How to Ethically model the success of your Competitors by finding what works &
Grow your Business?
(...using my Reverse Engineering Framework)
Why Reverse Engineer?
"Model someone who is already successful because success leaves clues"
- Tony Robbins
You can tell who the experts are, because they have arrows in their backs.
If something works, it's OK to model it. It's stupid to reinvent the wheel.
How can I Ethically model what works and Grow your Business?
(...using my Reverse Engineering Framework)
#1 - Find Competitor
There are two types of competitors to any business.
- Direct competitors (Similar Product & Same Market)
- Indirect Competitors (Different Products & Same Market)
It is crucial to prepare a list of both these types of competitors as it helps us understand what works and what doesn't.
Especially the Indirect Competitors, as their tactics reveal, what works in our Target Market.
It's very easy to find competitors. We just need to go to Google and search for the same keywords that we want our Target Customers to search for.
All the Ads and search results we obtain are our Competitors (Can be both direct and indirect, depending on the product/ service they offer)
#2 - Reverse Engineer Ads
Ads are the main ways through which our customers find us.
So, it is crucial that we speak right to them in a way they understand us.
Finding Ads that perform well to the same audience can help us speak to the audience better.
There are two resources where we can find winner Ads.
- Adbeat.com
- Facebook Ads Library
We can easily type in the competitors name and search for the type of Ads they use to drive traffic.
This list becomes our goto resource when creating our own Ads to get more and more Target customers.
We can find Ads that work by looking at the Posted date. The older the ad - we know that the better it has been performing.
Here are the Ads from Plume Labs (Air quality Monitor).
Here are the Ads from Beats (Headphones)
Once we find Winner Ads, we then model them to create our own Ads.
We model their Creatives, their Ad Copy and find inspirations from them.
#3 - Reverse Engineer Funnels
We can identify Winner Funnels by clicking on the link in the Ads that we found in the previous step.
It usually takes us to a Landing Page and this is where our journey starts.
We record the entire sales process that the customer goes through.
Like a Good entrepreneur, we take out our Credit Card and purchase what those winner funnels offer.
We navigate through the entire Sales process, the Upsells, the Downsells and record everything.
We then model it by inserting our own Content.
#4 - Reverse Engineer Traffic Sources
There is a website called SimilarWeb.com which can be very useful in understanding the various traffic sources of our Competitors.
We just have to visit SimilarWeb.com and enter the name of the company, it'll automatically give us the following information:
- Traffic Overview (Total visits, Avg. Visit Duration, Bounce Rate)
- Traffic by Country
- Traffic Sources (Direct, Referrals, Search, Social, Mail)
- Referring Sites (See below Example)
Referring Sites for Beats (Headphones)
Traffic Overview for Beats (Headphones)
Social Media Traffic for Beats (Headphones)
Once we identify the sources, we can then partner with the same or similar sources to drive us traffic.
