If you're in the B2B SaaS space and want to be perceived as omnipresent within your niche, there's a powerful growth hack that can help you achieve this. It's a strategy called "Competitor Customer Targeting" (CCT). This technique uses tools like BuiltWith and custom audiences to deliver your ads directly to your competitors' customers across various ad channels like programmatic ads, Meta, and LinkedIn —all at a lower cost per click than traditional branded search terms.
Let’s dive into how this works and how you can set it up to maximize your lead generation and revenue.
Unlike expensive competitor-branded Google search keywords that can cost $10 to $40 per click, CCT focuses on displaying your ads to your competitors' customers through display networks, native ads, or social platforms. These ads are more affordable (averaging $1- $3 per click) but just as effective at converting into qualified leads.
Imagine showing your ads repeatedly to people who already use a competitor's product. This strategy ensures your brand remains top-of-mind when they consider renewing their contract or switching providers.
CCT campaigns are a game-changer, especially for mid-market and enterprise software companies. They can significantly lower your cost per lead (CPL) and cost per acquisition (CPA), generating SQLs for a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.
Here’s how you can set up your own CCT campaign in just a few steps:
Consider signing up for tools like BuiltWith, a tool that identifies which companies use specific software tools. You can use other tools like Apollo, ZoomInfo, SimilarTech, Wappalyzer, Hunter TechLookup, or Netcraft, but Apollo is our favorite for this specific purpose.
Search for your top competitors on BuiltWith. For instance, if you’re competing with MailChimp, BuiltWith can show you over a million websites actively using it. This works well for competitors with 500+ paying customers.
It’s best to refine the audience by job title to focus on decision-makers before you launch your campaigns. It’s very easy to do directly in Apollo if this is the tool you’re using.
Download the full lead list of each competitor. This list will contain the companies using their product.
After downloading the list, export a CSV file of SHA-256 encrypted emails. You can also download unencrypted emails for outbound campaigns using tools like Outreach, Reply.io, YAMM, or keep it in Apollo if you’re already using it for outreach sequences.
Upload these email lists to Meta Ads Manager, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and your programmatic system as custom audiences. Approximately 20-60% of the emails will match user profiles on these platforms.
If you’re using Growth Channel DSP for these campaigns, navigate to Activate / Audiences / Custom Audience and upload your file. Click Submit to Save the audience for activation.
Make sure your DSP pixels are properly installed and track conversions. Tools like Cometly and Funnel can help keep attribution accurate across platforms and consider multi-touch customer journeys down through conversion.
Launch ads targeting these custom audiences. We suggest driving traffic to competitor-specific landing pages highlighting how your product compares and why it’s better. The same should be communicated via your creative, whether a display or a video.
Make sure to choose the right objective for your campaign from the start; for example, you may be looking for Conversions as form submissions on your landing page. You should also set a specific KPI goal for machine learning and AI to optimize your campaigns towards achieving that goal.
Hint: Consider frequency caps best practices as another important factor in your campaigns set up.
For example, if you want to generate 100 new leads and your website conversion rate is ~3%, consider that you need to drive at least 3,000 monthly visitors through this campaign. At an average CTR of 0.4% for a Display campaign, that means 750k impressions to your ads, so you’d need to spend $6,000 at an average CPM of $8. You can run more estimates using our media planner.
8. Measure performance
Closely monitor your campaign performance in the DSP reporting dashboard to evaluate your cost per acquisition (CPA). Don’t just look at the general campaign results, but try to understand which creatives perform better than the others, which placements bring the best traffic to your site, and what type of conversions your’re seeing. Use this data to optimize your campaigns.
Re-allocate your budget for campaigns that are performing better and cut down the media from under-performers. Optimize your landing pages, ad creative, and calls to action to improve results further.
If you want even better targeting, go a step further by refining your audience using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Seamless.ai, Apollo, ZoomInfo, or Uplead. This process takes more time but allows you to target specific job titles and departments.
For example, instead of targeting all 40,000 employees at a large company like Prudential, focus on marketing or IT decision-makers. While this requires more effort, it significantly improves the quality of your leads.
You can also consider using the direct account-based-marketing audience targeting inside your advertising platform such as Growth Channel DSP where you can customise the industries, titles, and keywords intent for the people you want to reach through advertising.
In addition to competitor customer targeting, consider running ads to the following audiences:
Competitor Customer Targeting is a highly effective strategy to gain visibility and increase conversions. By being omnipresent in front of your competitors’ customers, you increase the chances of winning them over when their contracts are up for renewal.
This process doesn’t take long to set up and can start delivering results within a few weeks. It’s an ideal strategy for B2B SaaS companies looking to accelerate growth and dominate their niche.
If you need help implementing this strategy, our team at Growth Channel specializes in helping companies scale through advanced advertising techniques.
Ready to get started? Reach out to your marketing team or agency to set up your CCT campaign, or contact us at Growth Channel for expert assistance.
