The funnel hacking consists on reverse engineering or spying on the funnel of the competition. In other words, it's about doing everything you can to figure out and analyze the entire strategy, sales and marketing used by different competitors, from the acquisition phase to the loyalty phase.
It is important to understand that you need a lot of practice in order to become a good funnel hacker. While there are required skills such as observation, analysis, synthesis, and insight management, most of them as easily achieved through consistent practice.
The best funnel hackers are those who have excelled these skills and already know the best techniques to discover the complete experience process that such a consumer has, like the different tactics competitors use to figure best for them.
What is funnel hacking for?
Spying on your competitor's funnel saves a lot of time and money when done right since it allows the company to save the effort of finding the best and most optimal ways to achieve different types of goals. Just think about it! It probably took months, sometimes even years for competitors to reach the current situation, which is the most optimal that they have found so far. These years of testing and iterating you may save yourself simply by starting of where they are now.
It should be noted here that the funnel hacking process is not designed to copy the funnel from the competition (in this case it would not be funnel hacking at all). On the contrary, this practice is designed to spy on the funnel of the different competitors and thus take the best practices of each one, collect everything they have learned and then design your own and adapted funnel.
The practice of funnel hacking helps:
- Know the current marketing techniques of the sector
- Discover new ideas and methods
- Get inspired
- Improve on what the competition already does
- Find out A / B tests performed by competitors and the results
- Create your own funnel based on everything already discovered by the competition and start from a funnel already optimized.
How is funnel hacking done?
The main strategy to carry out a funnel hacking is to become a consumer of your competitor. This process allows you to discover the different marketing techniques that make up the funnel as well as the different stages of the competitors' funnel.
A complete and detailed analysis from the consumer's point of view allows to find out:
- The steps that competitors follow to attract, convert, sell, retain and build loyalty.
- The strategies they use to achieve each of these goals.
- The stages they spend the most time on based on the friction they encounter.
- The language in which they speak to their consumers.
- The type of messages they use.
- The media and channels they use.
- The actions they take according to each answer along with the flow chart.
And that's it?
The funnel hacking doesn't end there. As we have said, becoming a consumer of the competition is the main strategy to analyze the sales funnel of the competition and it is also the technique that allows you to find out more information. However, there are also other funnel hacks that make it possible to delve into this analysis such as the following:
- A very interesting funnel hack is to keep entering a specific page of your competitor. In case the competitor is in an experimentation process, this action will allow you to discover the A / B tests they are performing as well as which ones gives better result.
- Another basic funnel hack is to analyze social media in depth. This means seeing the kind of publications they make, their programming, their social media actions, participate in their contests, see how they interact with users ... and so on.
- Analyze PPC campaigns from the first time you put their name on Google. It will be really useful to see how they design the targeting and retargeting strategy. Notice
- the different ads that appear, in what media and what you were looking for at that moment will give a lot of information about the techniques that the competition uses for traffic acquisition and conversion optimization.
- Putting different words in google and see in what position they appear in the search engine will allow you perform an SEO and SEM analysis to find out what keywords they use.
This will allow not only to know important words and to use them but also to look for other alternatives.
We can say that funnel hacking is the action of spying and analysis the funnel of the competition to discover as much as possible about their strategy of
sales and marketing, extract the best from each competitor and thus design a funnel as you use the most powerful findings.
This practice uses different techniques; although becoming a consumer is the best one that will give you the most information, there are other tactics that serve to deepen such as Social Media Analysis, SEO, SEM analysis and deep website research.
