Targeting Competitors’ Customers and Prospects

Competitor targeting is highly effective. At Obility, we run Competitor campaigns for all of our clients, and they are consistently some of the best performing, measured by cost per Opportunity or sales pipeline generated. Competitors’ prospects and customers are great leads. They are clearly in the market for a solution you provide and more than likely have existing allocated budget. If you are a retargeting network like Perfect Audience, and you target customers of Retargeter, Bizo, and AdRoll, you know that these prospects have already bought into running retargeting ads and have set aside budget for running retargeting campaigns. Competitor campaigns are effective because they hit an extremely qualified audience.

Competitors spend a significant portion of their advertising budget building awareness for their brand. More so, competitors are spending a large chunk of their marketing budgets on building a social audience – a platform that they do not control and an opportunity for you to take advantage. Social advertising is a valuable tool to reach your competitors’ customers and prospects. I have outlined a number of different competitor targeting tactics within social advertising below.

Twitter Ads

Twitter advertising is a great tool for competitor targeting. Target your competitors’ followers with sponsored tweets. In order to get the greatest number of impressions for your Sponsored Tweets, we recommend combining all competitors into one campaign. This lets you to test different offers, such as industry analyst reports and definitive guides. Use Twitter lead generation cards or drive them to a form fill on your site. If running Sponsored Tweets and sending users to a landing page on your site, don’t forget URL tracking parameters when tweeting so that you can attribute the MQLs and Opportunities to your competitor campaigns.

Pro Tip: Limit your targeting to desktop computers and tablets. Mobile devices drive a large volume of clicks, but typically mobile visitors are less likely to convert.

LinkedIn Advertising

LinkedIn advertising gets your ad in front your competitors’ current customers. When targeting your competitors’ customers, identify pain points with their current solution and outline how your solution addresses this. While not applicable for all marketers, targeting users with competitor skill sets or in competitor user groups can be fairly effective for marketers of software, in particular. Similar to Twitter ads, if you are running Sponsored Updates, be sure to include URL tracking parameters when posting the update.

Pro Tip: LinkedIn Sponsored Updates are often the most effective LinkedIn advertising solution. Sponsored Updates tend to receive more impressions and higher CTR than standard ads and are significantly less expensive than other LinkedIn solutions.

Facebook Ads

With Facebook, you can target your competitors’ followers, similar to campaigns run on Twitter.  Obility recommends running Sponsored Posts as this will be your best opportunity get exposure to competitors’ Facebook followers, but you can also combine your prospecting efforts and utilize your existing prospect database by importing target email addresses into Facebook and running Custom Audience targeting campaigns. Simply upload your target email addresses to Facebook and build a Custom Audience campaign. This will allow you to target email addresses of users of your competitor products directly on Facebook.

Pro Tip:Use tools such as BuiltWith to identify websites that are using your competitors’ tools or software.

YouTube Targeting

YouTube ads are basically AdWords contextual campaigns run on youtube.com. Target your competitors’ brands, products, and videos directly. You can run text, image, or Sponsored Video ads directly from within the AdWords interface. This is another good opportunity to utilize the hard work of your competitors. As they spend their efforts building videos, simply run a video ad campaign to drive traffic to your site.

Pro Tip: You can retarget viewers of your YouTube videos, and so if you run Sponsored Video ads on competitor videos, create a retargeting audiences targeting those viewers and maintain brand awareness with a Google Remarketing campaign.

Social advertising is fairly effective in its own right. Couple it with competitor targeting, and you can run highly effective campaigns, targeting high quality prospects. Get your first Competitor campaign up and running today.