Growth Hacking

In this post, I am going to discuss Growth Hacking. I’ll be looking at this from the point of view of someone who has successfully run a Marketing Funnel for both local businesses and online courses. To begin with I’ll be discussing a software called ClickFunnels™. I will consider “what is ClickFunnels™” to begin with and go through how someone can set up a Conversion Funnel. You may have been asking “What is a sales funnel?” – I will go into that including covering all the Sales Funnel Stages and I will cover some of the best parts about ClickFunnels™ such as Actionetics ClickFunnels™ and the ClickFunnels™ Marketplace also various applications such as the BookFunnel – plus will finish up with something interesting about the Russell Brunson Net Worth – he’s the founder of ClickFunnels™ – he may seem like your friendly guy next door, but don’t be fooled – this guy is one of the top marketers in the world and he’s giving you the chance to learn how to do that.

QUICKLINKS

Growth Hacking

Marketing Funnel

What is ClickFunnels™?

Conversion Funnel

What is a sales funnel?

Sales Funnel Stages

Actionetics ClickFunnels™

ClickFunnels™ Marketplace

Russell Brunson Net Worth

Growth Hacking

So what exactly is growth hacking? The term was coined back in 2010 when people started to realise that they didn’t just need marketers. In fact, with the huge shift towards a startup culture, companies either grew quickly or died. Some of the most famous original growth hackers helped massive successes get off the ground. When they were looking for replacements as they left their jobs, they found it hard to get them. Advertising for marketers didn’t cut it – they needed a different description – enter the “growth hacker” – someone completely focused on growth, no matter what tools or innovations they needed. Growth hacking has since taken on a job description of it’s own and these days, one of the most important job titles in the internet industry is that of a growth hacker. Modern techniques for growth hacking have changed considerably and continue to evolve. The reality is that growth hacking has existed for a long time under different guises, think “McDonalds placing a store at every highway crossroads in the 50’s” – that is a while back. Modern internet marketing still uses the same principles but the platform has changed considerably. Look at these 8 steps to implement growth hacking: 1. Make sure your product is what people want. 2. You don’t target everyone – just your core audience. 3. Figure out your method of aquisition (is it viral – get referrals, sticky – create a really awesome customer experience or paid – spend $5 to aquire a customer worth $50). 4. Activate your leads – there’s no point having high conversion rates without happy customers spreading the good news. 5. Retain your customers – repeat customers are more likely to purchase. 6. Pay attention to your revenue – warm up your customers and test different strategies to maximise revenue. 7. Get more referrals – pay close attention to whether your customers would refer you to a friend. 8. Improve your product on a continual basis – never stop innovating and improving – it’ll help your retention.
Along these lines, you can see how growth hacking is a core competency of any new internet product or service trying to make some waves.

Marketing Funnel

Some major innovations have come out of the evolution of this growth hacking phenomenon. One of the major shifts has been this front-of-mind awareness the role of the “marketing funnel” in businesses, not just internet businesses but any business. In the past, the concept of marketing funnels was something marketing agencies were aware of. In the last few years however, funnels are everywhere – kids are using them, adults are using them, businesses are going wild for them. It’s mostly down to one particular software innovation, but i’ll get to that in a bit. Let’s just separate out the “Marketing Funnel” concept. OK – so what is marketing? Marketing amounts to effectively and efficiently bringing your goods and services to market. A market is a place where people buy and sell. A large proportion of the internet is dedicated to buying and selling. The internet is effectively the biggest, quickest and most efficient market in history. If any of you remember those economics classes from school where your professor was talking about the concept of a “perfect market”, this is it. Back when i was in school, this was more of an abstract concept – we were encouraged to imagine a perfect market. Now, the internet comes pretty close. You can compare prices in real time and basically get the best price in an instant. A definition from the Financial Times lexicon: “A market in which buyers and sellers have complete information about a particular product and it is easy to compare prices of products because they are the same as each other etc.” – Yeah we are getting close to that http://lexicon.ft.com/Term?term=perfect-market
The second part of this topic is the “Funnel” – so what is that? Think about the shape of a funnel. It starts wide at the top and narrows at the base. Within marketing, the funnel starts with a wide net at the top – you are marketing to a large amount of people, then reducing that to leads (people who express an interest), then reducing that to hot leads (people who are likely to purchase), then reducing that to customers (people who have at least bought one thing), then reducing that to your best and repeat customers and eventually to your raving fans who buy everything you have for sale and rave about you continuously to everyone they know. So overall the concept of a marketing funnel, is to have a process in place that allows you to maximize the opportunity for profit at every step of this marketing behaviour. Think about casting the widest net possible while spending the least amount of money. Then think about maximizing the chance of getting the attention of your leads. Then think about maximizing the chance of those leads taking action. Then think about identifying which of those leads are most likely to purchase and then maximizing the initial purchase of those leads. Then think about maximizing the chance of those initial customers buying more from you, becoming more happy with your product & service, then maximizing the chance of them becoming raving fans. So this is essentially what a marketing funnel is – it is a marketing infrastructure geared towards maximizing the impact of your marketing activities. Now, traditionally this type of marketing infrastructure has been complicated to implement and understand. Mostly, this was left to so-called “marketing geniuses” who constantly looked at the numbers, had the confidence to split-test and trial different tweaks and turns in the marketing activities. This could have been a very long process taking place over months and years, with expensive implementations and measurement and God knows, there must have been some catastrophic blunders and losses, besides some huge successes. In the last few years however, one particular guy and his team have capitalized on the power and technology of the internet and the virtually “perfect market” that exists there. Not only that, they have set it as their mission to educate and empower anyone as to how to implement a “marketing funnel” in their business. This is Russell Brunson and ClickFunnels™ and I am going to explain a bit more about this next.

