Building a sales or marketing funnel from scratch can require considerable trial and error. You have to identify where your audience spends their time, what sources of information they value, and how to grab their attention.
What if there was an easier way? Well, there is: Funnel hacking allows you to skip the guesswork and use the strategies that have worked for your competitors. Careful study can help you build an effective funnel from top to bottom. Here’s how.
What is a marketing funnel?
A marketing funnel is a model of the process a potential customer moves through as they become aware of your product and eventually decide to purchase it. Typically illustrated as an inverted pyramid, it shows customers moving through three stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion.
In the awareness stage, you market to a broad audience to generate leads. In the consideration stage, you market to an audience familiar with your brand. And in the conversion stage, you market specifically to the leads most likely to convert.
What is funnel hacking?
Funnel hacking is the process of building a marketing funnel or sales funnel by studying your direct competitors’ marketing strategies, and then applying the insights you gain to your own business.
The funnel hacking process involves looking at how competitors engage with their audiences at each stage. Once you identify the key elements that make your competitors’ funnels work (from their digital ads to their content marketing and price tiers), you can adapt those elements for yourself.
What are the benefits of funnel hacking?
No matter how experienced you are in the realm of digital marketing, funnel hacking can help you succeed in a few ways:
It provides a practical rubric
Sure, you could start with a standard sales or marketing funnel template, but looking at a real-world, tried-and-true model is less likely to leave you suffering from blank-page syndrome.
Whether or not you use the same techniques as your competitors, having concrete examples of how they engage with their audience at each stage of the funnel can spur your creative thinking as you devise your sales and marketing process. At the very least, you’ll be able to see what type of marketing techniques they use to guide you as you make decisions.
It helps you differentiate your product
When you funnel hack, you don’t simply copy-paste your competitors’ marketing funnel and call it a day. Your product stands apart from the other offerings on the market—something you need to communicate to potential customers.
Funnel hacking can help you refine your value proposition by highlighting the areas where your competitors’ marketing tactics are not ideal for your product. Use the tactics that serve your product and discard the rest.
It helps you increase ROI
By implementing your competitors’ most successful marketing strategies, you might generate more return on investment (ROI).
As a funnel hacker, your goal is to eliminate waste—money wasted on poorly targeted ads, unappealing product features, and marketing copy that doesn’t land with your audience. By researching what works for your competitors, you can spend your time and resources on proven tactics that appeal to your audience and prompt them to click that Buy button.
How to use funnel hacking
- Identify your competitors
- Study your competitors’ positioning
- Study your competitors’ traffic sources
- Sign up for your competitors’ marketing emails
- Reverse-engineer your competitors’ marketing funnels
Funnel hacking is a relatively straightforward and intuitive process—it can even be fun. Here’s how to use it to build your marketing funnel:
1. Identify your competitors
Create a list of all of the companies selling products similar to yours (if you haven’t already, it might be worth conducting a full competitive analysis). Include both direct competitors (which sell products similar to yours to a similar audience) and indirect competitors (which sell higher- or lower-end versions of your products to a different audience).
Studying how direct competitors market their products is more likely to yield marketing strategies you can directly apply, but you can still gain insight from how your indirect competitors position their products to a slightly different audience.
2. Study your competitors’ positioning
This is where the real sleuthing begins. Survey your competitors’ websites, ads, and social media accounts to understand how they reach their audience—particularly at the top of the funnel. To start, you can use the Meta Ad Library to search for competitors and see if they’re running Facebook ads or Instagram ads. You can also browse the brands’ social media pages to see what kind of content they publish and how their audience engages with it. Take screenshots as you go, and record your observations for reference later.
3. Study your competitors’ traffic sources
Various tools can help you see where your competitors’ traffic comes from. Semrush and SimilarWeb, for example, provide traffic analysis tools that let you see your competitors’ traffic sources—whether that’s organic search, referral sites, social media, ads, or something else.
Additionally, Ghostery and the BuiltWith Technology Profiler are plug-ins you can use to see what type of tools your competitors use to identify their traffic sources. For example, if you find a competitor uses Meta pixel, you know they’re aiming to drive traffic via Facebook and Instagram. You may also learn what email provider, loyalty platform, and personalization apps they use.
4. Sign up for your competitors’ marketing emails
By subscribing to your competitors’ newsletters and marketing emails, you can see how they target those who are already familiar with their brand or have made purchases before.
For a couple of weeks, assess the emails to see how they fit into a larger strategy. Do your competitors offer promo codes? Upsells? Are the emails individualized in any way? Go to your competitor’s site and leave some items in your cart to see if you get an abandoned cart email. Record your findings and highlight the aspects of the email marketing strategies you like.
5. Reverse-engineer your competitors’ marketing funnels
Once you’ve gathered as much information as possible, sketch out your top competitors’ marketing funnels. Break down the different types of marketing techniques they use to target potential customers at each stage of the funnel, then highlight the details you like that apply to your brand.
Instead of copying successful funnels entirely, look for the most effective techniques and adapt them. If a competitor is gaining traction on Instagram with clever and irreverent posts, you might consider revisiting your brand voice guidelines to incorporate a sense of humor. If you notice a competitor makes persuasive offers in their abandoned cart emails, you could do something similar.
Once you’ve rolled out your marketing funnel, test, iterate, and refine until it’s firing on all cylinders.
Funnel hacking FAQ
Who came up with the idea of funnel hacking?
Author and ClickFunnels CEO Russell Brunson first articulated the concept of funnel hacking, but the practice of studying your competitors’ ads and applying the insights to your own is about as old as the art of marketing itself.
Why is funnel hacking effective?
Funnel hacking is effective because it allows you to harness strategies from your competitors’ marketing and sales funnels. Rather than creating a brand-new marketing strategy, you can pick and choose tested tactics from an existing funnel and refine them to suit your needs.
Is funnel hacking legal?
Yes, funnel hacking is legal. Although the process involves a little snooping, all the information you gather for funnel hacking is publicly available. Additionally, the overall practice of competitive analysis is an essential part of developing products to sell.
