Targeting the right audience with your digital marketing campaigns is a crucial part of ensuring your ads are successful. You can spend hours painstakingly researching and sifting through mounds of data to come up with the perfect audience and targeting methods to generate leads or sales for your business…
OR you can just steal your competitors' customers, here's how!
Google Ads provides the widest variety of opportunities to steal clients out from under your competition's nose. Here are a few of my favourites.
This method is quite simple, but can be quite expensive so it's best used with caution. All you do here is build a search campaign that targets your competitor's keywords.
Now, when someone searches for your competitor, your ad will pop up above their organic listing instead, giving you an opportunity to take potential customers right when they are searching for their services.
I would avoid this strategy if your competitor is running a search campaign to protect its branded terms, as that will drive the cost per click through the roof for you because their quality score will be so much higher for those specific searches.
If you are running a campaign like this, make sure to avoid using any trademarked brand names in your ad copy, or you could get yourself into some legal trouble.
There are a few ways you can target your competitor's customers on YouTube.
Method 1 is to set up a YouTube campaign that will only show on specific competitor videos or target their entire channel. Now, when someone is actually watching their content, your video will pop up and give you a chance to take that customer.
Method 2 is to set up a custom audience based on the URLs of your competitors. This doesn't have as strong of a targeting signal as regular remarketing audience, but it tells Google's algorithms that you want to target the type of people that visit those websites, and the people that look most like that are your competitors' customers. Once you have that set up, you need to use that custom audience as the targeting for your YouTube campaign.
Method 3 is similar to method 3 in that you will be creating and targeting another custom audience. This time, you will create the audience based on "People who search for any of these terms on Google". If you fill it with your competitors' brand names and terms, your ads will start showing to people on YouTube who are actively looking for your competitors' products and services or if they are researching a solution to an issue they are having with your compeitor.
Methods 2 and 3 from the YouTube section will work in the exact same way for Display, Demand Gen and PMAX campaigns. Try them out and see which one works best for you on each platform.
Meta Ads doesn't have as many methods of stealing customers from your rivals as Google, and it isn't always possible if your competitors are relatively small.
When creating your ad set in Meta Ads, go to the interest section and add in your competitors' names; it's that simple.
If they are big enough, you can select them and directly target people who are actively interested in their brand, which gives you a fantastic opportunity to steal new and existing customers.
Below is an example from a client's account where this method is running and working right now.
You can see in the example, our client is making €7 in sales for every €1 they are spending. What makes that number even better is that they are taking sales directly from their competition.
If you have some experience running ads on Meta and TikTok, you will see that TikTok's ad management platform has taken a lot of "inspiration" from its more established competitor.
Because of that, the method above for Facebook and Instagram works pretty much identically for TikTok.
However, TikTok also allows you to target ads to people who are searching for your competitors or engaging with hashtags that rival businesses are currently pushing.
Method 2, is to target users based on their engagement with specific hashtags. These can be brand names, taglines or really specific hashtags your competitor is pushing.
Method 3 for TikTok Ads, is to target people who are actively searching for your competitors' brand names. Searching for their brand can mean a few things, but usually they are in the research phase, or they're looking for a solution to a problem that they are having using your rival's product. That's the perfect time to show them your ad that solves their problem, potentially taking a customer away from your competitor.
There is a way that you can target your competitors' customers on almost any platform.
For this method to work, the competitor business must be somewhere that the customer actually has to visit to buy or use the product/service. All platforms have geographic targeting as a feature, but on the surface, it looks as if you can only target large areas like cities, towns or villages, or maybe a 10 km radius of specific locations.
If you dig a little bit deeper, most ad platforms will allow you to access the map yourself to drop a location pin. When you add a location this way, you can laser in your targeting to just 1km around your competitor's business, where you know their customers are going to purchase their products and services.
Please note that with this method, it's advised to layer it with some interest or keyword targeting to make sure you're not just hitting everyone in a 1km radius, but just the people that are most likely to be your competitors' customers.
I hope you find these methods useful. Like everything in digital marketing, they won't work for every business, but they can be really effective, so add them to your test list.
If you want to learn more, follow me on LinkedIn or follow 3B1 on YouTube for regular insights and strategies.
Written by Christian Donovan, Director of Performance Marketing at 3B1.