Imagine if you could turn your competitor’s customers into your audience in less than an hour?
We’re going to show you how, step by step.
The idea is to take all of your competitor’s customers and give them enough reason to switch over to you (well, the last part is pretty much still up to you; we’ve got the first part covered though.). We’re gonna export the Facebook audience list, too.
All it takes is a new Facebook account and a couple of clicks. And, most of the process can be automated too!
Step 1. The Group Hunt
Okay, first thing’s first, we’ve got to locate all your competitors’ groups. If you’re an avid entrepreneur that likes to “keep your enemies closer,” you probably have a list of all of them already.
Visit each group and grab the part of the URL that’s after “groups/”, you’ll be needing this in a bit.
Step 2. The Extraction Process – how to export facebook audience list
Wanna know how to export facebook audience?
We’re going to use a pretty powerful tool called Mailbiz. You can sign up for a free account on their website and they also offer a couple of paid packages, there’s a monthly one and a few lifetime ones.
When you’re done signing up for your account, you’ll be taken to dashboard with a lot of extraction options on the side.
You’ll want to click on “Email Extractor” followed by “Group Extractor”.
On the “Group Extractor” dashboard fill out the “Group Id” field with one of the group IDs that you’ve grabbed earlier in Step 1. Now, click “Extract” at the bottom of that field and wait for the magic to happen.
In a couple of minutes, this nifty little tool can pull out thousands of email addresses.
When it’s done working its magic, a message will pop up saying that it’s done, click “Close”.
You’ll be taken back to the screen earlier and now you have the option to “Download” your results. Click the button, select the fields that you need, and hit that button.
Congratulations, you now have thousands of email addresses harvested from that group. All you have to do now is input the rest of the group IDs of the other Facebook groups’ emails that you need, and keep adding to that spreadsheet of yours.
In less than an hour, you will have a giant list of email addresses that you can use to create a custom audience.
Keep these spreadsheets. Ideally, you can create a master spreadsheet with everyone on it.
Step 3. Create a Facebook Custom Audience
By using these emails, you can target your competitors’ audiences directly using ads on Facebook. You will be able to get a similar product or service in front of them and this helps your marketing strategy in two ways.
- You’ll be able to offer them a substitute that could have features that could be better suited for their needs, thus being able to convert them from the ad itself.
- You create exposure for your product directly off the bat. This means that before you even do a direct email approach – for example – they’re already familiar with you from the ads. Think about it as “pre”-suasion.
Go to Facebook Ads Manager and click on the hamburger icon at the upper-left. Under “Assets” click “Audiences”.
A menu called “Reach the People Who Matter to You” will appear where you can select “Create a Custom Audience”. Now go ahead and click that.
This gives you access to a wide variety of sources you can use, like web traffic (which you can use with the Facebook Pixel) and offline activity, which is used if you’ve gotten your list from your physical store for example. Click “Customer list”.
Pick the option to “Use a file that doesn’t include LTV” because essentially the emails that we have are from our competitors’ groups and they aren’t in our pipeline yet.
At this point, what you will want to do is to check out that spreadsheet that we got above, so we’ve essentially got a choice of uploading let’s say the name (first and last), email, phone number, gender, and date of birth.
You want to use as many of these as possible to make the process as accurate as possible.
When you’re done with that, drop your spreadsheet file into that box, give your audience a cool name, and click “Next”, and you’re done.
Now if you want to create a quick ad and want to throw it in front of the eyeballs of your competitor’s customers, you got the audience ready.
There’s an option right there to search for the custom audience you just made.
Sweet right?
Oh, by the way, that’s not all you can do with your custom audience. You can also create lookalike audiences which can really power up your lead generation strategy.
Here’s what:
A lookalike audience is essentially an audience that takes the characteristics and traits of your custom audience. This means that you can use your seed list from your competitors and turn it into another unique list of people with the same characteristics of the customers. I
f you click on the option under Audiences, you can easily create a lookalike audience from your custom audience.
Other Uses For Custom Audiences
Now, that we’re here anyway, let’s talk about custom audiences real quick. They are extremely powerful because they offer you an opportunity to customize your campaigns dependent on where these people are in your funnel.
Since we grabbed our competitor’s emails at the beginning of this guide, we’ve created a customized audience that is at the top of your sales funnel – awareness.
Now if some of them start moving through the funnel – let’s say they start clicking on stuff, you can take their names out of that list and put them into a new custom audience where you can hit them with another campaign.
It’s the same issue if you launch a video or any ad for that matter. It isn’t enough that people see your ad once; you need to be able to follow up on them again to get them to convert.
Don’t forget.
Lead generation has to be coupled with lead nurturing. And that means you’ve got to follow up.
Guerrilla Marketing at its Finest
Plug this list into Facebook as a custom audience to start running ads to them. Then use Lookalike Audiences to expand this initial pool from 5,000 to 150,000 or a million people.
This might be an unconventional way of both targeting and email hunting, but it’s one of the best ways to quickly capture your competitors’ audiences.
By doing so, you’ll be able to get your product or service in front of more people who have already shown interest in a similar product or niche. We love it because it’s so simple and we’ve got the tools to pull it off. It’s also data-driven, measurable, and easily deployable.
Most companies spend thousands of dollars to build an email list to then use as a custom audience.
The problem is startups that have little to no idea whether this audience will buy from them. Rather than guessing, I just showed you how to build one of the most refined custom audiences for 1/100 of the cost.
Exporting a facebook audience list or customizing one yourself isn’t difficult at all. The only step for you is to implement.
Make it happen.
Image Source: Giannis Riganas , Dribbble
3 comments
Kendal Richer
I went through the whole process and even signed up for the service ($150) because there wasn’t a free option. Well, low and behold, the dashboard looks totally different from your screenshots as well as what they show on their homepage – no option to extract anything from Facebook whatsoever.
Have sent an email to support, but worry that money is down the drain and they won’t respond. UGH, I’m looking for a tool just like this, if only it actually exists!
Marlon Francis
Thanks for the information, it was really inspiring and educational!!!
Patrice Panis
Very interesting! Does it work also with “closed” groups though?