In 2025, the fastest way to grow isn’t finding new markets or guessing who might want your product.
It’s about finding your target audience by leveraging competitor insights and focusing on a specific audience that is most likely to engage with your offering.
Understanding your competitors' target market—the broader group of consumers they aim to reach—is crucial for effective targeting, as it helps you segment and prioritize the right opportunities for your business.
Why? Because your competitors have done the heavy lifting for you.
Your competitors have already identified a specific group with shared characteristics most likely to engage with their product.
All you need to do is identify that specific audience, position yourself as the smarter choice, and show up where they are.
Here’s the catch: most companies stop at awareness. They see their competitors’ audience but don’t know how to turn that insight into revenue. That’s the difference between companies that grow slowly and those that scale fast.
In this guide, you’ll learn exactly how to:
By the end, you’ll have a blueprint to stop playing catch-up and start outpacing your competitors — using their own well defined target audience as fuel for your growth. This approach not only accelerates business growth but also provides a competitive advantage by leveraging deeper audience insights and more strategic targeting.
Having a well defined target audience enables you to create more effective marketing campaigns and maximize your return on investment.
Before we dive into the step-by-step blueprint, let’s take a closer look at why this strategy works so well.
By analyzing your competitors’ current customers and existing customers, you gain valuable customer insights that help you understand their customer base. This allows you to make your targeting more precise and effective.
A well-defined target audience helps focus your marketing efforts on a specific group with shared characteristics, enabling you to tailor your messaging, influence purchasing decisions, and optimize your marketing budget for better results.
If you’re wondering whether targeting your competitors’ audience is worth the effort, here are seven reasons that prove it’s one of the smartest growth plays you can make in 2025.
Breaking into a new market is usually a long, expensive process.
You have to run ads, test messaging, refine your ICP, and hope you land on the right formula.
That could take months — or even years.
By targeting your competitors’ audience, you skip all that guesswork. They’ve already identified the people most likely to buy and established a defined audience through market research and validation. This approach allows you to find customers and target people who are already proven potential customers, increasing your chances of success.
It’s like walking into a room where your competitor has gathered all the right people for you. All you need to do is introduce yourself with a sharper pitch or a better product.
For startups and fast-growing companies, this shortcut can mean the difference between burning cash and building momentum quickly.
Every time a competitor closes a deal, they’re proving that demand exists in your market.
If they’re able to grow steadily, you know there’s a healthy audience willing to pay for solutions like yours. Analyzing the purchase intention within each market segment helps you further validate and refine your targeting.
Instead of asking, “Is this the right market?” you can confidently step in and say, “Yes, the demand is here — now how can I capture a piece of it?”
This validation reduces risk and gives you a clearer path forward.
You’re no longer testing in the dark; you’re building on proven demand.
Here’s the thing: even if your competitor is serving their audience well, they’re not serving everyone perfectly.
There are always overlooked segments.
For example, maybe your competitor focuses heavily on a single target demographic, such as enterprise clients, leaving other groups like mid-market businesses underserved. Or maybe they’re great at attracting leads in North America but weak in Europe.
By studying their audience, you can identify opportunities to address multiple target audiences that your competitors may be neglecting. Dig deeper into competitor data to uncover hidden segments and overlooked opportunities that aren’t obvious at first glance. This lets you position yourself as the go-to option for the people they’re missing.
Your competitors’ audience engagement tells you what works and what doesn’t.
Which ad copy gets clicks? Which blog posts rank? Which social media posts go viral?
These are direct clues about the type of messaging their audience responds to. When you analyze which messages resonate with the audience and specifically focus on the audience's preferences—such as their likes, behaviors, and content consumption habits—you develop a deep understanding of what drives engagement.
This allows you to fine-tune your own messaging — but with your brand’s unique perspective.
Instead of wasting time on endless A/B testing, you get to piggyback on the insights your competitors have already uncovered.
That means faster learning and sharper communication.
When you understand your competitors’ audience as well as they do, you can position yourself strategically.
