#88 – Growth Hacking Melbourne Keynote Summary

[00:00:14] Stephen: Hey guys, Stephen Esketzis here from Marketing on the Move.  And I’m super pumped to be with you today.  I’m actually here preparing to go to a tennis lesson.  So, it’s a beautiful day here in Melbourne, Australia, on the way to tennis, getting up nice and early.  But later on tonight, I’m actually going to be keynoting a growth hacking tool.

[00:00:36] So, a couple of friends who are, you know, spearheading the growth hacking scene here in Australia.  One of them runs Sydney, one of them runs the Melbourne Chapter.  And they wanted me to share some of the takeaways for sales funnels and growth.  Geez, I’m losing my voice and I’m going to speak for an hour, so that’s not good, but let’s see how it goes.  Essentially though — so what I’m talking about is early traction.  They always don’t speak on early traction, how to apply customers and I thought that was perfect.  It ties in really well with sales funnels and that’s the whole point of it, you know, apply customers and how to get that early traction of your business on a small budget.

[00:01:14] You know, people with sales funnels can ultimately do that.  If you got a sales funnel, you don’t have a big budget, you know, you can definitely get something going, even on small budget.  So, that’s what I’m going to be talking about tonight.  So basically, I thought I’d give you guys a little bit of a summary of what I’m talking about, how it will kind of roll out.  To those of you who won’t be there, I don’t think it’s being recorded.  So, it probably should actually.  I probably should record it.  I will have someone record it.  But yeah, I don’t think it’s being recorded.  So, what I’ll do is just walk you through some of the contents because I think you guys will get a take out of it.  You get some takeaways from it.

[00:01:49] But essentially, what I’ll be starting to talk about is — basically, the first thing that you need is a breakeven funnel.  So your ultimate goal in this whole endeavor is to have a breakeven funnel, and that is when you’ve got a funnel that is, you know, acquiring customers for zero dollars.  So, you know, you’re liquidating your expense with a frontend product and your upsell.  If you can get — you know, you put a dollar in, you get a dollar out, you pretty much got a million- dollar business on your hand.  You’re acquiring customers for absolutely nothing.  That’s where you want to be.

[00:02:22]And then once you get that point, you go up to the scale and grow it and optimize it to make sure it’s profitable, even on the frontend; at which point, then you could actually start, you know, growing and scaling and then even be global.  But soon as you get that breakeven funnel, that’s the goal.  You know, you put a dollar in to media and advertising, you get a dollar out in product in everything.  And you cover your cost for filming, you cover your cost in advertising.  So, initially, you know, where do you start?  That has the word for your digital product and your physical product.  That’s the question I get a lot, you know, where do you go from here, how do you start, why you had it work.  Basically, you need to work out, you know?  What do you do?  Do you just go out there and look for a funnel?  How does this whole thing work?  So, what I personally do and, you know, what I think gets the best results?  It’s starting with something that’s already working.

[00:03:12] So, otherwise known as funnel hacking, otherwise known as reverse engineering, all of the above.  So basically, you want to start with what’s already working, you might start there and then optimizing growth from there.  So basically, just starting with a funnel that you know is proven or something close to it, something that you think is proven or along the line but being proven to work.

[00:03:39] And how do you do that?  So, first way to do that is to start looking at what your competitors are doing.  They’ve obviously dialed it in, you know?  If you’re a new business, especially, you know, you want to see what people are already doing in that market and how to actually learn from them and then take what they’ve done, leverage the work, leverage the asset, leverage the knowledge and put it into your own sales funnel.  The point that I’ve actually got in one of my slides is don’t reinvent the wheel, just make it go faster.  And I think that that’s so true because, you know, it’s not my point reinventing the wheel, you don’t need to integrate.  You need to be someone that can actually push things further, push things faster along.  And that’s the whole purpose of a sales funnel.  That’s the whole purpose of reverse engineering; what works, to leverage what people have already done so you can move faster than everyone else and it gets you a foot up in the industry.  So to that point, a lot of people go out and try things, blah, blah, blah, crap.  What you need to do is really push up that initial, get that initial traction, get it working, get it to a point where you’re already at.

[00:04:46] So, essentially, the first thing you want to do is pick up a spy tool.  So this comes out there.  [Inaudible 00:04:50] to a premium one.  They’re probably the best, I prefer, Adbeat.  What they’ll show you is the media buying, landing pages that the media goes to, what’s involved in the pages on all those, everything to do like that; what’s actually being sold, how is it being sold, all those kind of stuff.  And, you know, there’s other ones as well if you don’t have big of a budget.  You can look at things like SEMrush, if you’re doing SEO.  They’ve also got display advertising now, I think, as well.  There’s a few tools out there.

