How to Analyze a Business’s Marketing Funnel?
By: Bobi Pu
Tags: Funnel Builder, Marketing Funnels, Social Media Marketing, Competitor Analysis, Digital Marketing

For Digital Marketers, no matter what niche your clients are in, they probably not the only player. Most likely, the market has already been occupied with a handful of big sharks already.

So before turning on any campaign, it’s critical to analyze competitor’s marketing strategies and understand what kind of offers customers are already exposed to.

In this article, I will show you how to hack your competitor’s online marketing funnel.

Marketing Funnel Example. Img from Sprout Social

Organic Traffic

Among the various forms of funnels in the market, the organic content funnel usually is the first touchpoint.

The best way to understand it is to opt-in.

#1 Watch Free Content

Most of the customers started their purchasing journey with some organic content, like Youtube videos.

However, these videos are not coming for free. Once we watched it, we will be marked as viewers(or prospects) on Google or FB. Then they could run ads that “Re-Target” you.

So, once you understand the mechanism. You can start analyzing how do your competitors structure their free content, especially:

What kind of video/post do they use to grab the 1st attention? What kind of collaboration do they do to get traffic from other companies or influencers? What kind of information do they provide for FREE & what info they hold for SALE?

#2 Subscribe Email List

Email sequence marketing is another big channel for acquiring organic traffic. Ways of collecting prospects’ emails include:

Newsletter Funnel : provide free insights by subscribing to a newsletter

: provide free insights by subscribing to a newsletter Landing Site Funnel : become a member by registering a website account

: become a member by registering a website account E-Book Funnel : offer free knowledge by giving out the free book

: offer free knowledge by giving out the free book Webinar Funnel: offer a free class by hosting a webinar

No matter which approach, the purpose is the same. So just fill your email in all these funnels.

Then you will start receiving a list of emails(aka “Email Sequence) every X days. Usually, it starts with some marketing education, pain point agitation, and make an offer in the end.

For purpose of analyzing, you need to find out:

What kind of content do they use to engage with customers? What kind of pain points do they focus on? What kind of offer they make?

Email Sequence Example

#3 SEO Analysis

Keyword search like Google is also a major way of getting organic traffic. Nowadays, all most all companies that doing business online did a certain level of SEO.

I covered some basics techniques in a previous article, you can reverse these steps to understand how your competitors improve their exposure on Google. Go leverage tools like ahrefs.com or Google Keyword Planner, for their website or landing page, understand:

Which keywords do they optimize? What kind of backlinks are they using to boost their credibility?

Paid Traffic

Unlike Organic Traffic, paid traffic is the real battlefield you will confront with your clients’ competitors.

#1 Social Media

The best way to find out competitor’s ad campaigns is Facebook Ads Library. It’s a magic tool that you can directly search all the post have been running on the Facebook platform, results including:

Original ad copy and creative

Running date

Platforms

Facebook Ads Library

#2 Google Ads Auction Insights

If you are already running Google Ads campaigns, you can more detailed information from the Google Ads Auction Insights report. This report will tell you how you compare to other advertisers for your whole account, a specific campaign, or a specific ad group.

The great thing with this method is that you get a pretty clear picture of which advertisers you’re competing with and how aggressive they are.

However, if you are NOT running Google Ads Campaigns, some 3rd party tools could do a similar job, like similarweb.com

Explore the “Backend Offer”

All these methods mentioned above are focusing on the “Front-end Offers”. In most cases, after a customer purchased the 1st order, companies will present another high-end offer or some exclusive premium membership.

For example, if you purchase an online group class package, 3 weeks for $500. At the end of the last class, the instructor will offer another premium class for students who want more. It could be a small group class focused on some advanced skills or more intimate mentorship. Like “Tony Robins’ Platinum Partnership”.

We call this “Back-end” offers.

These offers only targets a small group of customers, but the margin is very high since there’s NO marketing cost.

Find out the “Back-end” offers is to fill the last piece of funnel “matrix”. Although it requires real dollar cost and time commitment, competitor analysis isn’t complete without it.