Having spent significant time working with B2B decision-makers & marketing teams over the past year or so – we’ve seen a recurring trend with companies looking for ways to expand their total addressable market (TAM), especially when doing outreach at scale.
Without precise targeting, businesses risk wasting resources on low-value leads or irrelevant markets. In addition, manual methods of identifying similar companies are both: (i) time-intensive, and (ii) prone to errors. This leaves businesses struggling to identify & capitalize on new opportunities effectively.
That’s where building lookalike company lists can be pivotal – ensuring your efforts are directed towards high-value prospects who closely mirror your best customers. As a result, you get precise and highly-relevant companies for you to redirect your outreach efforts.
Over the course of this article, we’ll explore how tools like Clay and Ocean.io can simplify and automate this process. Using advanced AI list building, we’ll break down the workflow step by step to help you build highly targeted lookalike company lists with minimal effort and maximum impact.
So what are you waiting for? Let’s get started.
Why Should You Build Lookalike Company Lists?
Building a lookalike company list allows you to mirror the characteristics of your best customers in prospective targets.
Let’s delve into the key reasons why this approach is a game-changer for B2B marketing and outreach:
1. Enhanced lead quality and relevance
Lead quality is a huge concern for many B2B sales and marketing teams, since it drastically improves your conversion rate & are more likely to respond to your cold email or book a meeting. With nearly 44% salespeople highlighting the same, building lookalike company lists ensures that your outreach aligns with businesses most likely to resonate with your product or service.
For example, if your current top customer is an HR SaaS solution, building a lookalike company list can increase the chances of a positive response.
2. Expands market reach strategically
Instead of casting a wide net, lookalike company lists help you scale your outreach to companies with similar profiles, expanding your TAM without sacrificing precision. For example, if your current clients are startups in the fintech space, your lookalike list can identify similar fintech startups globally, opening up new markets.
This approach eliminates guesswork and focuses your marketing and sales efforts on high-potential prospects, ensuring a more strategic market expansion.
3. Scaling with data-driven insights
AI list building tools like Ocean.io provide data-backed insights to identify lookalike companies. These insights go beyond surface-level characteristics, analyzing factors such as employee size, recent funding rounds, and even technology usage to ensure data accuracy.
By scaling with data, your outreach campaigns become more effective, ensuring that every lead generated has a higher probability of turning into a long-term customer.
4. Boosts competitive advantage
With competitors vying for the same prospects, standing out requires targeting the right audience with precision. A lookalike company list helps you stay ahead by identifying high-quality prospects faster than your competitors.
This speed and precision give you a competitive edge in winning over prospects.
5. Enhanced brand positioning
Targeting companies similar to your best customers reinforces your brand’s authority in a specific niche. If you’ve already built a strong reputation among SaaS companies, reaching out to similar companies strengthens your positioning as an expert in that field.
By leveraging advanced list building techniques with Ocean.io and Clay, you ensure your outreach is backed by relevant data, amplifying your credibility and increasing your chances of closing deals.
Why Use Clay and Ocean to Build Lookalike Company Lists?
Tools like Clay and Ocean.io are revolutionizing the way businesses approach AI list building. Here’s why these tools are indispensable for creating lookalike company lists:
1. Leverages advanced AI algorithms
Both the tools use cutting-edge AI to analyze and identify companies that closely match your existing customers. These algorithms go beyond basic data points, examining factors such as industry tags, revenue, and even employee profiles to ensure the highest level of accuracy.
This level of intelligence eliminates manual guesswork, allowing you to build lists that are not only accurate but also actionable.
2. Seamless integration & data enrichment
The integration between Clay and Ocean.io ensures a smooth data flow, allowing you to enrich your lookalike company lists with valuable insights such as LinkedIn descriptions, company size, and employee details.
This enriched data ensures your outreach is more personalized and impactful. For instance, knowing a company’s latest product launch or recent funding can help you craft highly tailored messages that resonate with their current needs.
3. Cost-effective & efficient
While traditional methods of list building can be time-consuming and expensive, both Clay and Ocean.io offer a cost-effective alternative. Using Clay credits, you can access Ocean’s powerful AI capabilities without committing to expensive monthly plans.
This approach ensures you get maximum value while keeping your budget in check, making it ideal for businesses of all sizes.
Building Lookalike Company Lists Using Clay & Ocean – Stepwise Tutorial
As mentioned above, Clay and Ocean.io are great sales prospecting & list building tools that can help you create lookalike company lists in a few easy steps. Given below, is a detailed overview of the same:
Step 1: Create a new workspace or Clay table
The first step to build a lookalike company list is to create a new workspace or table for the task. Once you’ve logged into your Clay account, click “Create new workspace” or “Create new table” to start a fresh data set for your lookalike campaign.
