It's Not Stealing, It's Swiping

Swiping is part of any smart marketer's tool box...you should do this too.

Nate Smoyer
June 12, 2024

Personal Update

It’s about time I do a personal update, especially for those I haven’t seen or spoken to directly in a few months. I am no longer with Roofer.com.

I will remain independent, working with earlier-stage proptech companies. I’ve worked with startups as a marketing strategist and advisor and overseeing advertising, and am now offering the service of fractional CMO, but the situation and the company fit would have to be just right. At the moment, I only have room for one more client.

In my time between projects, I’ve been exploring other ideas and businesses (either to start or buy). More to come on that as one idea is already in motion. The podcast and newsletter will continue as they have been. More on the podcast down at the bottom of this week’s newsletter.

I appreciate the support of everyone on this list. The DMs, replies, and mentions mean a lot every time. Thank you!

In the world of art, stealing and copying is common. Within the music industry, “samples” are used to create some of the biggest hits. Sampling is essentially taking portions of songs or sounds, and using them to create new music. Eminem’s latest single Houdini does this by sampling the popular sound and a similar hook as the Steve Miller Band song Abracadabra.

To set the stage here, I’m not advocating for you to literally copy or steal anything. Even if you almost straight steal in some art forms, that can land you in hot water like it did Vanilla Ice. However, you can take inspiration and ideas and then make them your own (just as I pointed out in the example above).

In marketing, we call sampling, swiping. These swipes are used to create swipe files. Swipe files are a powerful tool to accelerate and better define your marketing efforts.

I’m pulling back the curtains on what swipe files are, the benefits of creating swipe files, and how to create swipe files for your marketing efforts.

What Is a Swipe File?

“A swipe file is a curated collection of successful marketing materials that inspire content creators, including emails, sales, and landing pages. These repositories act as valuable resources for ideas and strategies.” —Mailchimp

Mailchimp had a great definition, so let’s just run with that for now. Being that finding successful (and even unsuccessful) marketing campaigns is relatively easy in the digital age, swiping can be mostly accomplished through screenshots.

Reasons You Should Start Your Own Swipe Files

A Source of Inspiration. Stop starting from scratch. When you keep a swipe file, you’ll always have a place to start from with interesting, great, or ugly ideas to help drive discovery. When you're stuck or need fresh ideas, you can quickly browse your collection for new angles and approaches.

Reduced Creative Effort. This isn’t the outcome of not applying your creative energies. It’s the opposite. Swipe files help you take existing ideas, but then make them your own. You can use your swipe files to say “We want nothing that looks like this,” as much as you say, “Let’s try this idea, but add some pop.” (The pop language here is intentional to trigger a designer who’s heard that previously.)

Competitive Benchmarking. Measure yourself against others, until you are the standard by which all your competition is measured. You can look at the volume you’re shipping, variations, hooks, CTAs, product positioning, and copy. This is a time for comparison.

Staying on Trend (or Not). It’s a fact that you may not always be up on the latest trend. That being said, it’s sometimes better to stay off trends. An example of a trend I don’t particularly advocate for is turning every holiday into a sale or promotion or some cheesy social media graphic. The same goes for social and political movements that alter a logo. Being on or off-trend is specific to your strategy, but being aware of trends is important regardless of the direction you take.

Cohesion in Messaging and Positioning. You can evaluate how your closest competitor sticks with or shifts on their messaging and positioning. Early on, this may prove valuable to you as you may have less money to spend to test ideas on what sticks. You may be able to find something in their messaging they overlooked or you can avoid making the same errors they make.

Skills Improvement and Adaptability. Just as reading can help improve writing. And reading marketing copy can help improve copywriting. Studying and evaluating the efforts of others, who are driving successful campaigns can help you improve your skills when it comes to writing, design, etc.

How to Swipe Your Competition’s Marketing

The point of swiping isn’t to 1-to-1 copy others. It’s to learn and accelerate your ability to win in the market. You can both learn what’s working and what’s not working.

I remember I would routinely feel stressed thinking certain competitors to Avail knew something I didn’t know about Facebook ads because of how much they were running certain ads. I knew they were spending tens of thousands. But I’m not quick to just do what others do, so I waited for a little. And then the ads stopped—and didn’t come back.

My competitors at the time spent tens of thousands only to learn it wasn’t working in our market segment. By staying patient and following closely, I could make rational decisions based on what they did…and then what they didn’t do. This is more than just monitoring because I was actively swiping files to learn from what they were doing.

If you want to watch and swipe your competitors (and even companies that are excellent that you don’t compete against), here are a few ways you can do this for free or at little cost using the tools you likely already have.

Before we get to how to swipe, a quick note on what to do with your swipes. I add them to a Google Drive folder for my own personal use. When working with a team, I’ll forward them to the channel owner and ask them to add to the swipe file with reasoning as to why. You can also use Figma boards or Airtable boards to help visualize and organize your swipes. No matter how you choose to maintain your swipe file, start doing it.

For the examples below, I decided to pick on the mom-pop to mid-size real estate investor category.

Swipe Search Ads

Tools like AHREFs, SEMrush, and SpyFu make it easy to see the search ads your competitors are running. I typically have used SEMrush over the years, but any of these tools will provide you with insights.

