Let’s be honest, we are too curious about our competitors and their marketing strategy.
Gathering your competitor’s data is always beneficial for you. It saves your time and money during testing, and you can optimize more profitable ads for your business. If you can identify what’s working for them, then you can use the same tactics to improve your marketing strategies.
But don’t be a copycat marketer. Instead, use competitor’s data as an inspiration and to know the effective and newest trends. All this will only be possible if you know exactly how to identify your direct competitors on LinkedIn.
If you don’t, this read shows exactly the same and
This guide covers:
- How you can find your competitors on LinkedIn.
- Spying on your competitors on LinkedIn.
- The best LinkedIn Tactics to take advantage of your competitor’s marketing strategy.
How to Identify Your Competitors on LinkedIn?
Before we dive further into the topic – do you actually know your competitors?
Competitive research or competitor analysis is the base of any advertising campaign regardless of which platform you are using it.
After all, if you don’t identify your direct competitors, you just cannot differentiate between yourself and your products.
If you know, then skip the step, and if you don’t, below are some quick tactics to find your rivals on LinkedIn:
Market research
Conducting market research on LinkedIn is easy and straightforward.
If you have your services/product, solutions, and benefits properly defined, just apply a few LinkedIn filtered searches to identify your competitors.
LinkedIn allows you to filter businesses by:
Location – Like country and the city.
Industry – Like marketing, software, advertising, online software, etc.
Company size – You can pick from 1-10,000+ headcount.
LinkedIn job listings – Yes or no option.
Connections – The site allows you to filter the users you are connected with from those companies.
As an example:
Alternatively, you can perform the same search for people. Like:
Job title/designation – CEO, Marketing executive, job industry, location, and much more.
But if you want to perform an advanced LinkedIn search, you will have to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
Moving on, here are some other LinkedIn competitor research strategies:
LinkedIn groups
LinkedIn groups are handy when it comes to competitors, but if you are unable to find your direct competitors in groups, you can still get other useful info.
To do this, just change the LinkedIn search filter to ‘Groups’ and enter your targeted keyword.
There you will see business owners (your competitors) and potential leads plus their posted and shared content.
To get noticed, you can also join the relevant groups. Join these groups, read the available content, ask questions, and you can get some valuable insights about your competitors.
If all goes as planned, you can generate business leads this way.
Analyze search engine results
Finally, the simplest and the most effective way to identify your business competitors is to Google them.
This method works most of the time. Many of your direct competitors will be writing about topics close to your offer or solutions.
If you look closely and thoroughly, you can easily identify the relevant keywords.
Via this method, you can also identify who is competing with you and your content on the search engines.
That’s not the end; you can use Google to identify your competitors in a few other ways, including:
Pay attention to the paid data:
- Facebook groups.
- Find your keywords on Twitter and explore suggested pages.
- You can use LinkedIn Sales Navigator’s “Posted Content Keywords” option.
- Read and review the articles relevant to your niche.
Now that you know how to find your competitors, it’s time to check out their marketing and advertising strategy.
Researching Your Competitors on LinkedIn
As a general rule, whenever spying on your competitors on LinkedIn, do the same in the private mode. In this way, they will not receive notification that you viewed their profiles.
To activate the LinkedIn private mode, click on your LinkedIn profile and select Settings & Privacy.
Now, look for the Visibility option in your profile & network, and select Viewing Options.
Then, activate the Private mode to browse your competitor’s profiles freely.
Now, the private mode is activated, and you have identified your top competitors; here is what to do:
First, visit the LinkedIn profiles of your competitors.
Next, analyze their profiles and identify the areas that need improvement and how you can improve them.
For example, read their description, or summary, headline, skills section, and more.
How can you optimize these things as per your target market?
Then, look closely at the People also viewed section. You will find it on the screen’s right side.
Now, you can see a list of people relevant to your niche and work industry.
Possibly, you will see their existing customers, coworkers, and your competitor’s target audience.
Then, we will advise you to visit their official business page on LinkedIn, scroll down to the bottom, and select ‘Ads’ inside the ‘Posts’ section.
If you don’t see any ads on your competitor’s official business page, this means:
The competition is much less, and if you spend some bucks on LinkedIn ads, you can easily outrank your competitors and reach out to your target market in a unique way.
Don’t hesitate to try out something new only because others are doing it. Often this works, and it can do wonders for your business.
The other possible reason your competitors are not running ads on their page is that they have already tested LinkedIn ads and don’t find them beneficial.
