Hey it’s Ryan Allis at SaasRise, the mastermind community for SaaS CEOs with $1M-$100M in ARR. If you’re not already a member, you can apply to join us here.

Today we have an article on how to acquire customers directly from your competition using targeted display advertising. Let’s jump right in…

Setting Up Competitor Customer Targeting Campaigns on LinkedIn, Meta, and Google by Ryan Allis

Writing this article takes me back to 2003, when at iContact we built a list of every single Microsoft ListBuilder (the largest email marketing software platform at the time) by subscribing to all their newsletters using a Perl script – and then offered their 30,000 paying customers a free trial of our product.

That single growth hack got us many of our first 1000 customers (we later reached 70,000 customers primarily through profitable paid advertising).

Now in 2024, here’s a similar yet modernized B2B SaaS marketing growth hack that can help you be seen as omnipresent and the dominant brand within your niche – so that when your target prospects are considering who to choose you come up top of mind.

It is a technique I call a “Competitor Customer Targeting” or CCT that allows you to use BuiltWith combined with custom audiences to show ads for your company directly to the customers of your largest competitors — across LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, and Google – at much lower Cost Per Click than by bidding on branded search terms. 

No, I’m not talking about expensive competitor branded Google search keywords that are often $10-$40 per click. This is about showing display ads to the customers of your competition — over and over again until you become top-of-mind as they consider their contract renewal or switching over to you.

I’m specifically referring to creating custom audiences of your competitors’ customers and then becoming omnipresent on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and your display ads showing up millions of websites around the web (Like the NY Times and ~2 million other websites) that are part of the Google Display Network.

Yep, with this process I describe below, your ads will be seen just by the people who are the customers of your competition – where the cost per click is usually more like $2 to $6 – yet these visitors are just as targeted and likely to convert into qualified leads as the more expensive (yet still effective) competitor brand search terms.

What could it mean to your 2024 quotas if you could advertise on LinkedIn, Meta, and Google Display and generate leads directly from the customers who use your competitor’s product?

This Competitor Customer Targeting process can be part of the magic behind getting qualified mid-market and enterprise SQLs for $200 instead of $2000 from more common marketing processes (and free trials for $30 instead of $300).

This is one of the techniques we use for our digital advertising clients at SaasRise. In addition to showing ads to recent site visitors (retargeting) and showing ads to a Lookalike audience of your current customer base, it’s one of the more powerful techniques we use.

And it doesn’t take that long to set up. You could have ads running to your competitors’ customers within 48-72 hours of now. If you’re in B2B SaaS and aren’t doing this yet – well, you should be. 

You can set it up yourself, via your marketing team or agency, or we can help do it for you.

So, how exactly do you start a Competitor Customer Targeting Campaign? Let’s jump right in and break it down step-by-step.

(You may want to pass along this article to your Head of Marketing or ads agency for implementation, or we’d be happy to help you implement it via our SaasRise agency division, which specializes in B2B SaaS Scaling and preparing you for a successful exit by raising your growth rate pre-sale and then getting the right bankers involved).

The Step-by-Step Process to Do a Competitor Customer Targeting Campaign

Here’s a step-by-step set up guide for how we create Competitor Campaigns.

There are ten steps to do this right…

Just do the following. 

1. Sign Up for A Technology Profiling Tool Like BuiltWith. Sign up for an account with Built.with, a tool that shows you which websites use which software tools (they know by scanning the code that is on these websites, and then building a database of which firms use which tech tools). They charge $299/month for two reports, and $499/month for unlimited reports. One month should be enough time to download the reports you need (though you can always stay longer if desired for ongoing access or updated data). BuiltWith is called a technology profiling tool. You could also try this with one of their competitors like SimilarTech, Rescan, Wappalyzer, Hunter TechLookup, or Netcraft → but we like to use BuiltWith.

2. Find Your Competition. Type in the name of your biggest competitors within your niche. I’ve found that most software competitors will show up if they have 500+ paying customers, sometimes even smaller firms will show up in their directory. For example, BuiltWith is tracking 4.2 million websites that have ever used MailChimp, including 1.3M that actively use it (based on the code active on their website). I’ll use MailChimp in the examples below, since I built iContact for a decade and they were one of our competitors. You can do this with nearly any SaaS platform. 

3. Download the Full Lead List: Once you find the competitor on BuiltWith, “download the full lead list” of that firm (the big red button in the screenshot below). 