You can see in the screenshot below that I’ve snagged images of some of the search ads Avail is running. I’m also able to drill down further to see which keywords they’re bidding on.

From here, you could build out a search strategy relatively quickly knowing you're on the right path given the success Avail has had in the category. However, you may not be able to compete with them on metrics like their max bid, which could impact your ability to be as successful.

Swiping search ad keywords and copy doesn’t guarantee success within the confines of your own metrics, but it can lead you down the right path.

Swipe Display Ads

Now let’s take a look at Google Display ads. The Google Ads Transparency Center is a lesser-known, free tool. It will show you the display ads of any domain running ads on the Google Display Network (GDN).

You’re not going to get the granular targeting criteria you may want from this resource, but you’ll at least get to see the copy and designs. This tool also highlights when there are multiple variations of an ad, so you can actively learn what your competition is testing against.

Below is only a sampling of the variations Baselane is running, per the Google Ads Transparency Center. I’ve only snapped a few so you can understand how thorough the tool can be.

My one complaint with this tool is you don’t get to click through the ad to see the landing page or UTM tagging they’ve put in place to better complete the advertising strategy picture (but I have my ways and that’s for another day).

Swipe Facebook Ads

The most commonly known swipe tool for ads is the Ad Library on Facebook. However, this is probably still an underutilized tool.

Very much like the GDN tool listed above, you can view any Facebook advertiser’s ads. Facebook, however, provides a little more context to the targeting and they allow you to click through the ad.

Below I’ve highlighted ads from TurboTenant. If you were to look at their ad library search page, you could also play any videos and click through to see their landing pages.

When I’m swiping, I’m ALWAYS looking at the UTM structure of links as well. This gives me helpful clues as to what the targeting was and answers questions I would need to learn what they’re doing.

One thing to note: if you were to check their ads today, it would look different from my screenshot below. I learned TurboTenant is running local meetups in CO to connect with prospective real estate investors from this effort. This isn’t posted in other places and was likely very targeted messaging. You could follow this strategy to see if they continue it or not to better find out if it’s worth attempting for yourself.

Swipe Email Marketing

Probably the easiest, and in my opinion one of the most crucial swipe files to keep, is your email swipe file.

I subscribe to an unusual amount of newsletters. Most of it is real estate, tech, or VC-related, but I occasionally expand to other topics. That’s why I’m currently sitting at 333K unopened emails (reply to this email, and I’ll send you a screenshot as proof). I use my inbox as an ever-flowing river of email marketing to swipe from.

What you’re looking for is headlines that make you open emails, convincing graphics, or pleasant layouts. One thing I look for that is very hard to quantify is “delight.” I wish I could describe this to you in a tangible way, but that’s an entire article in itself.

Email has such a unique opportunity to delight audiences. If you ever find an email that delights you, IMMEDIATELY screenshot that, and add it to your swipe files.

The tool to screenshot this is mentioned in the next section.

Swipe Website Tech and Design

Swiping ideas from other websites and the tech they use is easy, as well. Remember, this isn’t about stealing, this is about being resourceful in reducing effort and accelerating learning.

If you come across a landing page you like and want to document the page, a great Chrome extension I like to use is the Full Page Page Screen Capture (the same tool I used to swipe the Azibo newsletter above). This enables you to capture the entire landing page (even if it’s miles long) and export it as a PDF and PNG. I do this for any project such as building new product pages, pricing pages, directories, guides, or tools so that I can compare ideas to what’s readily available on the market.

Swiping isn’t just about the visuals though. I’m a sucker for always looking at the types of events someone has set up on their site for Facebook marketing. This helps me learn 1) whether they are using Facebook to build audiences and track key events and 2) what they are tracking. With the free Meta Pixel Helper, you can get surface-level info very quickly to see how a website might be using a Facebook pixel.

Finally, I’d like to share about Wappalyzer. This is a very powerful tool that allows you to see some of the tech that’s under the hood of a website.

In this example, you can see some of the tools LandlordStudio is using to power its website. You may not think there’s much to learn here as much of what is shown is a pretty basic stack these days. However, we’re looking for clues (especially if you’re tight competition) to gain an edge. One item I would draw attention to here is something like the Retargeting tool OptinMonk. You’ll also see how others are using screen recording and testing tools such as Hotjar and CrazyEgg, using the Wappalyzer Chrome extension.

From there, you can deduce they’re potentially running A/B tests, and if you can locate those (typically by clicking on ads) you can learn what’s working best based on what they land on as their final version following the test.

Did I miss something on swipe files? Have questions on other ways you should be thinking about swiping or want to add something to this article? Reply back and let me know what I should add, and I’ll call it out in the next newsletter.

Proptech News

Weekly Podcast Feature

NEW PODCAST EPISODES—TWICE WEEKLY!

The podcast has built up a long backlog of episodes. I want to flood your inboxes with them all at once, but not everyone enjoys binging and that’ll get me marked as spam.

So for all of June and July, you can expect to see two episodes dropping each week! I’ll also be taking a break from recording in the second half of July and all of August. This means we’ll be back to the normal one episode a week starting in August.

Here are a few interviews to check out from the last few weeks:

Find all podcast episodes on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere podcasts are streamed.

Have a topic you want to see written about next week? Submit your questions here or respond to this email.