However, to conclude the same, you will have to analyze multiple competitors as it is difficult to confirm the same by looking at a single competitor. So, do extensive research and figure this out.
If your LinkedIn competitors are showing ads on their business pages, note down the ad format. Follow these things in this case:
Evaluate their ad copy, latest offers, and call-to-action.
Are their ads appealing to any particular industry or audience?
This will show you what kind of demographic your competitors are targeting through their ads.
Then, pay close attention to their latest offerings within the ad.
It works as a lead magnet. For example, a free e-book, free consultation, or anything similar or it is a general brand-awareness ad.
Keep in mind that LinkedIn ads are expensive than the others. Thus you need to note down the stage of your competitors marketing funnel with these ads.
If the CTA encourages users to download a whitepaper or recommends the latest blog post, this means that they are at the top of the marketing funnel.
If their ads recommend users to book a demo or buy now, they are at the middle or bottom of the funnel.
Keeping all these essential details in mind, you should conduct a detailed audit of your marketing and promotional campaign. Ask yourself these questions:
How is your offer compared to the others? Is it relevant to your audience or market?
How can you improve it? For example, if your competitors promote an old blog post containing five pages, determine you can write a more engaging and up-to-date post about the same topic?
Furthermore, look beyond LinkedIn and analyze other mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, and other channels to get the desired results and knock out your competitors.
How to use your Competitors LinkedIn marketing strategy: The Best LinkedIn Tactics
Understanding your competitor’s LinkedIn marketing strategy is important, and if you know and understand it, you can seamlessly incorporate this in your LinkedIn marketing campaigns to target the audience.
Below, we will discuss three different LinkedIn tactics that you can use and take advantage of your competitor’s pre-existing followings on the platform.
Here’s are the tactics that you need to know.
Facebook group scraping:
If your competitor has an active Facebook group, you can use this hack to scrap the data.
This hack can help you a lot, and you can:
Reach out to all your competitor’s Facebook group members on LinkedIn and design a strong social selling drive that tells them why your product or service is the better alternative. Here you can also use any growth-hacking tool and LinkedIn automation for your advantage.
Here is how you do it:
First, scrap the Facebook group’s data using any Facebook Group Extractor tool, and then you can put that data into a spreadsheet. You can use LinkedIn Profile URL Finder to work on the list.
When you have all the LinkedIn profiles in the spreadsheet. You can easily create a connector campaign to reach out to those group members.
While sending the connection request, you can mention that you are also an active member of “XYZ GROUP” along with your brief intro. And you will see that most users will gladly reply because of mutual interest.
Hack your competitor’s Twitter:
After conquering your competitor’s Facebook audience, it’s time to focus on their Twitter audience.
The method is simple and works like the previous one.
First, scrape the list of your competitor’s Twitter followers and reach out to them on LinkedIn. However, target only relevant people.
Then you will need a Twitter Followers Extraction tool to get the details of all the followers.
Then, find their LinkedIn Profiles same as the previous Facebook method.
When you have all the details, you can reach out to your competitor’s followers on LinkedIn.
And if you want to take your marketing campaign a bit further, you can connect it with Facebook ads. In this way, you can retarget the same followers or audience on Facebook.
LinkedIn content retargeting approach:
Here is another simple but fruitful lead generation marketing strategy that mainly depends on the existing content of your top competitors and influencers.
Here the primary objective is to find a popular post that should be relevant to your niche, and then you can reach out to users who were engaged with the post.
Suppose the post is about LinkedIn automation tools, and it is relevant; Chances are, the users who were responding to it are highly interested in the subject. So, the goal is to reach out to those users with a viable solution.
Here is how you do it:
First, you need to find a post with high engagements.
- Then, you will need a LinkedIn automation tool like Closely.
- Then copy the post link and log in to Closely.
- Create a fresh search and enter the LinkedIn post link.
Now you have all the details about those users who commented on that post.
Next, reach out to people and while sending them a connection request, mention that you also loved the content.
It would be beneficial if you mention something specific about the post or influencer as it sounds more authentic, and you can easily engage the prospects.
In the End:
Exploring your direct competitors and their marketing activities on LinkedIn can provide you some valuable insights that you can use for your own business.
That’s why every marketer should know how to conduct a detailed competitor analysis and identify the latest trends that competitors are using to stay ahead of others.
Getting every insight about your competitor gives you an advantage and is always worthwhile. Your peers have probably already spent a hefty amount on researching and testing their ads.
Thus, by conducting research about your LinkedIn competitors and their ads, you can discover what’s working for them, and you can use it to your advantage.