By using strategic targeting to identify and engage specific segments within your competitors' audience, you can tailor your messaging to address their unique needs and interests.
This approach not only differentiates your brand but also helps foster brand loyalty by building stronger emotional connections and ongoing engagement.
Maybe your product is more affordable, easier to use, or has features they’re missing.
Armed with audience insights, you can highlight those advantages in a way that speaks directly to what the audience cares about. Over time, this can help you pull prospects away from your competitors and into your funnel.
One of the biggest expenses in marketing is figuring out who to target.
Every wasted ad impression or irrelevant lead costs you money.
When you focus on your competitors’ audience, you’re targeting people who already have the right pain points and buying intent. Aligning your ad campaign with this pre-qualified audience increases efficiency and reduces wasted spend.
That makes your campaigns more efficient. You spend less money chasing unqualified leads and more money converting high-probability prospects. By focusing your ad spend on a pre-qualified audience, you reduce wasted budget and increase ROI.
Lower CAC = higher ROI. And in 2025, efficiency is everything.
Now that you know why targeting your competitors’ audience is such a game-changer, let’s walk through the exact steps you can take to uncover and engage them in 2025.
To find your competitors’ target audience, you need to conduct market research, gather data from various sources, and analyze industry reports to gather demographic information and build a comprehensive audience profile.
The insights gained from this process can then be used to develop and optimize your marketing strategies, ensuring your efforts are tailored to effectively reach and engage your target audience.
Finding your competitors’ target audience manually can take weeks.
You’ll be switching between LinkedIn, Crunchbase, Google, and other platforms just to build a list — and even then, you’ll often end up with missing data, outdated contacts, or irrelevant companies.
That’s frustrating and slows down your growth.
With Leadsforge, you can skip all of that.
Leadsforge instantly finds and enriches competitor audience data for you by leveraging detailed analytics, social media insights, and social media analytics from platforms like LinkedIn and even your competitors’ Facebook page. This enables you to reach the right audience more efficiently.
It also integrates with tools like Google Analytics to provide a comprehensive view of your target audience.
All you need to do is enter your competitor’s company name (or even multiple names), and within minutes you get a verified, ready-to-use list of similar companies and their key decision-makers.
The biggest reason is speed. In just a few clicks, you’ll have the same data that would normally take weeks to collect manually.
Leadsforge doesn’t just give you names — it gives you accurate, complete, and enriched data: company names, websites, industries, sizes, locations, and even roles within those companies.
This enriched data allows you to build detailed customer personas and buyer personas by analyzing demographic information such as job titles, industries, and locations. With this information, you can also analyze consumer behavior to understand customer habits and preferences, enabling you to tailor your outreach and marketing strategies more effectively.
Instead of bouncing between tools and spreadsheets, you can focus directly on outreach and growth.
1. Select “Followers” on Leadsforge homepage
First of all, select the “Followers” option as shown in the screenshot below.
2. Input your competitor’s LinkedIn URL
Input one or more competitor company LinkedIn page URL.
3. Instant enrichment
Leadsforge scans and finds the target audience of your competitor. It also helps you quickly and efficiently identify your competitors' target customers.
It enriches the data with full company details and relevant audience contacts.
4. See audience personas
You’ll see job titles, roles, and even industries of the people inside those companies.
5. Export or integrate
Once your list is ready, export it into a CSV or push it directly to your CRM.
From there, you can start outreach immediately.
While using a tool like Leadsforge gives you instant results, you might also want to understand how to manually find your competitors’ target audience.
Manual research methods can include conducting focus groups, gathering direct feedback from potential customers, and analyzing basic demographics to build a clearer picture of your competitors' audience.
This method takes longer, but it gives you a deeper appreciation for the process.
Plus, it can be useful if you’re just starting out and want to build your research skills.
Manual research means doing the legwork yourself — digging through websites, social media, and public data sources to piece together who your competitors are targeting.