4. Download the Custom Audience. Once you’ve downloaded the full lead list (which takes a minute or two), then download the Custom Audiences CSV which will have an SHA-256 encrypted emails. You could also download the unencrypted emails themselves under “Create a Custom Export > Default Fields > Emails” if you want to use the emails later as part of a targeted outbound campaign using a tool like Outreach, Reply.io, or YAMM.

5. Create Your Custom Audience. For each competitor, upload these email addresses to Meta Ads Manager as a custom audience, to LinkedIn Campaign Manager as a matched audience, and to Google Ads as a customer match audience (all the same thing, just different titles) Around 20-60% of these email addresses, depending on platform, will match specific users on these platforms, enabling ad targeting. Call each audience something different like “Competitor Name User List” so it’s easy to set up ads against later on.
   

6. Ensure Conversion Tracking is Working. If you haven’t already done this, make sure your Meta Pixel, LinkedIn Insight Pixel, and Google Ads pixels are installed with conversion tracking on and tested so you are able to tell how many trials/demos/customers come from these ads campaigns. Sidenote: We also like to use Cometly as our overlay tracking tool to keep the lead and customer attribution accurate across all the platforms.
   

7. Refine Targeting & Turn On The Ads. Turn on ads to these audiences on Meta, LinkedIn, and Google. You can either send traffic to the homepage for a quick and dirty test or, even better, create a different landing page for each major competitor - and explain how your product compares and why your product is better / faster / cheaper / easier to use / or has more integrations / better support, etc. You can either advertise to everyone who is associated with the domains/websites that use your competitor’s products (which might be too wide of an audience and waste money) – or you can often filter further by the job titles who are part of the buying decision for your particular product. So if you primarily sell to CFOs, CTOs, CMOs, VP Engineerings, etc. then filter down the matched audience by job titles (usually possible on Meta and LinkedIn, but not Google Display). Be sure to also limit the ad displays to your geographic targets (USA/CAN/UK/AU for example) and make search expanded match is OFF or you’ll end up getting hundreds of mostly worthless clicks from lower-income global countries for $0.11 each that have a very low chance of ever becoming a paying client.
   

8. Add in a Company Match Audience in LinkedIn. Now, before we rest and let the results come in, let’s go back to Built.with and export the Company Names of everyone who uses your competitor products under custom export. Then upload this list of companies to LinkedIn as a company match.

   

9. Calculate Your CPL and CPA. After about a week or so results, calculate your Cost Per Lead (CPL) and after 30-90 days of results (depending on the length of your sales cycle), calculate the Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) for each of the campaigns.
   

10. Scale Up Spend For What Works. Scale up spend for campaigns that are within your cost targets, which should be set at around 6-12 months of revenue or around 1/3rd to 1/6th of LTV, depending on the desired tradeoff between revenue growth rates and profit. Optimize your landing page, ad creative, and Call to Action (CTA) as needed to get your leads within your Max CPL targets and your customers within your Max CPA targets.

That’s the quick and dirty version. Most of the above can be accomplished in about 2-3 days of focused work, maybe a week if you need to throw up a few competitor specific landing pages and get pixels installed and conversion tracking working This above process will get you started and off and running and start getting results. 

Keep in mind that most SaaS contract terms are 1-2 years (and month-to-month for SMB) and so by being omnipresent among your competition’s clients through this type of competitor ABM campaign (especially if you can back it with either a better product, more features, better UI/IX, better integrations, better service, or a lower price) you can often win over 5% of your competitors’ clients each year.

And then you can come back and decide if you want to go even deeper and build a customized Competitor Accounts Based Marketing (ABM) list using a combination of the Company list from Built.with and a tool that allows you to refine further by job title and revenue and geography like Seamless, Apollo, ZoomInfo, or Uplead.

How to Build an Even Better ABM List By Combining Builtwith With Seamless.ai & LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Ready for the next step? Ready to go one step further?

Yep, there’s an even better version of this competitor customer ABM list building process, that I’ll describe below if you have extra time and the desire to build an even better competitor customer targeting list. 

If you’re selling into the mid-market or enterprise ($10k+ ACV) and have a couple weeks of an SDR or data entry associate’s time to invest – I highly recommend going to the next level with this type of ABM data preparation and not ONLY doing the quick and dirty 3-5 day competitor ad campaign setup above.

