PART 1 — Steal Your Competitor’s Ad Strategy for More Leads
Do you already know who your competitors are?
If so, there might be an untapped audience out there interested in your product or services — but they just don’t know about it yet.
You see…
Having competitors in your niche validates your offer.
Meaning, there are other methods out there that work.
Based on that, you can look at your competitor’s advertising strategy, emulate and improve it, and then, use those tactics to elevate your own business.
For example, there are quite a few other LinkedIn automation tools on the market.
But the Unique Selling Proposition of Expandi is that it’s the safest tool out of them all.
With that in mind, I can spy on my competitors’ advertising strategies, see what works, what doesn’t, and adapt the working ones for Expandi. If done well, I will be even able to convert some of my competitors’ audiences to start using Expandi!
But even if you don’t know about your competitors’ advertising tactics, don’t worry, I’ll show you how to identify them, spy on them, and I’ll also share some LinkedIn marketing campaigns to get the most of this info.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
- How to Identify Your Competitors Online
- Spying on Competitors on LinkedIn
- 3 LinkedIn Tactics That Take Advantage of Your Competitor’s Advertising Strategy
Ready?
Speaking of, we’re constantly sharing the latest outreach templates and subject lines you can use in your marketing campaigns in our private Facebook group. Be sure to join the LinkedIn Outreach Family today!
And here’s how to get your brand out there and start targeting a group of people who may already be interested in your product and let your voice be heard.
How to Identify Your Competitors Online
First things first — do you know who your competitors are?
Competitive research is the backbone of any strong marketing campaign.
After all, if you don’t know your competitors, you won’t be able to differentiate yourself and your products.
If you already know your competitors, feel free to skip ahead.
Otherwise, here are a few quick tactics you can use to find your competitors on LinkedIn.
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Market research
Doing market research on LinkedIn is quite simple.
If you already have your product, solutions, and benefits defined (which you should), all you need to do is run a few LinkedIn filtered searches to find your competitors.
On LinkedIn, you can filter companies by:
- Location — Country and the city.
- Industry — E.g. marketing and advertising, online software.
- Company size — Select from 1–10,000+ employees.
- Job listings on LinkedIn — Yes or no (not relevant in this case).
- Connections — 1st connections only. Meaning, you can filter for people you’re connected with from those companies.
As an example:
Alternatively, you can also run a similar search but for people.
Something along the lines of — CEO role, job industry, location, and so on.
But if you’re looking for a more advanced LinkedIn search, you might want to consider LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Moving on, some other competitor research tactics include:
LinkedIn groups
Even if you might not find your competitors in LinkedIn groups, you can still find other important info.
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Simply switch the LinkedIn search filter to ‘Groups’ and type in a keyword related to your niche.
There you’ll find business owners (competitors) or potential leads, posting and sharing content relevant to your niche.
If you want to get noticed, start with smaller groups and work your way up. Join groups, read their content, ask questions, and you’ll learn what they engage with more.
As a bonus, you might also start generating leads this way.
Analyze search engine results
Finally, the easiest and possibly the most effective way to identify your competitors is to just Google them.
When it comes down to it, many of your competitors are already writing about topics close to your value offer and solutions.
If you examine your solution closely, you should be able to identify keywords that are central to your proposition.
From there, look those keywords up on Google and see who is competing with your content on Google.
Just like that, I can find other LinkedIn automation tools and start studying their advertising strategies.
Some other ways you can use search engines results to identify your competitors include:
- Looking at paid data
- Facebook groups (we’ll explore this below).
- Searching for your keywords on Twitter (and exploring other, suggested pages).
- Using LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s “Posted Content Keywords” feature
- Looking up listicle articles related to your niche (e.g. “Top SaaS solutions for small businesses”, “for LinkedIn automation”, “project management”, so on. The more niche your results are, the better.)
- Using a backlinks API This is an invaluable tool in the SEO arsenal for gaining insight into your competition and their strategies. It allows you to see what they’re doing and where they are getting traffic and prospects coming from, so that way we can learn from them.
There’s a ton of content out there for just about any niche.
Take advantage of what people have already written about if you want to get ahead.
Now, assuming you’ve found a few competitors close to what you do, here’s how you can get the most out of their advertising strategy.
JOIN THE LINKEDIN OUTREACH FAMILY
We’ve got all the juicy Growth Hacks, proven strategies, and must-have tools you need to succeed in your LinkedIn outreach.
And the best part? It’s all in one convenient, members-only spot! Join our private Facebook community!
💥 JOIN NOW 💥
Spying on Competitors on LinkedIn
As a rule of thumb, when spying on competitors on LinkedIn, you might want to turn on private mode so that they don’t get a notification that you visited their profiles.
To do this, click on your LinkedIn profile at the top right corner of your interface and select Settings & Privacy.
Under Visibility of your profile & network, select Profile viewing options.
Then, turn on Private mode so that you can browse profiles freely.
Now, once you’ve turned on private mode and you’ve determined your top competitors, here’s what you can do.
First, go to the personal profiles of your competitors.
Analyze their profiles and think about what you can do to improve.
For example, look at your summary, tagline, skills section, and more.
How can you optimize these based on your target audience?
Then, on the right, check out the People also viewed section.
There, you should find a list of similar people in your niche and industry.
Possibly their customers, colleagues, or even their target audience.
Wondering how to improve your LinkedIn profile based on proven examples? Check out our guide on top 5 proven LinkedIn summary examples for inspiration and writing tips.
Then, go to their company page on LinkedIn, scroll down, and select Ads under the Posts section.
If you look at your competitor’s company page and see they’re not running ads, this can mean two things:
- There’s less competition and if you invest in LinkedIn ads, you’ll be able to stand out from your competitors and reach your target audience in a unique way no one else is focusing on. Don’t be afraid of trying something new just because your competitor isn’t doing it.
- They’ve already tried LinkedIn ads and decided they weren’t worth it. It might be hard to find out if this is the case from looking at a single competitor. So, you’ll have to do more research to figure this out.
To catch PART 2 [UNGATED] — continue here.
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