Funnel hacking can give small or new businesses a leg up on the competition by emulating their successful marketing and sales tactics.
But how do you identify these tactics? We are going to tell you exactly what you need to do to funnel-hack your competition and grow your business successfully.
What Is a Marketing Funnel?
A marketing funnel is a mechanism used to turn prospective customers into loyal customers by focusing on the four different marketing stages of awareness, interest, desire, and action.
You should think about your marketing efforts as a funnel. The top includes a large number of people within a target audience. From there, you move to the middle of the funnel that includes potential customers with interest in your products and business. Finally, you move to the bottom of the funnel that includes customers that have actually made a purchase.
In order to move people through the funnel, you need to focus on awareness, interest, desire, and action (AIDA). These steps also align with the funnel — with awareness at the very top and action at the very bottom.
What Is (and Isn’t) Involved in Marketing Funnel Hacking?
Developing your own funnel takes time, research, and money. But what if there was a better way to do it? This is where funnel hacking comes into play.
Funnel hacking is the process of strategically investigating your competitors’ sales and marketing processes, which you then use to model and test within your sales and marketing processes. Essentially, funnel hacking involves taking what your competitors are doing and making it work for you.
There are a lot of misconceptions surrounding this concept. For instance, whether funnel hacking is immoral, illegal, or poor business practice. For this reason, it’s important to establish that funnel hacking is not about ripping off your competition’s hard work or copying their products. It’s also not about using deceptive marketing tactics to manipulate your audience.
Instead, funnel hacking is about using your competition’s funnel as inspiration for your own funnel. In order to be effective, your funnel still has to be unique to your business.
Why Do You Need to Hack Your Marketing Funnel?
Here are some benefits:
- Funnel hacking allows you to save money on testing and optimization efforts when trying to build your funnel.
- Funnel hacking can help you to maximize your profits since you’re not building a funnel from scratch.
- Funnel hacking provides you with information about your competition that you can then utilize to your advantage.
- Funnel hacking provides you with useful information about your industry and niche that you can use to improve other areas of your business.
How to Start Hacking Your Marketing Funnel
What do you need to do to get started? Follow these steps.
Identify Potential Competitors
The first step involves identifying your potential competitors whose funnels you want to hack. Specifically, you want to identify competitors you know outperform you since they’re doing something right and are likely to have insight your business could benefit from.
You should start with your obvious competitors. You should also keep in mind that not all competitors on your list need to be direct competitors. In fact, they might be in another niche. So long as the competitors are similar enough for you to benefit from, they’re worth having on the list.
Gather Information
Once you have identified your competitors, you need to do a deep dive into them. You should spend a lot of time going through their websites and social media pages to get a better idea of what they’re doing. The easiest way to do this is to take screenshots and save them in an organized manner. You may also want to join their email list to get the full picture of their marketing funnel.
Analyze Information
Once you have gathered your information, you need to analyze it:
- What type of copywriting do they use in their headlines, and is the header section fixed?
- What color schemes do they use?
- Do they use a lot of social proof? If so, what kind?
- What are their prices, and where do they mention them?
- Do they offer one-time offers or discounts for their products?
- Are buttons located above the fold or below the fold?
- Do they have long and detailed opt-in pages, or are they short and straightforward?
- Do they use videos, pictures, text, or all three?
- How do they describe the benefits and features of their products? And where?
Identify the Good and the Bad
You then need to identify what’s working and what’s not. If you notice a trend between multiple different competitors, you would want to emulate it. From there, you can identify what would work for your brand and what would not. Not everything they do would make sense or work for your brand.
Create Your Own Unique Funnel
From there, you can put all of this information together to create your own unique funnel. You should start with the front end of your funnel — website homepages and landing pages. You may want to focus on things like design, copywriting, graphics, and tracking codes. You can then move on to the back end of the funnel — email sequences and retargeting advertisements.
Final Thoughts on Funnel Hacking
Instead of starting from scratch, you can give yourself a leg up by using tactics that have been proven effective by your competitors. At the same time, you need to remember that funnel hacking does not involve creating a carbon copy of your competitors’ strategies. Instead, you need to put your own spin on different aspects of the funnel for it to make sense for your unique business.
Knowing who your competitors are and what they do is one thing. Knowing who your audience is and what they want is another thing. If you’re struggling with these concepts, you may want to consider hiring a marketing expert like Greg Gillman for the knowledge and expertise necessary to build your marketing funnel and grow your business effectively.
Sources:
How to Use AIDA Model in Business | Small Business Chron
Why Split Testing Is the Best Way to Prevent Wasting Marketing Money | Entrepreneur
How To Identify Your True Competitors Online And Make Your Brand Stand Out | Forbes