You see, one of the problems with exporting all the emails found on the websites of your competitors’ customers is you end up getting pretty much ANYONE and EVERYONE at those companies rather than just people who are involved in the buying process for your product. Do you really need to advertise to all of Prudential’s 40,000 employees, or would targeting just people who work in their marketing department (or whatever department you target) be a better use of funds?

So to fix this, you can either add in job title targeting on LinkedIn and Meta as mentioned above, OR you can simply export the company list from BuiltWith and then use LinkedIn Sales Navigator combined with Seamless.ai (or Apollo, Uplead, or ZoomInfo) to build a list that has only with the department/job titles/revenue levels you want to target. For Google Display, this is the only way to get better targeting (to refine the list BEFORE you upload it).

So, while this process would take an extra 2-4 weeks for an SDR or EA to build this type of list, it will give you even better quality prospect targeting. 

Remember: targeting is everything in B2B SaaS!

More In-Depth Enterprise ABM List Creation Tools

And you can even use more in-depth (and expensive) tools if you want as your revenue generation activities and team matures. What do I see later stage and more mature B2B SaaS firms use for ABM prospect list generation?

I’ve most often seen 6Sense, DemandBase, and MadKudu. Let me know what you like to use (you can reply to this post or comment on it). 

Most of my background is in B2B SaaS within the SMB and mid-market where sales cycles are 90 days or less and average Annual Contract Values are in the $1k to $250k – so I’m still learning about the world of enterprise sales processes where ACVs are $250k+.

Other Audiences You Should Be Targeting Besides Your Competitor’s Customers

Don’t only show ads to your competitors’ customers. That’s just one of many effective audiences to advertise to. You also want to be targeting prospects who don’t use anyone yet – but have a need. 

You should also be showing ads to, at minimum:

1. Past website visitors (site visitor retargeting)

2. Past MQLs (via a custom audience)

3. Past Demos/SQLs (via a custom audience)

4. Customer lookalike list (works on Meta and LinkedIn)

5. Prospect lookalike list (works on Meta and LinkedIn)

6. People that type in your competitor brand terms on Google and Bing

7. A cold audience based on job titles, departments, and researched target company list

Read my free guide to SaaS Omnipresence if you haven’t already for more background on this process of setting up ads. And don’t stop with competitor ads – also be sure to set up retargeting ads and customer lookalike audience ads. I hope you enjoyed this article. We’ll be back in touch next week with more great SaaS scaling content. 

See you next week!

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About the Author: Ryan Allis is the founder of SaasRise, a community for SaaS CEOs with $1M to $100M in ARR. Ryan previously led iContact as CEO and Co-Founder to $50M ARR and a $169M exit, raised $47M in equity capital and $6M in venture debt, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Today, Ryan advises B2B SaaS CEOs on scaling up and helping them prepare for nine figure exits.

P.S. - Below are six valuable SaaS growth resources we’ve put out. I hope they are useful to you!

Six Helpful Free SaaS Growth Resources from SaasRise

The most in-depth guide for scaling up SaaS companies from $0 to $50M in ARR. Including over 1,200 slides on every aspect of SaaS scaling.

How to determine whether to scale up or down your marketing channels

How to calculate ARPU, LTV, Churn, Lifespan, CPL, CAC, and Max CAC

A fourteen page in-depth PDF on we take each CEO client through a six-phase process designed to increase lead volume, customer acquisition, and revenue growth — and then scale up the sales team, executive team, and investor support as we help you prepare for future fundraising rounds (if needed) or an exit (if desired).

A twenty page in-depth PDF on how to scale a B2B SaaS Company from $1M to $50M ARR. Covering CAC-based customer acquisition, sales team scaling, venture capital markets, and preparing for the exit.

The SaaS Growth Formula was written to help SaaS CEOs who are focused on growing their company's sales - by implementing a simple formula called The Growth Formula. This formula is for companies that have already established product/market fit, already have paying customers, and are now ready to scale up through scientific and CAC-based digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales.

Join Our Saas Growth Mastermind for CEOs and Founders With $1M+ in ARR

If you like the above resources and want more stuff like this, apply to join SaasRise, our mastermind community for SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M+ in ARR who are focused on scaling up MRR. Every Wednesday we jump on a call to support each other and share what is working with scaling our companies – and we support each other throughout the week in our private community.

About The Author

We’ll see you next time with more great SaaS growth and scaling content!