Step 2: Utilize Ocean for a lookalike search
The next step for building your lookalike company lists involves leveraging the Ocean.io Clay integration to perform a lookalike search. The tool allows you to input domains of your ideal customers and generate a list of similar companies.
Within the new table, select the “Find Company Lookalikes with Ocean.io” option and then add the URL of companies you want to create a lookalike for, under the “Company domain” field. You can also add domain exclusions for companies that you don’t want to either target or have already reached out to.
You can also add other filters such as the company size you’re looking to target and the geographical locations they belong to.
Step 3: Map and enrich your data
After Ocean processes your input, map the columns in Clay to capture all relevant data points. This step is crucial for ensuring that your lookalike company list is enriched with comprehensive information such as the company name, domain, social media links (including Facebook, Twitter/X, YouTube and LinkedIn), company description and HQ location among others.
Once you’ve done that, you can leverage Clay’s enrichment features to add more depth to your data, such as the tech stacks and job openings at those companies, if any.
Step 4: Review & validate results
The fourth step for building lookalike company lists requires you to review and validate the results generated by the Ocean lookalike search. While you can run a prompt to perform a check on the website URLs generated, one-time manual verification is recommended to maintain high data quality and reliability.
You can cross-check a few entries to confirm that the companies align with your ICP, or even go ahead to tweak your search parameters to improve accuracy.
Step 5: Export and integrate with other tools
To close off building lookalike company lists, you can simply export the list as a CSV and then upload it to automation tools like UnifyGTM as an email sequence to streamline your outreach and run personalization at scale.
Best Practices to Build High-Quality Lookalike Company Lists
When building lookalike company lists in Clay, there are a few things you need to keep in mind. Some of them are as follows:
1. Define a clear segmentation criteria
Before building your lookalike company lists, it’s essential to define the attributes of your ideal customers. These attributes may include industry, company size, revenue, geographical location, and specific technologies they use. Having a clear segmentation criteria act as a blueprint, enabling tools like Clay and Ocean.io to deliver more accurate results.
For example, if your best customers are SaaS companies with 50–200 employees in North America, specifying these filters ensures your AI list building efforts are aligned with your goals.
With recent research showing how precise segmentation helps boost lead conversions by up to 20%, you risk generating irrelevant leads if you don’t have a segmentation criteria in place.
2. Utilize data enrichment capabilities
Once the initial list is created, data enrichment adds depth and value to your lookalike company lists. The likes of Clay and Ocean.io integrate seamlessly with data enrichment tools, pulling in details like LinkedIn profiles, contact information, employee roles, and even technology stacks.
These enriched lists provide the comprehensive insights needed to craft highly personalized outreach campaigns. For instance, enriched data can reveal whether a company recently raised funding or launched a new product—valuable insights for tailoring your messaging.
3. Regularly update your lists
Markets are dynamic, and businesses evolve. Lookalike company lists that aren’t updated regularly can quickly become outdated, leading to wasted effort on irrelevant or stale prospects. Ensure that you’ve set a routine to refresh your lists, incorporating new data and removing outdated entries.
Both Clay and Ocean.io simplify this process by allowing you to rerun searches or integrate with CRM systems to pull updated information automatically. Regular updates not only maintain relevance but also ensure you’re consistently reaching high-value prospects.
4. Avoid credit wastage
Platforms like Clay operate on a credit-based system, where each search or enrichment uses credits. To maximize your budget, it’s crucial to optimize your searches by setting specific filters and targeting only high-potential prospects.
For example, rather than running a broad search for SaaS companies worldwide, narrow your focus to a specific region, revenue range, or technology usage. By using filters effectively, you can extract the most value from your AI list building efforts.
This not only conserves credits but also ensures your outreach is targeted and relevant, saving time and resources.
5. Balance personalization with automation
While automation accelerates the process of building and managing lookalike company lists, personalization is what drives engagement. Using enriched data from the likes of Clay and Ocean.io, you can craft outreach messages that resonate on a deeper level.
For instance, if your list includes companies that recently launched new products, your email could say, “Congratulations on your new product launch! Here’s how our software can support your go-to-market strategy.”
This blend of automation and personalization ensures your outreach stands out, even in crowded inboxes.
Grow Your Sales Pipeline with AI-Powered List Building & Outbound Systems from Cleverviral
Creating lookalike company lists with AI can be a game-changer for B2B businesses looking to scale their outreach. By leveraging AI list building and following best practices, you can target high-quality prospects with precision and efficiency.
If you’re a B2B product or service-based company looking to take their list building and outreach campaigns to the next level, Cleverviral offers expert lead generation solutions tailored to your needs. To know more about how we can help you grow your sales with AI, reach out to us on [email protected] or fill the form on our website to get started.
Until then, happy prospecting!
