Conquesting Campaigns

Conquesting Campaigns

Have you heard of conquesting campaigns? This practice has been around for as long as traditional advertising has, but it is still useful and relevant today for digital marketing.

But what exactly is conquesting? What are some common conquesting tactics? Let’s break down what this marketing strategy is and why food and wine brands should take advantage of it.

What are Conquesting Campaigns?

Conquesting in the context of digital advertising refers to the act of deploying an ad for a brand’s products or services in the same space as editorial content that relates to a competitor or their products. For example: A wine brand’s competitor might have a wine article that promotes their products placed on a wine fan blog. The wine brand would then have banner ads for their product placed on the same page as the article. However, it gets a little more complex than this.

Understanding How Conquesting Advertising Campaigns Take Place

In ad campaigns, there are usually non-brand and brand keywords that are used. One would have to know the subset of unbranded keywords and competitor keywords in order to usurp the competitor’s advertising and keywords. Essentially, brands will bid on competitor keywords in order for their ads to show up where the competitor’s ad would usually show up.

Brand keywords are, naturally, keywords that will include your business name in some capacity, such as “Bob’s Winery” or “Jim’s Winery.” An unbranded keyword would be something more like “wineries in Idaho” or “wineries near me.” Competitor keywords are typically a mix of branded and unbranded keywords that your competitor excels in.

The Advantages and Disadvantages of Conquesting Campaigns

Conquesting campaigns can be beneficial, but they also have some downsides. Sometimes, competitors will create false conquest campaigns to create tension between brands by placing a link to the competitor’s website via the original brand’s ad. Conquest advertising is very much legal, so it’s not impossible for such a scenario to occur, but it can definitely be irritating to deal with.

There are many benefits as well. Branded search sits pretty low in the sales funnel, so consumers that are searching through branded keywords are often close to making a purchase. A conquest campaign can be very effective for generating leads in this respect.

By ensuring that potential customers are aware of your company and the various ways your products are different from the brand they may have been searching for, you can absolutely push incremental sales with relative ease. In many scenarios, targeting your competitors’ unbranded and brand keywords can produce an inexpensive cost per lead or cost per sale when compared to targeting regular, non-branded terms. This digital marketing tactic is very useful for new and upcoming brands that are trying to usurp or disrupt a major player in their industry.

Methods of Conquesting Campaigns

Banner Ads are the essential media format to use in your conquesting campaign. Banner Ads can get in front of potential customers easily, especially through programmatic targeted marketing. While your click-through rate will definitely affect your cost per click, one can easily run a consistent banner campaign based on behavioral targeting and keywords shared with your competitor.