Some of the common manual tactics include:
Manual research works when you’re testing ideas or need a small sample, but when you’re serious about growth, Leadsforge makes a much stronger case.
Let’s say you’re a new SaaS company competing with HubSpot.
You want to reach the same type of businesses that already use HubSpot. If your service offerings are tailored to tech enthusiasts or a specific market segment, Leadsforge can help you quickly identify and reach those groups.
That’s the difference between guessing who to target versus knowing exactly where to focus your energy.
If you want control and depth, manual research will give you that.
But if you want speed and accuracy, Leadsforge is the smarter choice.
Uncovering your competitors’ target audience is powerful — but what you do with that data is what really drives growth.
Strategic targeting of your competitors' audience, especially by engaging them where your audience hangs out online, can help build brand loyalty and accelerate growth.
The fastest way to turn those insights into real customers in 2025 is to automate multichannel outreach.
And that’s exactly where Salesforge comes in.
Instead of juggling separate tools for email, LinkedIn, and data enrichment, Salesforge gives you everything in one platform.
It’s an all-in-one growth engine that helps to find your competitors’ audience, enrich the data, and run outreach campaigns automatically across multiple channels.
While most platforms only handle one piece of the puzzle, Salesforge covers the entire process:
Here’s the growth formula scale your business with your competitors’ audience:
If you try to do this manually, you’ll spend weeks building lists, sending cold emails, and following up on LinkedIn.
With Salesforge, the process takes hours — and scales automatically.
Instead of chasing your competitors’ audience, you’re systematically winning them over with smarter, faster outreach.
By now, you’ve seen how powerful it is to uncover and target your competitors’ audience.
Instead of wasting time guessing who your ideal customers are, you can skip the trial-and-error and go straight to the people who are already proven buyers.
But here’s the key: speed matters. The longer you wait, the more your competitors tighten their grip on those customers.
As a business owner, make competitor analysis a core part of your growth strategy. Regularly examine your competitors’ websites, social media, and search engine performance to better understand their strategies and target audience.
That’s why the fastest way to grow in 2025 is to use Salesforge to automate the process.
With Salesforge, you can:
Start your free 14-day trial of Leadsforge today and turn your competitors’ customers into your next big wins.
It’s the group of people or companies your competitors are already trying to sell to. This audience is often a specific group or target demographic that shares common characteristics—such as age, gender, interests, or behaviors—and is most likely to engage with their product or service. They’ve invested time and money figuring out who’s most likely to buy. By studying and targeting the same audience, you can reach high-quality prospects faster.
Because they’re already proven buyers. If your competitor is spending money to reach them, it means they’re a good fit for your market. By targeting your competitors' audience, you can reach potential customers who have demonstrated purchase intention, increasing your chances of conversion. Instead of starting from scratch, you can tap into a ready-made pool of prospects.
You can research manually using LinkedIn, forums, ads, and competitor case studies. Additionally, you can use social media platforms, Google Trends, and industry reports to gather valuable insights about your competitors' audience, market trends, and consumer interests. Or you can use a tool like Leadsforge, which instantly generates verified lists of your competitors’ customers and lookalike companies.
The most effective approach is multichannel outreach — combining personalized emails with LinkedIn messages. This way, you’re not just showing up once, but building multiple touchpoints that increase your chances of a response.
Traditional methods like direct mail can also be effective for reaching your competitors' audience, especially when combined with digital outreach.
Scaling manually is tough. That’s why many teams use Salesforge, an all-in-one platform that automates email and LinkedIn outreach, manages replies, and even books meetings. It saves weeks of manual effort and helps you grow faster. Additionally, using lookalike audiences can help you scale your outreach by targeting new prospects who resemble your competitors' customers.
Yes. As long as you’re using publicly available data or verified lists, it’s completely legal and ethical. Businesses compete for the same audiences all the time — what matters is offering a better solution and communicating it effectively.
With the right tools, you can see results in days. For example, Salesforge users often start booking meetings within the first two weeks by running automated outreach campaigns to competitor audiences.