What is ClickFunnels™?

ClickFunnels™ contains various elements, but primarily consists of three elements. These are, in no particular order: the software, the education and the community. Let me dive into these a bit. Firstly lets have a look at the education. Behind ClickFunnels™ is probably one of the most charismatic guys you will encounter. Russell Brunson is undoubtedly the leader of the ClickFunnels™ tribe and if you have encountered ClickFunnels™ at any stage you will most certainly have encountered Russell. Russell had passions for a few things, namely wrestling and marketing. When he was younger, he became obsessed with marketing coupons and ads in magazines, phoning up for free giveaways and writing in to the ads to claim all their free offers. Little by little, even as a young guy, he was skilling up on the principles underneath marketing funnels – how these big companies were casting their nets and how they were upselling their products and services. In some ways, it reminds me of the story of Warren Buffett walking around his neighbourhood as a young child collecting pepsi and coke cans to bring them home and count up to see who was more popular. Either way, when you encounter Russell, it’s sometimes hard to take onboard all the stuff he is teaching. The reason is that a lot of the time, he is also selling stuff. After all, his business is largely about selling, so it makes sense that he will be selling you stuff while he is educating you. In fact, a large part of his teaching revolves around selling by teaching. All that being said, if you can wade through Russell’s “attractive character” (his concept not mine), you will find an almost unending series of educational videos explaining any aspect of selling through marketing funnels. At some stage, I want to organise all the training videos I have by Russell, but it’s fairly safe to say that there are videos explaining how you approach every step in your marketing funnel, from casting your net, running your ads, converting your traffic into leads, converting your leads into customers, converting your customers into raving fans, retaining your raving fans and more. Most of this training revolves around using his software (ClickFunnels™) to achieve these goals, but nonetheless, there is a huge amount of education presented within ClickFunnels™ and surrounding it. As i said already, it’s difficult sometimes to know whether RB is educating you or selling you and I find that a bit of a drawback. If you can do a bit of homework and organise this training without getting too hyped up about joining the 2 comma club (people who’ve made a million or more in their funnel), there is a lot to be learned about the different parts of the “marketing funnel”.
The second part of ClickFunnels™ is the software. Overall it’s really user-friendly and really nice to use. The interface for managing your funnels is slick and easy to navigate. There is some getting used to the drag and drop page builder, but overall it’s excellent, arguably better than any other page builder out there. You can toggle between mobile and desktop view, you can add in buttons, videos, sections, even choose from a range of “conversion colours” for different elements. The email setup with the basic package, is fairly basic but if you are on the full package and get access to Actionetics, that’s a whole different ballgame – I’ll get into that a bit later. There are also a range of pre-made funnels that you can implement in a few clicks for various objectives. I’m not going into too much detail here – you can find explainers of all that stuff elsewhere or just sign up and test on a 2 week trial. I want to stay with the main point – it almost gets lost in all the hype – what is ClickFunnels™ for and does it work? So essentially, the software gives you all the things necessary to make slick websites easily and an autoresponder you can use to fire out emails for people who opt in to your campaigns. It also hooks up with loads of other software so you can text people, send instant messages. It also allows you to split test pages and measure your conversion rates at different stages of the funnel, which after all is what a marketing funnel is supposed to be about. I think a lot of people forget that. Sure you can use ClickFunnels™ as a website builder and marketing program, but at the end of the day a marketing funnel is supposed to be about “Maximising impact” at each stage of the funnel. How can you do that? Well that is supposed to be what ClickFunnels™ does – it is supposed to help you measure your conversion rate at the different steps of the funnel so that you can maximise your profits. It does a pretty good job, in that you can easily see the percentages of people that convert to the next step of the funnel. Then you can split test changes to those steps in your funnel and try to improve conversion rates. OK finally you have the ClickFunnels™ community – the “funnel hackers” – at the time of writing, there are over 170,000 people in the ClickFunnels™ facebook group and there is a huge amount of activity there on a regular basis. You can get advice about any aspect of any funnels in any niche. It’s pretty awesome and inspiring – you can get advice as a newbie straight from a 2 comma club winner or better from someone who has made 8 figures in a single funnel, an 8 figure club award winner.

