So you go out and buy $1,000 worth of advertising on Google Adwords, making sure that you are bidding on the most relevant keywords for your target market.
All the traffic comes flying in and you get dismal conversions resulting in a painful loss.
What do you do?
You blame the traffic source.
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
If you are buying premium traffic from reputable sources like Google, Bing or Facebook, it is not the traffic that is the problem.
You see, buying traffic is pretty much a mechanical process. You zero in on your targeted keywords or interests to reach your intended market.
So if it’s not the traffic source, then what is it then?
It’s your marketing funnel.
I feel that this is the most misunderstood aspect of creating on online business.
I know this because I get dozens of emails from readers telling me they spent X dollars on traffic source X and made absolutely no money.
This can happen if you are buying traffic from second tier traffic sources (these are usually called traffic aggregators who pool multiple traffic sources), but if it is rock-solid traffic from a place like Google, the traffic source is not the issue.
Now there are a lot of great spy tools like SpyFu, iSpionage and Adbeat that allow you to find winning text ads and banners, but that is really just the first step in the marketing funnel.
You need to study and analyze the entire marketing funnels of your competitors if you want to understand the entire process of what really is working.
You need to know the:
* Ads
* Landing Pages
* Sales Letters
* Upsells
* Downsells
* Email Followups
If you enter any market with this knowledge in hand, you can dominate that market and your competitors within a short amount of time.
I know this because we do this same exercise with our competitors in particular markets and simply improve the marketing funnel.
Trust me, it is much cheaper to go through your competitors’ entire marketing funnels, buying all their upsells and downsells, and staying on their email follow up sequence to see what else they market.
The alternative is to spend a lot more money through trial and error, struggling to develop your own winning marketing funnel.
This can get very expensive.
Once you have an optimized marketing funnel that is profitable, this will allow you to buy more traffic from more sources.
The business with the largest life-time customer value will always win because they will always be able to buy more traffic then their competitors.
Study the funnels of your competitors.
Swipe, clone and deploy with your own sales hook and watch your online sales skyrocket.
Comments?
Cheers
Gauher Chaudhry
Jerry
By just adding just something like “without touching” word to all my followup letters for a particular niche, my sales increase, the last advert campaign I run made me more than 100% ROI.
Tweak and re-arrange, know body actually knows what works not until you have figured it out.
The world and our IM industry is becoming nosier everyday, once your land on a working model, you milk out every penny possible from it.
cheers
Brian
Not sure what you mean by ‘life-time customer value’ (meaning vs definition).
…found a CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) entry on Wikipedia which then led me to the MASB (Marketing Accountability Standards Board) – so this can get very involved/detailed.
Do you use one CLV formula (with your internal metrics/details) for your own business – and a second CLV formula for your competitors? OR one generic fits-all formula?
Also, does one have to take into account cultural differences (US, Canada, China, Kuwait, Indonesia, etc.) of their customers when determining CLV?
John
Any suggestions on the software the will help in this endeavor.
Josan
I have been reading a lot of stuff lately about marketing funnels. I think it’s time for me to develop an excellent funnel of my own. By the way, you have a typo on line 24. The word should be “misunderstood”.
trevor
@Brian. Customer Lifetime Value — good question.
This is a number that is specific to the relationship that a customer has a with a product.
That relationship may include the sales funnel, product satisfaction, support and other things that give positive feelings such that the customer buys once with relish or multiple times due to trust, reliability et al.
While CLV is a single number, cultural differences such as being unable to support customers really well who are from Indonesia or Tongo may certainly affect the overall CLV.
So, in some cases, where the conversation on regional differences is relevant ( and it usually is not ), yes, you might want to break this information out to see if its worth hiring regional staff to aid with increasing the CLV from a certain locale.
As an example. In the casino industry, a certain monster poker room has a CLV of $600 worldwide. That number may be $450 in certain areas due to regulatory statutes that are unfavorable and it could be $900 in another european area where its social community type value outweighs the player’s desire to necessarily win, win, win. The issue really only comes up strongly when its a global brand.
Djem Ahmet
Hey Gauher,
Pretty much nailed it.
But what markets to go for?
Ash
Do you have any course that covers this competitive intelligence? Or is there any other that you would recommend?
