PART 2 — Steal Your Competitor’s Ad Strategy for More Leads
To catch PART 1 [UNGATED] — continue here.
If your competitors are indeed showing ads, you should make note of the ad format.
Analyze their ad copy, offer, and call-to-action.
Are they framed to appeal to a specific industry or a particular audience?
This may reveal what kind of demographic your competitors are going after.
Then, look at what they’re offering within the ad.
It could be a lead magnet (e.g. e-book, free consultation, or something else) or a general brand-awareness post.
Because LinkedIn ads are traditionally expensive, you should also make note of what stage of their marketing funnel these ads are in.
If the CTA is to download a whitepaper or read a blog post, this might be at the top of the marketing funnel.
If the ads are suggesting to book a demo or to buy now (conversions), then these ads are focusing on the middle or bottom of the marketing funnel
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Wondering if LinkedIn ads are right for you? Check out our complete guide on LinkedIn advertising for an overview of different ad formats and other alternative solutions to ads.
With that in mind, you should then conduct an audit of your advertising and promotional strategy:
- What is your offer? Is it relevant to your target market?
- Is there anything you can do to improve? For example, if they’re promoting an article from 2018 that’s only 10 pages — can you write something more up-to-date and longer?
- Look outside LinkedIn and also analyze Facebook, Twitter, and other channels (we’ll teach you how to scrape Facebook and Twitter followers below).
3 LinkedIn Tactics That Take Advantage of Your Competitor’s Advertising Strategy
Once you know what your competitor’s advertising strategy is, you can use this in your LinkedIn outreach campaigns to target their audience.
Below, I’ll show you 3 different LinkedIn tactics that worked for us to take advantage of pre-existing followings on our competitor’s social media.
Here’s what you need to know.
Facebook group scraping LinkedIn outreach campaign
This one works if your competitor has an active Facebook group.
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One of our competitors, Dux-Soup, has a Facebook group of up to 3.6K members.
Objective: Reach out to members of the Facebook group on LinkedIn and create a strong social selling campaign that educates them on why Expandi might be the better alternative. Using a clever growth-hacking tool and LinkedIn automation, this turned out to be extremely simple to set up and replicate.
Strategy: We scraped the Facebook group using Phantombuster’s Facebook Group Extractor and used LinkedIn Profile URL Finder to convert that list into a spreadsheet of LinkedIn profiles. Then, we uploaded the spreadsheet file into Expandi and created a connector campaign to reach out to the members of the group. In the connection request, we mentioned we were also part of the Dux-Soup user group, and most people were glad to comment because of the mutual interest in LinkedIn automation.
With a 72% acceptance rate, 49% response to follow-ups, and 42 booked demos, the campaign was a success.
Check out the full guide on how to set this LinkedIn outreach campaign and the exact social selling templates we used here to start generating more leads.
Steal your competitor’s Twitter audience LinkedIn outreach campaign
With this guide, we’ll be focusing on your competitor’s Twitter audience.
For this campaign, we used Dux-Soups’ Twitter following.
Objective: Scrape the list of Twitter followers to make sure we’re targeting a relevant audience and reach out to them on LinkedIn.
Strategy: This is similar to the above. We used TexAu’s Extract Twitter Followers automation, and then, their Find a LinkedIn Profile. Now, you can stop there and reach out to them on LinkedIn. But we took this step a bit further and connected the campaign with Zapier and Facebook ads. Essentially, we connected Facebook Ads Custom Audience to our campaign so that we could then retarget the same audience on Facebook.
Check out the full omnichannel campaign and how to set up the marketing flow here: Steal Your Competitor’s Audience: LinkedIn + Twitter Growth Hack
LinkedIn content retargeting strategy
Here’s another simple lead generation strategy that relies on existing content (by your competitors or influencers in your niche).
Objective: Find a popular post in your niche and reach out to people who’ve engaged with it. If the post is about LinkedIn lead generating strategies, chances are, the people who commented on it are also interested in the topic. So, the goal here is to reach out to them with a solution.
Strategy: Find a post with a high engagement rate, copy the post link, Log in to Expandi, create a new search, select ‘Post Engagement’ and paste the LinkedIn post link. Once you reach out to people who commented on the post, you should also mention that you also like the influencer’s content in your connection request (mention something specific to be more authentic).
With this, we achieved a 72% acceptance rate and a 40% response to follow-ups.
Check out the full content retargeting LinkedIn strategy to see the exact templates we used and how to launch your messaging sequence on autopilot.
Conclusion
Finally, another strategy you might want to consider is cross-branding.
As an example, the Expandi and Hyperise integration allow marketers to leverage hyper-personalization with LinkedIn by using personalized images or GIFs in your outreach messaging.
While this isn’t dependent on your competitor’s advertising strategy, a strong partnership can boost your lead generation efforts and allow you to reach a whole new, untapped market.
With the example of Expandi and Hyperise above, we managed to come up with a completely new and unique outreach method that no one is doing on LinkedIn yet.
Using it, we managed to stand out and capture attention and differentiate ourselves from our competitors.
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