Using Google As to target your competitors’ keywords is effective, but can get expensive.That’s why I recently shared some Ways to Target Your Competitors on Google Ads Without Using Search. These recommendations remain in Google Ads, so in this blog post I want to talk about other cheaper ways to reach your competitor’s audience without using Google. We will focus on paid social. These include:
- Quora ads by topic or interest
- LinkedIn Membership Group
- Twitter followers
3 Cheaper Ways to Target Your Competitors on Paid Social Sites
For this article, I’m going to assume that one of my clients is a CRM brand.if i want to Target competitor keywords On a Google search, let’s see what I might have to pay for these keywords in the US.
$7.17 all the way to $69.61
Now let’s see if we can find a cheaper but still effective way to target similar users. I admit that these would not be apples to apples comparisons in audience targeting.I also acknowledge that the user intent of search ads differs from social media advertising, But we can still reach relevant audiences who show interest in your competitors.
1. Quora ad themes or interests
Quora is a question-and-answer site that offers multiple ways to target its users.The most specific form of targeting Zhihu Advertisement (but also the minimum amount) will be for individual issues. You can do this if you only want your ad to show for a very specific issue.
If people are researching which CRM is the best, or in the example above, what are the downsides of some CRMs, you can place an ad on that question to show why your product is a better choice. But as I said above, problem targeting won’t come in many volumes, which is why I recommend targeting topics or interests first.
Quora question targeting doesn’t come in many volumes, which is why I recommend targeting topics or interests first.
All questions on Quora are grouped under topics. If you target a topic, your ad may appear on any issue within that topic while the user is currently on the page. Interests use the same targeting options as topics, except that it targets people who have interacted with a topic’s question or answer at a recent point in time.
In this case, I can find my competitor on Quora as a topic. What you don’t see in the picture is that these five topics have 200,000 to 300,000 impressions per week. Pretty decent volume. What are the recommended bids for these topics now?
$0.24 – $1.28. Even at the high end of the bid range, the amount is well below what we pay on Google for the above keywords. I’m pretty sure you can find some areas of your account where ad spend is wasting and take it to Quora for testing.
>>use our Free Google Ads Scorer or Free Facebook Ads Grader Look for wasted spending.
2. LinkedIn Membership Group
LinkedIn Advertising Has a reputation for being expensive, but not always. There are several targeting options that are less expensive than popular job or company matching targets. I like to use membership groups to find users who are interested in my services, or in this case, my competitors’ services.
In the example in this article, some of the member groups I can target are Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, Agile, and Zendesk:
These are just some of the member groups I can target. However, targeting users who like to engage in active discussions about products can be a very relevant audience. I admit that if users are focused on a specific product, it may be harder for them to convince them to convert, so it’s worth visiting each group to see what people are talking about.If you notice a complaint or Pain points, or seeing that you can offer better features than everyone is talking about, you might want to target those groups.
How much does the membership group I selected above cost now?
$12.65 – $27.87, $17.24 recommended. If I opted for manual bidding, the lowest bid I could use was $4.45—much lower than a Google search. Even if I use similar advertiser bid suggestions, it’s lower than Google search. If I’m not getting the results I want from a competitor’s search campaign, I might want to test another avenue.
Individuals in groups focused on product users are hard to convert, so visit the group first to see if there are any complaints or pain points you can take advantage of.
3. Similar Twitter Followers
I’ll be the first to admit that this isn’t as straightforward a targeting option as my other examples, but it works.exist twitter ad, you can’t target followers of other accounts on Twitter, but what you can do is advertise to people who behave similarly to your account’s followers. How does Twitter determine if a person is a good fit for a lookalike?
this is twitter state: “We identify users who are similar to those who follow the account based on a variety of signals, including what they retweet, clicks, tweets, etc.”
When creating an ad group, go to targeting. You should easily see the Follower look-alikes section. Start typing each of your competitor’s Twitter handles and select each one.
Twitter will recommend targeting at least 30 accounts for follower lookalikes. Take this with a grain of salt. I recommend only choosing specific accounts that fit your target audience, no matter how many. Now let’s look at the cost.
$0.70 – $3.80. This ad group doesn’t add any additional layers to targeting. We can see that the bid recommendations are again much lower than Google. While targeting options are definitely not as relevant as keyword targeting, you can still use your competitors’ brand recognition to try and reach relevant audiences.
Twitter recommends targeting at least 30 accounts with follower lookalikes, but I recommend only choosing specific accounts that fit your target audience, no matter how many.
We have more options than targeting competitor keywords
Yes, there is a deeper level of intent when a user enters a keyword on a search engine like Google or Bing, but people visit a lot more websites than search engines. Paid social platforms can provide an effective and more affordable option when trying to use competitors for positioning. As I mentioned earlier in the post, I’m pretty sure every account can find areas to suspend or clear. Use this new ad spend to test different strategies in other channels. The results may surprise you.
