Have you been watching TV and see a commercial for Web.com or listening to the radio, or browsing the internet and see ads for the large companies like Hibu, Wix, 1and1 and others?
If you’re wanting to offer your services to businesses, you probably have asked yourself, “how can I compete with these big businesses”?
They have employees, full time sales staff, a marketing department with what seems like an unlimited budget.
How can you compete with that?
Is there any hope?
In this post, I’m going to discuss:
- How You Can Take On the Big Dogs
- Strategies To Exploit Their Weaknesses
- How Their Strengths Often Aren’t What They Seem
- How You Can Position Yourself To Their Clients
- AND MUCH MORE
Creating Your Own David vs. Goliath Story
Whether you’re religious or not, you’ve heard the ancient David vs. Goliath story.
For the purpose of this post, we’re going to consider that companies like Hibu/Yellowbook, Web.com, 1and1, GoDaddy, Wix and others are Goliath. We, both me and you, are the David’s.
David was thought to be the underdog, the weak one, the one that won the battle on faith alone, but that’s not true. David didn’t have the perceived strength that the giant had, but the giant was slow. The giant couldn’t move quickly, every move could be telegraphed in advance.
Agility wasn’t Goliath’s strong suit. He was strong, intimidating but slow, clumsy, and thought to be half blind. Sounds like the typical corporation to me!
David was agile, a sling shot that was lethally accurate from a distance of 2 football fields. David didn’t stand a chance going head to head, sword to sword. He kept his distance, kept moving, taking shots out of arm’s reach. He didn’t win the famous battle by brute force. He won the battle by playing smart, exposing his opponent’s weaknesses, exploiting his downfalls while utilizing his strengths.
The point here is, that despite what people have thought throughout time, is that David wasn’t the underdog. David actually had the advantage.
You’re like David. You’re quick, you don’t need to approve marketing strategies in front of a board of directors. You don’t have layers of middle management to go through before testing an idea. You don’t have to adhere to corporate guidelines.
You’re scrappy… you’re smart… you can decide to switch gears or change directions in an instant.
The goliaths you’re up against, are slow, muddied by corporate bureaucracy. Half blind, because the people making decisions often don’t see the bigger picture. They’re clumsy, and definitely restricted in movement. They can’t change direction nearly as fast as you.
Going forward, don’t think of yourself as the underdog. You’re at an advantage, able to see and take your shots at a safe distance while being lethally accurate.
How You Can Take On The Big Dogs
One of the biggest breakthroughs I had when growing my agency was when I started scraping business data with Mobile Renegade. I was scraping Yellowpages and Yellowbook (which you will see they rebranded to Hibu) for business information like phone numbers for cold calling, addresses for direct mail and of course emails for cold emailing.
At first, I was having a little bit of success by just having a strong marketing message. It wasn’t enough for me though.
I’ve noticed that most of the people I would talk to that were with yellowbook, were pretty unhappy. Either they weren’t getting any results from online stuff, or their actual advertisement inside the phone book was performing poorly and they were open to a change. Of course, there were many other issues they’ve had, but those were the 2 most common.
I segmented my lists based on where I scraped their information.
Then it began…
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The Yellowbook / Hibu Bashing Campaign.
I was scraping 24/7 with multiple machines and VPS’s so make sure I had every phone number, every address, and every email that yellowbook had in their directory.
I used a method I discussed before as the “Quadruple Marketing Threat” and then also later on in the Poor Man’s Guide to Launching a Web Agency post.
The campaign was a “Yellowbook Sucks” type of message. I explained in emails, phone calls, mail, that it’s not the business owner’s fault, and I give them props for doing what they think is good for their business. I then explained how phone book ads are outdated. How they were marketing like we were in the 1990s instead of the 2010s.
I used a stock photo in some of my messaging, showing a land fill full of phone books.
I didn’t even describe what I would offer, I just exploited the weakness Yellowbook had.
A lot of the prospects I targeted, agreed that Yellowbook sucks… Showing them that I understand that there is a problem, made them think, “Wow, this guy knows me, understands my business, knows the problems I have, he must know how to fix it”.
