5 Non-Obvious Benefits
of Comparative Content Marketing

5. Passive Lead Generation via Google SEO

Comparative Content has the best conversion rates out of any article you can publish.

🔗 Check out my study here.

That’s because when someone searches for a comparison between two platforms in your market (for example “hubspot vs salesforce”) they are in the last stage of the funnel – one step away from buying.

Speaking from experience, if your comparative articles attracted 1000 visitors every month, 20 to 100 would sign up for a free trial and 10 to 20 would book a demo call. Depending on your onboarding or sales process, that would mean between 2 and 6 new paying users every month.

Percent of cold Google traffic that created an account with our client.

That’s the most obvious benefit.

And it’s a key point we discuss on our calls before deciding if Comparative Content Marketing is a wise investment for your company. Based on your ARPPU, churn, keyword search volumes, and expected conversion rates we assign a monetary value to every comparative article we would create.

🔗 Read more about this ROI calculation here.

An example of a keyword strategy we prepare so you can decide if this is a wise investment for your company. The numbers under the “year” columns are cumulative revenues.

Passive lead generation is a tangible way to recoup the investment, but it’s not the only benefit.

4. Refining, Rediscovering, and Strengthening Market Positioning

In early 2023, we wrote comparative articles for a company selling “call scheduling software”.

The company had a great product. But for 10 years, they were positioning themselves as a “cheaper calendly alternative” with “better customer support for smaller teams”. This positioning wasn’t strong, and the company had a hard time expanding to the US market where Calendly was the leader.

As we always do, we hand-tested their features and compared them to the competition.

We soon realized our client had two standout features they weren’t promoting: 

1. great support for languages
2. hyper-customizable email sequences. 

Our report sparked a big internal debate, which led the client to reposition itself as “the scheduling software that speaks your language“. 

Our comparative articles helped promote their new positioning, and they successfully expanded to the European and Asian markets where the density of languages is high and where the booking experience is highly valued.

Sometimes, though, our research simply validates positioning — which leads to the next point:

3. Team Morale Boost through Competitive Intelligence

We have a client in the document generation industry.

When we started working together, they didn’t understand why all the best prospects flocked to two “industry leaders” in their market. They assumed the competition had a better product — after all, they had corporate branding, a myriad of feature & benefit claims on their website, and good social proof.

In 2006, when our client founded the company, they accepted this reality.

But after 16 years of development and no change in sight, it became frustrating.

When we came in, we put the competitors’ claims to the test. After analyzing the products side-by-side our client realized that their product is, in fact, the best in the industry. And that the marketing these “industry leaders” were practicing was all smoke and mirrors.

After discovering this, our client experienced a huge morale boost throughout all levels of the organization: the marketing shifted to target bigger accounts, the sales team became more excited on the calls, the leadership team charted a daring road to new horizons, and the product team felt vindicated.

This exercise was a true plateau-buster.

We promoted the article via organic SEO on Google. The traffic was good: it attracted everyone searching for “software A vs software B”. But our client was so excited they wanted to immediately show our report to everyone in the market — even existing users of their competitors.

Which brings us to…

2. Great Assets for Targeting Branded Keywords With Google Ads

An efficient way of poaching users from competitors is by bidding on their brand.

Hunch Ads is a creative management platform. It’s one of the newer companies in the industry. But if you needed a creative management platform you wouldn’t get that feeling; everywhere you’d look, they would pop up. Search for their competitor and you’ll see Hunch promoting their comparison.

For example, here’s Hunch appearing on top when someone searches for Smartly.

The funnel is super simple.

The landing page has a (1) CTA above the fold, (2) a brief comparison, (3) a link to a longer comparison.

The goal of this landing page is to get prospects on a demo call (could also be a free trial signup) as soon as possible. And short copy works well here because people who consciously click on Google Ads have self-selected themselves as interested buyers.

What I like most about this page is that it links to a deeper comparison piece at the end.

Great for everyone who doesn’t trust Hunch Ads enough to hop on a demo call straight away. Which means Hunch gets more calls and better ROAS than otherwise.

Now Hunch has likely created the comparison page first and then repurposed it into a landing page. It’s what we would do since the research and copywriting overlap. This way they stayed economical while getting both organic traffic from “hunch vs smartly” and paid traffic from “smartly”.

That’s a lot of high-quality traffic, and with that comes the final piece of the puzzle…

1. Your Own “Warm” Source of Buying Intent Data

In advertising, two targeting options always beat cold traffic:

1. Warm audiences
2. Buying intent audiences

Warm audiences are people who know your brand, usually through your blog. Buying intent audiences are people who are currently buying a product like yours – companies like G2 sell you this data.

Usually, you would target one or the other.

But here is the kicker: traffic to comparative articles is warm and has buying intent. You won’t find this with any other traffic source. Hunch knows this: I got retargeted the moment I visited their comparison page.

Let’s reflect on this for a second.

These ads aren’t special. But their targeting is: they are literally showing the ads to people who know them AND who were just moments ago reading a page comparing two products in their industry (a very high buying intent signal). If this isn’t the absolute best advertising dollar you can spend then I don’t know what is.

The funnel is simple here, too.

Their case study ads lead to a solution-focused landing page:

(This would get even better results if the landing page was a matching case study.)

We can safely say Hunch is squeezing every bit of value out of their comparative content… but believe it or not we can take it a step further.

Every so often larger companies will land on these pages — accounts worth 10x more.

Besides retargeting them, you’d also want to figure out who they are and then reach out to multiple people in that organization. To do this, Hunch could install lead intelligence software that identifies anonymous traffic. Like Leadfeeder. Then, they could reach out first (with a warm outreach) before G2 even sells the intent data to their competitors.

All this is possible with a few Comparative Articles.

Crazy, innit?

Next steps

If you’d like us to help you create Comparative Content so you can reap these benefits, then book a call with me here: miha.youcanbook.me.

We’ll first discuss if Comparative Content is even a good fit for your company. Then, I can prepare a good strategy along with ROI calculations, so you can make an informed decision about the investment.