During the holidays, the promotion of products and services on Facebook can become highly competitive as advertisers and marketers strive to draw their target audience’s attention with their most attractive deals.

In such a scenario, raising the ROI with Facebook Ads becomes challenging. 

A lot of you must be considering targeting your competitors’ fan base, as they would more likely be interested in your products and/or services as well. 

In this article, we will provide insights on how to help you target your competitor’s followers and increase the chances of Ad conversions by using an often overlooked, but highly effective tactic.

1. Locating the Facebook Pages You Want to Target –

Making a list of the exact competition pages you want to target is your first step. There are several ways to locate these pages. 

• Competitor Pages: 

List down all your significant rivals and look at their Facebook accounts. You would be able to access the company’s Facebook pages or the pages of the founders. Who are their followers, and what do they put out? 

• Brands or Public Figures:

Consider popular brands and individuals in your sector and them to your list by finding their Facebook sites. Identify influencers and brands that are aligns with your marketing activities.  

• Keyword Research:

When it comes to keyword research, you should begin by typing related phrases into the Facebook search bar. This will generate a list of pages that are related to your industry. Additionally, it’s important to keep an eye out for trends, popular content, and the type of information users are seeking through these pages.

• Related Pages:

Utilize the sidebar to look for “Related Pages” or “Pages Liked by This Page” By making use of these options, you may discover pages that you would not have considered otherwise.

• Community Tab:

On any Facebook page, the Community tab will offer a list of the most committed users. If you add “/likes” at the end of the page’s URL, you can view their profiles and also explore the pages that they have liked.

• Youtube Users:

To find out who has the most popular videos on YouTube, enter your relevant keywords. Also, look for their Facebook profiles. They most likely have a worthwhile, high-quality audience you can target. – Interlink the youtube videos to the Facebook profile/pages

• Audience Insights:

When you are using Facebook Audience Insights, make sure to include interests related to your business. If you click the Page Likes tab, you will be able to view pages that people with similar interests have liked. Facebook will categorize the list based on the affinity score, which will tell you which pages are most important. Keep a tab on pages with a high-affinity score.

After gathering a selection of potential audiences, you can channel your advertising activities and expenditures to the correct target audience.

2. Identify the most responsive audiences –

Begin by building potential audiences using different targeting options, key phrases, and interests. You will get more accurate results if each audience and their sources are specified more precisely. 

Test your ad on different audiences to determine which one responds best. There is, however, a limit to how many audiences and variables you can evaluate based on your budget.

If you have a tight budget (under Rs 4 lakhs, for example), you may be able to evaluate 10 to 20 ad variables with five varied audiences. On the other hand, a bigger budget enables continuous evaluation, which eventually helps you to keep refining your Ad strategies.

The winning ad variant is the one that has the lowest cost per outcome (like cost per link click or cost per video view). 

When running a test on Facebook, we‘ll often show confidence or power percentage to help represent the likelihood of a causal result from your test. – Facebook Tutorial

You can derive the most optimized Ad variant with a split test. The procedures for developing a split-test campaign are as follows:

Steps:

– On the Create button on your Ads Manager dashboard, click (green)

– Decide on Quick Creation Workflow.

– Select Video Views from the Campaign Objective dropdown menu by going to that tab (since we are using video views for this example)

– To access the variable selection box, turn on the Split Test switch.

– Check which audiences you want to test & set it up in respective ad sets.

3. Utilize Facebook page insights to research the content – 

From the Audience Insights dashboard, you can gain access to a multitude of potential content ideas and research information by simply navigating to the Facebook pages of your competitors. Observe your competitors’ website content and user activity.

                                                                                         Source: Facebook Tool 

Content sections such as About, Posts, Photos, Instagram, Videos, and Communities, will be visible. Investigate each of these links further to see what kind of interaction your intended audience is receiving. 

You can devise techniques to modify your effective Facebook Advertising strategy in accordance with the sort of engagement (good or negative) your rivals are receiving. To have further clarity on the process, ask the following questions

• What sort of material do they release? Do they speak to the concerns and interests of their audience?
• What subjects evoke the most interest from the fans?
• Existing historical data that validates your current  advertisement strategy 
• Are your competitors using Facebook to advertise their events?

With these action-oriented insights, you will be better able to formulate a data-driven approach to engage their end audience and push the down the funnel.

4. Learn more about the intended audience – 

An alternate method to discover your rivals’ pages is to “like” their pages and associated interests. There is a strong likelihood that your competitors’ commercials/Ads will begin showing up in your newsfeed.

In this case, you may use the “Why am I seeing this” choices found on the sides of each advertisement to learn more about the intended audience and other goals of the rival.

                                                           Feature: Why am I seeing this ad feature on Facebook

                                                                                     Source: Facebook Tool

Tools to help you out – 

There are many tools available for analyzing Facebook competitors. Some of our favorites are as follows:

1. Social Status – 

Social Status is a powerful tool for social media marketing and has the ability to analyze and compare the involvement of your competitors on multiple social media platforms, such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

2. BigSpy – 

BigSpy is a Facebook competition analysis tool made especially for social media advertisements. It boasts of integrating more than 6 major social networks, including Facebook, and has a vast database of more than 1 billion ads.

You may quickly see the newest commercials being utilized by other companies in your industry using it, and you can gain ideas for your own ads. With its robust search tools, you may find and exclude advertising based on a wide range of criteria, including countries, sectors, CTAs, dates, and more.

3. Sprout Social – 

Another social media monitoring company that offers a Facebook competitor analysis tool is Sprout Social. With its social listening capabilities and competitor reports, you can quickly gauge the industry’s pulse and determine how you stack up against your rivals.

Final tips – 

It is important to ask the right questions at the outset to make the most of this opportunity:

What demographic are your competitors targeting?

What are the types of ads they are using?

What words are they using, and how successful are they?

How much engagement do their ads get?

What objectives are their advertising campaigns trying to accomplish?

Do not forget to continually evaluate and alter your own ads while you are putting in the hard work to analyze your rivals’ advertisements. The Facebook Pixel provides you with all the information required to monitor your ads.