Check out this link

Conversion Funnel

“Conversion funnel” is a phrase used to describe the journey a customer goes on from advertisement or search result all the way through to purchasing in an ecommerce site. So you can use ClickFunnels™ to set up your conversion funnel and measure the “conversion” rate at every stage in your funnel. The ClickFunnels™ educational process surrounding your conversion funnel actually helps you implement growth hacking – let’s have a look:
1. Make sure your product is what people want: Use survey funnels – built into ClickFunnels™
2. You don’t target everyone – just your core audience – build your tribe as per expert secrets
3. Figure out your method of acquisition – squeeze pages are fundamental part of funnels
4. Activate your leads- use actionetics to gain valuable feedback on autopilot
5. Retain your customers – develop your value ladder as per dotcom secrets.
6. Pay attention to your revenue – again following attractive character secrets & value ladder to upsell.
7. Get more referrals – use backpack to generate referrals for commission.
8. Improve your product on a continual basis – very easy to tweak and test pages and courses in ClickFunnels™.

Check out this link

What is a sales funnel?

If you’ve ever put oil in a car then you know what a funnel is. A funnel has a wide opening at the top and as oil runs down it (sticking with our car analogy) the opening becomes smaller and smaller until the oil reaches the engine, which is the ultimate goal. A funnel is a way to guide something which is usually unwieldy and uncooperative, like liquid.

If you are building a product then your task is to guide people towards a particular goal (signup, checkout, etc.). The problem is that people are unpredictable and full of free-will. If you are going to get people to do what you wish, en masse, then you must employ a funnel.

Blog on Growth Hacking: Check out this video.

Scroll To Top

Sales Funnel Stages

The first step in the funnel is visitors: Getting anyone to visit your website. They are visitors at this stage because they don’t belong to you yet. They haven’t opted in. They aren’t members because that would mean they have a relationship with you. Now they are strangers that are on your site, or visitors. There are three ways to get people visiting your website. Pull them in, Push them in, or bring them in with a product.
After a visitor land, beginners think they’ve done their job as a growth hacker. Not the case. Next they need to be activated. Activation happens when they’ve taken action that creates a relationship with you: Join an email list / Create an account / Make a purchase. Or a few of these combined. They have then converted from visitor to member or become “activated” by joining you.
It’s difficult to activate a visitor but even more difficult to convert a member to a user, where a user is someone who uses your product / service on a regular basis. This is called retaining users and they are the ultimate goal of a growth hacker.

Actionetics ClickFunnels™

Within the top tier version of ClickFunnels™, you get an awesome CRM called actionetics.
Actionetics is the ClickFunnels™ automation platform that allows you to keep in touch with members via email and SMS via Twilio. There is a huge number of features within actionetics such as tags and action funnels and social scoring so that you can assign different values and tags to different members of your list so that you can communicate more effectively depending on what stage of the funnel they are at or what type of customer they are. See this video for the rundown of actionetics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj7wYGf_UkY
There are also a lot of awesome new features included in Actionetics MD (multi-dimensional) and you can check these out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJfZfDkT_tM

BookFunnel

The support is great

Check out this link

ClickFunnels™ Marketplace

You can make money by building and selling funnels on the ClickFunnels™ marketplace. Or you can simply go and download funnels directly from there into your account. These funnels are either free or paid, and typically the paid funnels come with better assets, cool graphics, patterns, designs and so much value that they’re a screaming deal.If you’re planning on listing your “Winning-Funnel” on the Marketplace, it’s important to take note of what goes into a “Winning-Listing” on the CookBook Marketplace.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s currently the best format to sell your template to other ClickFunnels™ users…

Get an Attention Grabbing Headline!
Build a Long Form PDF to SELL your template
Provide statistics if your funnel is truly market-tested! (Conversion Data, Sales Data)
List screenshots of your pages so that potential buyers know exactly what they’re investing into.
Record a video on the installation and usage of your funnel, be sure to include the benefits of using this pre-built template rather than going and doing all of the work for yourself. (Sell using a VSL on your Listing!)

Russell Brunson Net Worth

Russell Brunson is best known as the founder of ClickFunnel. One of the fastest growing software companies in the world, they have helped countless individuals since their launch in 2014. As of 2018, the business is worth over $360 million.
In addition to his work on ClickFunnels™, he has authored several books including DotCom Secrets: How to Get 100 New Customers in 100 Days Online and Expert Secrets. In fact, he had just released his fourth title, Network Marketing Secrets in February 2018.
Considering his accomplishments, one has to wonder—how rich is he? How much has he banked from ClickFunnels™ over the years? His books? According to various sites, Russel Brunson’s 2018 net worth stands at approximately $37 million.

Conclusion: Growth Hacking

Let me say – I’m a full member of ClickFunnels™ and i love the software. The support is second to none and overall, it’s just an awesome community to be in. There is so much more than just the software – as i mentioned the education and the community are 2 central pillars to the value in ClickFunnels™. If you want to become a growth hacker, ClickFunnels™ will help you shortcut a lot of the hard work needed and will also bring you some of the best tools available in the world today for growth hacking. Join the ClickFunnels™ community today and become one of the many success stories. Unless of course you don’t want to be part of the fastest growing community of successful online entrepreneurs in the world. In that case, stay away  Of course if you want to be ultra-spiritual: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRBjJ4Vr9hI