When I had someone hooked, and on the phone, I would tell them do something. I told them that the next time they go to a restaurant with their family, take a second and look around. How many people in the restaurant are talking to each other? How many have their heads down and eyes glued to their phones? How about at your own table?
If it were a tree service company, or roofing company, I would ask them, if there’s a wicked storm and a tree falls onto the car or comes through the roof of your customer’s house, would they go thumbing through a phone book to call people or would they pull out the phone from their pocket and search for someone to call via Google?
I explained, my job is to make sure people have the ability of finding you when that happens.
Phone books, you can search through and find a list of ALL your competitors. When it comes to Google, only the top spots are getting any attention. What would you rather have?
The Yellowbook Sucks campaign was done through email, direct mail, and I’d make cold calls to people that were paying them for either their website or advertising.
It was so effective that I’ve received 7 different cease and desist letters from their headquarters in the US. I only responded to one of them, with a drawing of a middle finger. Note: Don’t do something like that unless you already have a lawyer on retainer.
Why was the Yellowbook Sucks campaign effective?
They’re the giant… they were clumsy and half blind.
They list prospect information in their directory and still do. They gave me the emails of their clients. They gave me their addresses and phone numbers.
Even if they were doing a great job for 90% of their customers, the 10% that are unhappy, were the ones I wanted to target anyway. Those were the ones that would respond well to the marketing I was doing. When you have a company that large, with the amount of paying customers that they have, it’s easy to understand that there’s a certain number that are ready to move on!
I built the campaign for those people.
I did the same, on a smaller scale against Vistaprint, Yellowpages / Dexx, Service Magic now known as homeadvisor.
How You Can Exploit Their Weakness
No matter who you’re going up against, whether it’s YP or Yellowbook/Hibu, or others, there are certain strategies you can implement to exploit their weaknesses.
I’m not talking about scraping business data that they display, I’m talking about contrasting yourself and them.
For instance, let’s take a look at hibu.
If you want to find sites that Hibu has done in your area, search: Keyword “Powered by Hibu”. If you’re in the UK, the common search would be Keyword “web design by hibu”.
Take a look at the sites you find.
Most are pretty basic.
What are their weaknesses?
I would say:
- Very templated, not much variation between sites
- Not much content, very few pages
- Many use stock photos that look poorly
- They build in volume, quality isn’t a concern
- Not much time focused on conversions
- On page optimization is pretty weak
- Very difficult for a client to keep their domain name (okay, this one is based on experience)
Now, based on what I know, I’ve heard people complaining about having a simple image changed can take months.
One roofer I worked with, said that they put an image of a hideous pink roof on his website. It took 18 months for them to remove it.
I told him that we cover content changes and image uploads in our hosting and maintenance service for sites we design. I told him, all he needs to do is send an email to a dedicated email address, and all changes were complete within 48-72 hours. The email address we used, would automatically create a task into our project management platform (I recommend TeamWork), and it was very easy for outsourcers to maintain sites and changes.
So the question is, how will you be able to exploit their weakness and turn it into strengths?
I can’t answer that for you. However, since you’ve been reading this blog for a while now, I assume you must have a good head on your shoulders and can figure that out for yourselves.
Step 1 – Observe what the competition is doing.
Step 2 – Exploit their weaknesses, and turn their weakness into your strength.
Step 3 – Profit.
Quite a simplistic view of how things work, but it’s accurate.
Final Thoughts
I can sit here and write about war stories all day. Give examples of what I’ve done in certain situations, but the truth is, it’s not going to add any additional value to this post.
The point here is that you have to think about business in a way that you’re in a battle. That you’re at war with the opposition. You have to be able to identify their weaknesses, exploit them, and then make the sales based on your new positioning.
These companies aren’t untouchable. If anything, they’re a proof of concept and a source for creating your positions. Many of them can provide you with an unlimited source of prospects just by looking for a little tagline in the footer of the website. Heck, even your local competition probably does that.
Now go and make some sales!
