Competitor Research Part Four

Heeey there,

The world has not become less weird since last week.

Some very smart, or at least very resourceful people have pleaded for a 6 months stop in the development of AI… While Thomas Bangalter, one of the founders of Daft Punk revealed his fears of AI leading to a “2001 Space Odyssey”-like situation.

Speaking of music, half of our 1-hour standup today was spent contemplating how Bad Bunny was the highest-selling music artist last year when none of us has listened to him yet (crazy right?!), and how David Guetta looks better at 55 than a decade ago.

We did spend the second half focusing on our business, but since we can only see each other through screens, and most of us only a few times a week, I quite like the fact that we can just go around and have fun instead of being strictly business.

In my experience, it is much easier to inspire one another and thus achieve great things, with people that you can also chill with.

Now back to marketing stuff 🤙

For some weeks now we’ve been covering a competitor research guide based on a 4 part guide I wrote some years ago.

If you’ve missed out & would love to score some low-hanging fruit in your messaging, check out the following visual summaries:

• For scraping competitor research » this summary on the scrape&break method.

• For understanding growth models » check out this visual summary, we’ve created.

• For researching the model & product » peak this summary.

• For getting insights into your competition’s Facebook Ads » see last week’s carousel.

If you find these insights valuable, the best way to support our work is by inviting your friends to become Dot Connecters and learn more about Connecting The Dots between marketing activities and financial goals.

Topic Of Today:

• Linkedin Competitor Research

  • How active are your competitors on Linkedin? 🎛️

  • How are they using Linkedin Ads? 💸

  • What else is there? 👀

  • How to record it 📸

  • How to use this 👨🏻‍🏫

  • Looking to take your competitor research even further? 🚀

  
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Linkedin [Ads] Competitor Research

Same drill as last week, with Linked ads too, before you start running ads based on a hunch (or a board meeting), it makes sense to look around.

Again, you are not supposed to copy ads or strategies (I mean unless they are one-of-a-kind and ridiculously good…then knock yourself out) »

but to find insights into how they are using the platform to acquire leads.

These are some of the things you want to learn from your competitors running Linkedin [Ads] 👇  

• How active are your competitors using LinkedIn as a platform (if at all)?

• What’s the communication angle they are using to convince leads?

• How much are they A/B testing on the platform?

• How are they building their Funnel to convert visitors into sales? [i.e. Are there distinct steps in how they build up their ads?]

• What kind of images are they using?

• How advanced is the marketing team in using UTM tags? [i.e. When you click on the ads, how does the URL build up?]

• What can we learn from the UTM tags used by the competitor to build our own funnel?

• How are your competitors using their LinkedIn» to understand the maturity of their marketing team and the effort they spend on LinkedIn to build a multi-touchpoint funnel

Let’s start at the beginning. 🏁

How active are your competitors on Linkedin? 🎛️

Let’s start with the most straightforward way of checking this » looking at their LinkedIn profiles.

2 things worth checking out here:

1. Their company page

2. A few of their marketing/sales/leader profiles

Since we ran this with Freshbooks last week, let’s continue with them.

Steps 1 & 2:  are super easy & straightforward:

You open LinkedIn, search for the company, and click on “Posts”.

Scroll through and check:

• what they are posting,

• how often they are posting,

• what is their tone of voice etc.

Step 3: Learn
Scrolling through Freshbook’s posts, it’s easy to see that they use LinkedIn actively.

They have a large variety of posts.

They share gated content, content about people behind Freshbooks, event announcements, and client testimonials and they even induce UGC (user-generated content).

Plus we can even see that they run cross-platform campaigns on Instagram and Twitter.

This can already give you some insight into their general approach, what they do well and what you would do differently.

You can get inspiration from what they do well and build on what you feel they’re missing out on.

At a 1st glance for example, to me, it looks like, while they are in fact creating a variety of posts, most of it is branded content.

They could perhaps mix in a bit more expert content that does not focus on their brand » like articles, videos or audio content that focuses on their client’s pain points.

Moving on. 💃

Step 4: See how engaged their team is on Linkedin.

There are multiple ways you can do this.

1 is simply looking at reshares on the posts made by the company.

Especially when a business is quite active on their company profile, there is a good chance that they’ll have likes, reshares & even comments made by their team members.

Check a few of the posts and look for reappearing names & faces (that work at the company).

The other way is to click on the “People” tab of the company profile and search for positions in marketing, sales or any leadership position.

Bit more tedious, but you’ll be able to see how active of a role their marketers/salespeople and leaders take in their social media presence.

Either way, you can get insights on a few things:

• Is their “real” engagement on their social content or are they engaging with their own posts?

  • If the likes, comments and reshares come from their colleagues, it still doesn’t mean that it is not working, it”s rather a sign of their team taking their social presence seriously

• Are their people also posting or do they focus only on their company profile?