[00:05:21] So pick up a spy tool.  There’s a couple of — I think it had a bit.ly/sespytools, I think that’s where I made the short code so you could go check out all the spy tools I had.  So go check that out.  Just go to my website and you’ll have a look on the marketing tools and spy tools.  But essentially, that’s where you start and what you want to look for, the key tell signs to see what a successful funnel.  So what’s causing a funnel to be successful, how do you spot one.  So the key tell signs are — you know, if ads have been running for a long time.  So if you’ve got an ad that’s only been running for seven to 10 days, it’s likely not to be as successful as one that’s run for 70 or 700 days.  If you see an ad in Adbay.com, for example, so this way your funnel is inside.  So what they do is they scale the net, they index it every single day, they see what ads have a big showing up the same day and they notice how long they’ve been run.  So pretty clever.  They do a whole lot of indexing.

[00:06:19] So basically, you’ll got through and you index all the landing pages, the ads, see how long they have been running.  They’ll estimate how much ads spent and how much has been put into it, which gives you a nice idea, you know, on how much they pushed to that.  And then from there, you can say, oh, this ad’s successful, awesome, time to model it, you know, what kind of style is the ad, what kind of style is the landing page, all that kind of stuff.  You go through, you check that out and once you have figured that out, now it’s time to figure out — time to build something similar.

[00:06:59] So there’s a few more steps in the funnel hacking, reverse engineering process I’m not going to into now because I don’t have an hour right now to go through the whole process.  But that’s the kind of where it starts.  So, it starts at that point and then from there it just gets a bit more intricate.  So we got to a few more steps I’ve outlined in the presentation on exactly how to do it.  And I might present this again, by the way.  So, this might be a presentation I’ll do somewhere else so you might have another chance to listen to it.  If you do, I’ll make sure I let you know.

[00:07:31] But essentially, that’s the deal.  That’s where you’re starting and that’s kind of where you want to take advantage of it.  And from there, what you want to do is essentially start building your product.  So you’ve got your landing page, you’ve got your — you know where the media is, you know where people are buying it.  Next thing is to build the product.  I don’t go too deep in this part.  All you need to do is build a product that is typically better, you know?  Use the skyscraper method, is what they call it in SEO.  If you’re doing a skyscraper outreach, if you are trying to get backlinks for your SEO, what they call that is making content better that’s already out there and then promoting it and reminding people the link to it.  Same thing with your product, make content that is already better.  Have a look at what your competitors have out there and make it better.  That’s all you need to do.  You don’t need to reinvent the wheel again, you know?  Just make it more effective, make it look sexier, a whole lot better.

[00:08:26] And then from there, you basically start building your funnel ware.  So you start structuring the parts.  You choose the funnel parts that you need.  You start dialing in the numbers that you need to keep an eye on.  From there, it depends what analytics you’ve actually got, but there’s a whole list that I’ve listed, your conversion rate, your lock-on value, your cost per lead, your earnings per click, these are all things that you must know if you want to, you know, go further in space and you want to actually build a funnel that’s going to get results.

[00:08:56] So, keep in mind that it’s not a simple process.  All people think it’s a silver bullet, you know, the sales funnel thing and everyone is doing it well and it just works from this and that.  It is not a silver bullet as much as you may think so.  So, just keep that in mind and going from there, then it’s time to scale up, then it’s time to grow.  So, if you can start scaling and growing from that point, that’s when you see the real growth.  That’s where you start seeing real results in your funnel.  But it’s all about getting to that first stage.  No one starts scaling, everyone starts just giving the idea, getting [inaudible 00:09:34].

 

[00:09:36] So actually I’m just listening to myself talking.  It’s probably not as succinct as I would like it to be.  And I’ve just turned down a dead end so I’m going to be late.  All right.  So, I think I’m going to let you guys go pretty much because I can’t focus on what I’m doing and I’m going to be late.  So what I’m going to do in the meantime, though, which I think you guys will get a bit out of, is on the way home I might continue the — on the way back from tennis, I’m going to continue the podcast in an episode two.  So we’re going to go back to back, let the model being one and then all them up in two episodes.  So hang tight for the next episode.  I’m going to try to put another one out for you, just full quality.  And I’ll go through the second part of the presentation.  But that was kind of the first part.  That was the first part of what the presentation is going to be all about, very quickly, very quick overview.  But I want to kind of give you guys a little bit more than that.  So, stick around, there will be more to come and I will share it with you soon.