits or even take a loss on the up-front cost of a website, because we are focused on long-term relationships with our clients to provide the bulk of our revenue. If competitors don’t have that long-term retention strategy in place, they can’t adequately duplicate what we do.
So we go on, thinking of new ideas and implementing them. Yes, we do watch our competitors, too, and in some cases we learn from what they do. It’s not like this copying goes only one way. But, being a small company, we think we have done way more than our share of innovating, and get a thrill out of being copied by the big guys.
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