• If people from the business are posting, do they post content related to the company?

  • Content related to their profile?

  • Or just content they like?

• If they do post content relating to the business, are those just reshares?

  • Is most of it branded content?

  • Is there engagement in their posts?

• Are the people posting about the business have a relevant following?

• Are they just posting content or also engaging with others?

  • If they are engaging with others, are they leaving value-driven comments or rather engaging socially?

• Do their posts start conversations or are their followers silent?

  • Again, they could still generate inbound traffic, as Linkedin is part of the “dark funnel”

In this case, for example, you can see that there are active profiles » some commenting, some posting regularly, some just resharing posts.

Besides the points we’ve discussed, you can also look for potential audiences that you can target with your activity, by seeing who engages with the posts of your competitor.

In some cases, you may find influencing figures in a certain field who draw the attention of your target audience.  

You might even find information about your competitor that will help you in setting the tone for a temporary campaign.

Not suggesting to use sad news like this maliciously.
Simply pointing out that information like this may lead to understanding what is going on with your competitor on a deeper level, which you may then use in your campaign.

How are they using Linkedin Ads? 💸

In the next step, we’ll look at their Linkedin Ads strategy.

The idea here is the same as what we discussed with the Facebook Ads last week.

The key thing we are looking for here is:

• How are they building their Funnel to convert visitors into sales? [i.e. Are there distinct steps in how they build up their ads?]

Step 1: Same route. Linkedin company profile. Click on “Posts”, then on “Ads”

Step 2-3: Scroll through, Observe & Learn.

As you can see (well you can see part of it, but trust me) they only use ads to promote their open positions.

At least at this moment.

While I wouldn’t spend too much time researching competitors, it could help to periodically check out the ads & organic content of 1-3 key competitors…

1. Perhaps they’ve tried something you planned on testing

2. They might be doing something well that you haven’t thought of

What else is there? 👀

Finally, you could also check out whether they have separate profiles for other purposes.

This can give you further insights into their social or even overall strategy.

Here for example we can see that Freshbooks has a specific brand for Mexico & profile focusing on their partner program.

All in all, we can see that Freshbooks has 87k followers on Linkedin and a colourful social presence...

yet, they don’t (at the moment) use ads in their strategy and mostly focus on producing branded content.

There are some great ideas that they do (like UGC, cross-platform campaigns & testimonials), and some opportunities (like thought-leadership & value-based, ungated content).

How to record your research 📸

The simplest way is creating screenshots just like I did for this post, storing them in a sheet/notion/whatever, and adding the links to them.

The other option, which makes storing & sorting easy but will cost us, is what we talked about last week and what you might have already seen on some of the screenshots »

Swipekit » You can save the ads or posts your competitors are using with a click of a button.

Step 1: Install the extension
https://swipekit.app/
Step 2: Head back to the LinkedIn page of your competitor.
Step 3: Save posts/ads that you like

How to use your findings? 👨🏻‍🏫

In about an hour, you can gain a lot of insight into a key competitor which then you can and should cross-reference with your other research.

Like the one about their activity on other channels (such as Facebook/Instagram etc.), their messaging on their sites, other content they produce etc.

While some completely dismiss competitor research, saying that all you need to do is listen to your (potential and current) customers »

I think unless you are an established brand with a significant number of active customers (that are happy to share their insights and are big enough in number for you to “test on”)...

It won’t hurt to look at what worked & what didn’t for your most relevant rivals.

Looking to take your competitor research even further? 🚀

Most of your competitors will use UTM parameters to track the performance of their campaigns.

This is where you can find some extra data about who they are targeting:

Step 1: Scroll through your competitor’s ads.

Step 2:Click on the ‘Call To Action’.
You’ll get redirected to the page they are promoting.

A great way to see which landing pages and propositions they are using in their ads.

Step 3: Have a look at the URL of the website you landed on.
Since most marketers use the audience they are targeting in the parameters.
This way, you can know whom your competitor is targeting on LinkedIn.

For a breakdown of how to parse the UTM tags, check out the Facebook ads breakdown.

Note: Some companies don't use UTMs or hide their UTM parameters if they are a little more advanced with a GTM lookup table. But most companies just forget or are very inconsistent.

LinkedIn posts worth reading this week:


1. Do Not Create New Blogposts

A comprehensive guide on how to run optimisations on your blog post.

2. Guide For Advanced Linkedin Advertising

A complete guide on how to manage LinkedIn Ads at the highest levels of performance.

3. 5 Lessons To Become A Better Copywriter

Learnings from Jasmin Alic on copywriting, who has been writing copy for over 13 years and wrote for brands like Apple, Microsoft, Marriott and Digicel.