How to Reverse Engineer Your Competitor’s Funnels

Competitors.

What to do with them…

Are you afraid of them? Motivated by them? Do you ignore them? Those are all valid feelings, emotions, actions.

Personally I don’t see competitors as a threat, they’re an OPPORTUNITY. And in today’s email I’m honing in on that opportunity and how you can leverage it.

Let’s start from the beginning though, when you’re creating a category, you have to do two types of Marketing. One, you have to market your company within the category, because you want more business obviously.

Two, you have to market what the category even is, which is a highway to competitors coming your way. 

Now the easier thing to do is entering an already existing market. You know there’s a set demand, you don’t have to spend time educating consumers on the market and solely lock in on educating consumers about your brand.

But we’re not in it for “easy”. 

So when you’re in those crowded markets, competitors are flooding in, legacy brands are dominating, what can you do?

REVERSE ENGINEER YOUR COMPETITOR’S FUNNELS. 😤

And it all starts with actually GOING THROUGH your competitor’s funnel from start to finish.

Go to their Meta ads library, or Ads transparency on Google.

Click on the ad, see what landing page you go through, fill out the form, see what emails you get in your inbox. And take note of it all.

If you’re an ecom brand, go even further and actually buy the product, see the flow of the funnel, every touch point, and BUY their product. 

There’s a gold mine of information and inspiration in your competitor’s funnels.

Take the time to go through the actual funnel and see every single step. Create a spam email, enter it in your competitor’s forms, see how quickly the welcome email gets to you. Analyze their subject line. What are they saying to you? 

Once you enter your spam email with your competitor, you can now see what emails they’re on a daily basis. It’s an evolving inside scoop on your competitor’s funnels.

There’s even a few tools you can use to get more info on your competitor’s funnels.

One of my fav is the Chrome plugin called BuiltWith (Ari showed me this one LOL, ily honey) that allows you to look at your competitor’s code in the back end. So you’ll be able to find what ESP they’re using, any automation platforms, how they’re tracking web analytics. 

You basically can peek into their tech stack.

Another tool is Spyfu. You can take a look behind the curtain of your competitor’s most profitable keywords and ads for SEO & PPC. It’s the little things Marketing Bestie and now you know ;).

And TBH I don’t really care what other brands are doing. My strategy will rarely deviate when competitors arise.

Instead I focus more on the things that my competitors are doing that are grabbing attention from my audience and how I can combat that. What are unique things I can learn from them and flip on its head to stand out in the eyes of my audience again?

Or if they’re doing something that I’m not doing, asking myself why aren’t we doing that? I am not a fan of adjusting your whole strategy towards what your competitors are doing, even if what they’re doing is crushing.

But it’s great to know what they’re doing well, where they’re struggling, and what they’re doing differently.

Any new go-to-market we launch with The Marketing Millennials, we do a competitive analysis of what’s out there, at what price points, who is their audience?

And you should too, yet keeping in the back of your mind that it all comes back to YOU. Bring a fresh perspective, disrupt a little.

^ I talked about all of the above with my best friend Jay on the podcast. See you in Boston buddy I hope you’re having a bad hair week I hate taking pictures next to you.