What do you do when things at work don’t turn in your favor? You either take help from someone who can point out what is going wrong or you can learn by the behavior of others. In the competitive world of today, finding a mentor would be difficult. However, replicating from the best in the business can save you a lot of trouble.

This is what funnel hacking is all about — modeling what others are doing to improve your sales or to bring more customers to your web-page.

What is Funnel Hacking?

Beginners tend to confuse funnel hacking with copying. It is not copying what your competitors do, but understanding their strategies and adding your own spin to it. The basic structure of both the sites is similar, but the blocks are placed differently.

Before we talk about funnel hacking, it is imperative to comprehend what a sales funnel is. A sales funnel is nothing but steps that a potential lead takes while visiting your website or an advertisement. The end goal is to convert them into a sale.

Funnel hacking is the process of digging into your competitors’ marketing strategies and tweaking them a little to sell your own products. Through this, you can look at your competitors’ sales pages, landing pages, price ranges, emails, and more to reverse engineer their sales process.

Why do you need funnel hacking?

Funnel hacking is one of the easiest and most crucial ways to grow your business

The basic goal is to look for techniques that can work for your business that you are probably unaware of or are ignoring right now.

How to become better at funnel hacking and understanding your market

Research

The golden rule to model something is to find the best in the market. You don’t want to spend countless hours on a website, only to realize that it is of no good use.

Research adequately about your competitors. These people are your immediate and not so immediate competitors who take away a chunk of the market that you are eyeing.

Don’t just chase the successful websites. Sometimes you can learn from others’ failures too. Evaluating unsuccessful businesses might give you greater insights into steps that you should probably avoid.

Look for basics like how their webpage is laid, how their email flows are set up or which adverts they are running.

Analysis of your competition helps you to understand how much of a threat your rivals pose. They also help you spot gaps in the market where they are probably falling short.

A smart businessman is the one who grabs these opportunities at the right time and capitalizes on it.

Use the SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Threat and Opportunities) analysis system initially and update it as per the need and demand

Sufficient research will help you to make the right decisions that can propel your business to the new heights of success

Define who your target audience is

Sometimes blind chase leads you to nowhere. While copying someones’ tricks is a good option, you must know what the destination is.

Have a basic customer profile in mind. Develop clarity on basic parameters like the gender of the customer, age, occupation, among the other things.

The better you know your market, the greater are chances of recognizing and connecting with the right people. Thus, you will probably convert more leads into sales and eventually into loyal buyers, thereby creating more revenue.

Screenshot, bookmark

While researching, the universe is limitless. It’s not necessary that you remember from where you started and what you analyzed. You should never trust just your memory for a job like this one.

Hence, use a screenshot tool to take a snap of every page that you are visiting. You can later visit these pages and study their structure to develop greater insight.

While capturing, remember there’s nothing unimportant. You should look at every page, every ad campaign your competitors use.

Keep a lookout on how their landing page is designed, how their ads are placed, is there a particular color scheme that they use, what is the call-to-action (CTA) button, where it is placed.

Go through their sales funnel and become the customers of your competitors

Yes, you heard us right! Invest time and a little money (if possible) in your competition. Sometimes, the best way is to learn is to be a part of the marketing process and looking at how marketers convince the leads to take the final plunge.

While going through your competitors’ sales funnel, look at how they present the product to you. Sometimes, presentation makes all the difference.

Look at how they have developed their price strategy, how user friendly their page is, if there are any pop ups available, how long the page takes to load and the number of steps that a lead has to go through before converting into a sale.

Find out where you are lacking and inspect the cause. The goal is to get a clear picture of the tactics your competitors are using to sell to customers.

Even if you don’t intend to make a purchase, jump on a sales call. This will let you know the secrets of their pitch that they might not otherwise publicly declare.

Use tools to look at their backend

While competition analysis seems like a daunting task, it can be made simple with tools.

There are tools for everything — to take a screenshot, to research your competitor’s organic and paid keywords, site audit, backlink research, detecting trackers, analyzing ad campaigns, and more.

By using tools you will able to develop greater knowledge about valuable stuff like where your competitors drive traffic from, tracks cookies, and beacons placed on sites by Facebook, Google, and other sites.

Some of the most popular tools associated with funnel hacking are Ghostery, BuiltWith Technology Profiler, AdBeat, SEMrush, WhatRunsWhere, Follow, PowerAdSpy and SimilarWeb.

There are both paid and unpaid tools. Choose the ones that fit your needs.

Understand the social game

With the advent of social media and the growth of brand influencers, marketing is no longer done in the traditional route. These days, social media is the king.

Look at how your competitors post on social media and how do they engage with the customers.

Most companies have different strategies for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. WhatsApp is another medium that companies are now turning to lure potential leads.

Closely monitor how do they engage with the audience, how frequently do they post, is it mostly text or are their videos and pictures.

Brand influencers is also a fast emerging trend. Celebrities and popular people talking about a product automatically gives the company an additional edge.

Apart from them, people who are actively and positively discussing a brand on social media are natural brand ambassadors.

Conclusion:

Now that you are armed with all the important information, organize it properly. Put together the pieces and start building your own funnel

Start making your pages, create ads and social media strategies from what you have learned from your competition. But remember to add a little of YOU in all this.

Make it unique and don’t think about failures. Mostly, funnel hacking is a trial and error method. It might look like a daunting task, but it always pays to test and find out which strategy works best for you.

Test, look at what’s working, rinse and repeat is the formula!

What are you waiting for? Dive into your competition now!

Try It Today. to convert your visitors into leads & then customers