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My first client has a Hibu site. It’s a basic template, similar to what I use, honestly. The problem is that there isn’t more than 250 words on any of his pages and most are just 1-2 paragraphs.
Also, the color scheme is horrendous! White font on a black background. Awful.
He only paid $400.00 upfront for it, BUT Hibu retained ownership of the domain name AND made him sign a 3-year contract at $50.00 per month! If he cancels they could hurt his credit by sending him to collections.
I’ve used his story to close a couple website sales now.
They used to offer a “free” website with an Ad in the book, but they stopped once they rebranded I guess. $400 + $50/mo for 3 years. So I guess they’re getting $2,200 per website at that price. It seems like they have a lot of negotiating room, as I’ve heard from people getting quoted anywhere from $200-$1,300 up front + minimum $50/mo. If you use their online advertising they’ll get you on BS SEO and outrageous PPC. I had one client spending $2,000/mo with them just for online stuff and they never had an ROI from it. Never ranked in local and was page 2 organic.
Great post. I have made a killing with yellow book clients.
One of my clients said they wanted him to pay 2300 for his domain name if he left. We just got a new domain.
Yeah I personally know people that have been asked to pay in between $1,500-$4,000 for a domain name. They usually let the domains expire though so it’s easy to pick it back up. I was shocked when one client said they only asked for $500 to bring the domain with him. That was the cheapest I ever heard.
I never tried going for hibu customers but maybe I should.
I had a few bites looking for vistaprint but didn’t have much luck. Also if you find defunct webdesigners you can go through there portfolio and contact prior customers that’s what works best for me.
Thanks for the comment Charity. Yeah, vistaprint isn’t as good but I’ve had a few good clients come from them. Typically, they’re looking for cheap solutions, but every now and then you’ll get someone that wants higher end stuff. Hibu is definitely a gold mine for prospecting purposes.
Good idea on the portfolios. I bet there’s a lot of competitors hating on you lol.
Great stuff (again!) Nathan.
To be honest, while the Hibus of the world (i.e. generic, high volume, low quality mass production companies) are a great source of potential clients, there are other “Goliaths” out there that people could consider targeting. I’m talking about local agencies that might be dominating in one particular city. I say that because I worked for one that dominates our local market. While the quality of their sites is clearly WAY better than a ‘hibu’ site, the prices that clients are paying (typically $9,000 to $15,000 for sites with 5 to 10 pages and then monthly ‘marketing’ of $500 to $2,000), compared to the results they get just blew my mind.
My point is that if you know what all your competition is doing, you can really position yourself well with this model. The local agency may well be positioning themselves as the David to Hibu’s Goliath, but you can be the the David to the local agency! (assuming you can build a quality website and get actual results for your clients). Because in my experience with this local agency with less than 15 employees, implementing new strategies was still a very slow process. Sure, a client could get an image updated easily (which is great), but a new effort to try to improve SERP positioning? – that was a slow (or no-go) proposition.
Anyway, just some additional food for thought for those finding different kinds of competition in front of them. Keep up the great posts my friend, really loving them!
Glad you enjoyed it. You’re absolutely right, this applies not just to the big companies, or even local companies but to ALL of your competitors. Doesn’t matter how big, where they are, what their pricing is, once you know your competition you are more likely to position yourself for success. Great input Rey!
Great read! Yellowbooks, Yelp, Google, etc I got clients from. Show them the website that you made are better and show examples of results you got for other clients.
Yep, you got it Darius!
Hey Nathan.
Great post once again. I use to learn every thing I see from you on warriorforum, but I didn’t know you have a blog. So, I’m really blessed today as I’ve found this blog. Thanks (seriously)!
I’m an offliner and I use to drive local traffic only using Facebook & local ads. Maybe, it’s time for me to sell my service online. I really think I’ll implement what you’re teaching here and be a “David” 🙂
Many thanks again & talk soon.
Glad you found it! WarriorForum has been dying down for a while now, which is one of the reasons I decided to start this blog. I want to be able to share information, but it might as well be on a property I control! Glad to have you here.