Use Your Competitor’s Ads To Find New Business

When a new client joins us at K&J, we ask them who their competitors are. We do this to see what ads they are running on Instagram and Facebook and get the creative juices flowing.

Here is how you can use the Meta Ad Library to see what others are doing:

1. Visit the Meta Ad Library

2. Enter the name of your competitor into the search bar - This example has the search term “UOA - Auckland Online”:

3. Browse the ads and try to find the oldest running ad by scrolling to the bottom of the page. Ads that have been running for a long time usually indicate that the advertiser is making money from them.

4. When we look at ads, we’re looking for two things:

- A good headline
- A image or video that makes you curious enough to stop scrolling

Take note of what looks good in your competitor's ads and write a few headlines that fit your brand.

5. Once you’ve got what you need test, test and test by running $5.00 against your headlines and copy and see what has the highest click-through rate.

Here is an example of an ad we ran for Rugby Bricks with a format we took from a competitor.

Our cost per email sign-up went from $1.48 to $0.86.

Notes:

This isn’t always going to work.

We did the same thing here at Hakune and ended up with terrible results by copying others’ ads.

The additional research will give you a good feel for what is in the market.

Once you decide on the ads you want to run, you must test to see what sticks.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal

In 1970, Xerox wanted to buy a million dollars of Apple’s stock.

Intrigued, Steve Jobs agreed to the deal under the condition that he could visit Xerox’s secret laboratory.

Xerox executives showed Jobs how they had invented a computer small enough to fit on a desk.

“They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer could do,” Steve Jobs recounted during a 1996 interview, “Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry… [But] Picasso had a saying. He said, ‘Good artists copy, great artists steal.’ And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Although Picasso never said that, Jobs makes an essential point about the necessity of looking beyond ourselves for good ideas.

Don’t worry about being novel.

Just improve on what is already there.

Notes:

Not all of us can be Steve Jobs, but many of us can look for ways to borrow from those already in the market.

Just like when we’re looking at the ads of our competitors we need to test to see if our assumptions are going to hold up in the real world.

This formula is far easier than reinventing the wheel every time we want to bring a product to market.