Thomas
Awesome info man! Never thought about the cost of going through a competitors entire funnel vs pioneering and testing on your own, Tremendous saving in time money and effort right there. Thank you.
JJ
Agree with this approach but it sounds more like marketing incest.
This is not a fool-proof method so will not… “Make Paid Advertising Profitable Every Single Time”
It is important to study your competitors… but if you’re making a clone of their ads, landing pages etc, then you’re just a ‘me-too’ product in the market.
This is not a bad strategy to start with… time is money…. but it’s not the holy grail!
The real gaps are only discovered by undertaking serious market research… yup, it’s expensive and it takes a time… but you want 100-1000X opportunities, then there is no other way around it. This is how to get a pay-day!
Incest will only get you so far…
Gauher mentions in passing… ‘deploy your OWN sales hook’… you’re not going to uncover a sales hook until you know your market… yup, detective work called market research!
Tyler C.
Great write up Gauher
Ziring
Obviously it’s important to have a good funnel. But what do you do if your product is a free app download for mobiles. There is not much of a funnel you can put in that. But still it costs a lot to get the traffic. Any ideas for this scenario?
Jeremy
Gauher,
Do you have a post anywhere that shows how to set up your pages so they will redirect to upsells, downsells, etc.?
I’m new at setting this all up…the most I’ve done is my squeeze page with redirect to one affiliate product I am promoting.
Also, what do you think of driving traffic through the sources on Fiverr.com? I can get 3,000 views to my page for $5… how does that compare with other traffic sources (like those in your free Rolodex of 100+ traffic sources?)
Khoren
Very interesting post thanks for sharing these jewels with us.would be nice to show us how do you use adbeat / whatrunswhere to spy on your competitors…
Gauher
Jerry: That is awesome. That just shows you that adding little things to your marketing funnel can have a big impact.
Brian: CLV is simple a calculation that determines how much somebody will spend with you over the course of a marketing funnel. This can only be calculated internally as you will never have access to your competitors’ numbers.
John: There are a couple of software programs that help you create marketing funnels. One is Click Funnels and another is Ten Minute Funnels.
Josan: Typo fixed. Thanks.
Djem: I tend to go for large evergreen markets like health, finance, education and relationships.
Ash: Adbeat.com has a pretty good course that covers front-end competitor intelligence.
Ziring: An in-app purchases can be considered part of the funnel. Even getting users of the app to give their email address within the app can allow you to build a lucrative marketing followup using email.
Jeremy: Get a program like Click Funnels or Ten Minute Pages, they will help you set these up.
Thanks
Gauher
Nathan
I totally agree G. In fact a great tactic is to go through your competitor’s funnel (copy the infrastructure you like but make it your own) and order their product (what does it look like, how does it arrive, etc, – model what you like again).
Shola
Important to note that a funnel isn’t just the pages. It’s the well constructed/engineered message. I use the word message deliberately. While the best practice certainly is studying what the best in the market are doing, at the end of the day, nothing takes the place of actually talking to hyperesponsive buyers. They will give you those small nuanced bits of language that make your offers convert. Like adding an “S” and changing the context of a message. Like using the word “client” vs. “customer”. So the starting point of every funnels should be to start with what’s working. But the next step is talking to customers. The least effective methodology is just popping an idea – “something original” out of your head and expecting it to work. It’s all about finding the right message, not “creating it”. And leave it to Mr. G to always be focused on the fundamentals ;). I talk about this same stuff in a podcast interview on Web Agency Podcast
http://www.webagencypodcast.com/063/
I actually have a “who I pay attention to” list and there are less than 50 names. Gauher continues to earn his spot on this list due to posts like this.
yemi
I totally agree with the big guy Gauher
But here is my take on it.
Another critical piece that most folks including me is missing is that we go to Google, Bing and Facebook to test our campaigns.
Yes, you already have all the proven marketing channels set up.
I think folks should head over to one of these PPV channels and use the traffic source to test the heck out of your materials.
Once you can make it work on a good PPV channel, chances are you will definitely make it work on quality traffic channels like google, bing and facebook.
Just a thought!
Allysian
Marketing funnels are so important to master. Paid traffic is quick but you need to pay attention, tweak, and test to make the most from it. Great post Gauher.
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