Find Customers through your Competitors on LinkedIn in 7 Steps: n8n Automation

Do you follow your competitors on LinkedIn to know what's happening in the market and who is working with your competitors? While it can give you a lot of insights, it is nearly impossible to track your competitors' activity manually on LinkedIn. That's when you use this n8n automation workflow to find customers through your competitors on LinkedIn:

Step 1 - Define your competitors

Node: Manual Trigger or Form.
Input: list of LinkedIn company pages or personal profiles representing direct competitors.
Store them as workflow variables for later use.

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Step 2 - Identify competitors active 5+ days per week

Node: HTTP Request (PhantomBuster / LinkedIn API partner).
Pull each competitor’s activity log from the past 7 days: posts, likes, comments, shares.
Count active days.
Filter for those with engagement on 5 or more distinct days.
Output: “Active Competitors” list for further tracking.

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Step 3 - Fetch interaction network of active competitors

Node: HTTP Request (same tool).
For each competitor:
- Gather all profiles they’ve interacted with — those they’ve liked, commented on, or shared posts from.
- Also capture users who’ve engaged (liked/commented) on the competitor’s own posts.
Store: name, LinkedIn URL, interaction type, company name, and engagement date.

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Step 4 - Filter potential customers based on ICP

Node: Function / Gemini.
Input: all interaction profiles + your ICP.
Ask Gemini to filter and retain only those who match the ICP (e.g., “Operations Managers in manufacturing companies with 100–1000 employees in the US”).
Output: refined list of potential customers likely relevant to your offerings.

Suggested Gemini instruction:“From this list of LinkedIn profiles, keep only those who fit the Ideal Customer Profile: [ICP details]. Return their names, companies, and roles.”

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Step 5 - Deep research on shortlisted prospects

Node: HTTP Request (Gemini + optional LinkedIn API/enrichment tools).
For each filtered prospect, collect and summarize:
- Company overview (industry, size, recent news, focus areas).
- Prospect’s role and likely challenges.
- How their engagement with competitors’ content signals interest or pain points.

Suggested Gemini instruction:“Summarize what [prospect_name] and their company [company_name] do, their likely goals or challenges based on their engagement with [competitor_name]’s content, and how our offering could be relevant.”

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Step 6 - Generate hyper-personalized LinkedIn messages

Node: Gemini (Text Generation).
For each researched prospect, use gathered insights and your company’s offering summary to create a message.
Instruction example:“Create a short (under 80 words) LinkedIn message for [prospect_name, title, company]. Reference their recent engagement with [competitor_name]’s content, connect it to [your_offering], and sound personal and friendly. Avoid a hard sales pitch.”
Output: unique messages for each prospect.

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Step 7 - Save results