Leveraging Conquest Advertising

Looking for more aggressive tactics to reach in-market shoppers? Use your competition’s audience to boost conversions for your business with conquest advertising.

What is Conquest Advertising?

Conquest advertising is when you capture demand for the competition’s brand by running ads on your competitor’s branded keywords. It is the flip side to branded advertising campaigns where you try to ensure that your business has high relevance for your own business-specific keywords.

This aggressive ad strategy benefits businesses in competitive industries. It serves ads to in-market users interested in buying the same or comparable product or service from your competitors. Conquest advertising is likely not a good fit if you are part of a close-knit business community with your competitors.

If conquest advertising is a good fit for your business, you can run campaigns on:

• Paid search: Google or Bing
• Display advertising: Google or Bing
• Social media advertising: Facebook

Benefits of Conquest Advertising

Conquest advertising campaigns are a great way to capture low-funnel leads. This is because branded keywords are usually served to users who have already done some research and are further along the buyer journey. Successful conquest campaigns:

• Increase in brand awareness
• Persuade competitors’ customers to switch to your business
• Drive more sales

Challenges of Conquest Advertising

The downside of going after another brand’s demand is that Google views the bid as less relevant to your business, and costs can go up compared to other brand strategies. For example, if a user searches for Bob’s HVAC, Google expects an ad to serve about Bob’s HVAC, not your HVAC company. Conquest advertising is becoming more of a challenge as Google looks for more relevancy in ads but this ad type can still be deployed at a premium. You might also get lead actions that are less relevant to your business from users looking for the business, product, or service they originally searching for.

You can deploy other display and social media tactics that are not as direct of lead drivers but can still generate leads, build your awareness and put you in the consideration set as a user moves through their buying journey. Conquest display campaigns target in-market audiences for your competitors’ brands and custom-intent audiences for people who have been online searching for your competitors’ names or brands in the past. Conquest social campaigns target in-market audiences for your competitors’ brand and behavior and interest audiences for people who have liked or engaged with your competitors’ names or brands.

Next Steps

Interested in learning more about how conquest advertising could benefit your advertising strategy or if it’s a good fit for your business? Request a free digital analysis to get the conversation started.