Do Online Technical Marketing Courses Deliver Real Value? CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review - A 12 Part Series

 Whether it is for professional upskilling, a first degree, career change or personal development, online learning platforms have shifted the way we access education.

 The emergence of virtual classrooms has presented learners with an enormous list of institutions to choose from. 

However, increased quantity brings about questions of quality. Is the content students are receiving from online learning inferior, equal to, or better than what traditional institutions offered?

 Founded by Peep Laja, an entrepreneur who was voted the most influential conversion rate optimization expert, CXL Institute is one such online platform offering a range of technical marketing courses designed to equip students with the knowledge they need to be ‘the best’ at their craft. 

 The Institute prides itself in giving learners access to teachings from practitioners who are in the top 1% most successful in the industry.

I was given the incredible opportunity to complete and review the CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree. Over the next 12 blog posts, I will be sharing my opinions and learnings from the 33 courses (111h 41min) making up the Minidegree.

 At the end of this journey, I hope that you will be well equipped to make an informed decision about whether or not online technical courses are worth your time and monetary investment.

 Growth Mind-set – John McBride

 "Start by admitting that you don't know what your customers want."

John McBride founder of WeTheFuture.org

John kicked the program off by explaining that the main difference between traditional brand marketing and growth marketing is that growth is driven by experimentation.

 Growth marketers drive growth by constantly experimenting with different product features, campaigns, etc. The goal is to increase conversions, create better user experiences, and generate data that will be used for learnings. 

 Whereas brand marketing focuses on the top of the funnel - awareness and acquisition, growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel.

 That means that as a growth marketer your job is to drive growth across the business.

 Whilst most companies are running tests and experiments to some extent, the ones who are gaining the best results from these tests are working through what John described as the three layers of testing.

At first, you test to find out if a particular action works or not. If it does, you want to move deeper and test what the best messaging, campaign or offer is for that action. Finally, you want to customise that messaging or offering to each individual customer based on the data you have about your users. It is at this last level of optimization of your offering where you will see 30 - 50% increases from your current baseline. 

 Treating each customer as the unique individual that they are is likely to lead to customer loyalty.

 An important mind-set shift I took away from John, was that of applying the Lean Start-up Methodology which is based on ‘hacking’. Hacking involves working quickly without finding the perfect solution, to find the fastest, best solution to start getting learnings.

 Growth is a process, a series of hacks about constantly learning. There is no one growth hack!

 I found the section on how to be a successful growth marketer very informative, especially for those who are transitioning from traditional marketing.

 The three main skill sets John highlights for success in the sector are:

·        channel level expertise

·        analytical capability

·        strategic thinking.

One would need to have baseline knowledge in all three areas and then focus on one area of specialization as they advance their career. 

 He also shared tips for attending interviews when you don’t have experience to back you up. This includes, going into the interview with strategic knowledge of the industry that the company operates in - growthhackers.com is a great source for this contextual information, and showing initiative by preparing solutions and ideas beforehand to take into the interview.

 This first course helped me understand better what skills I will acquire from the Minidegree and most importantly it heightened my interest in growth marketing.

Building A Growth Process - John McBribe

 As much as I was excited to dive into growth marketing, I had questions about how to begin this process. Fortunately, the second course addressed that very question.

 When you are starting out your team, you begin by defining your growth model (Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics for start-ups is a good framework), mapping out your customer journey and identifying all of your growth channels. This will inform your high-level strategy.

 Afterwards, you should move into your quarterly planning. This consists of exploring data, identifying your quarterly goals and building the road map to execute those goals.

 Lastly, you will work on your end-quarter execution. This is where you have your high-tempo growth process: you build experiments, ship your experiments, analyse them and then you either automate and scale or scrap it because it did not work.

 John dedicates a full session each to the three stages, which helped me have a better understanding of the process.

 Ensuing, there was a session on ‘brainstorming’. Most people will either loathe or love brainstorming. I believe the differences in opinion come from how brainstorming is conducted. I learnt key takeaways on how to conduct successful brainstorming sessions.

 1.    Focus the conversation on a specific metric and go deep on it.

2.    If you are bringing in different stakeholders, have someone from your team walk through the customer journey for everybody. This will help everyone understand what steps customers are currently taking and identify areas needing improvement.

3.    You can brainstorm by looking at other businesses in a similar space.

4.    Talk to people in other growth teams.

5.    Do not limit the ideas on ways you can affect the metric.

6.    Formulate your ideas in the form of a hypothesis wherein you say, my idea is that by doing x, we are going to see y improve in a metric because of this reason.

 The ideas from brainstorming should then be rated by the process of prioritization. Prioritization ranks ideas on:

·        projected impact - how big is the audience receiving the experiment.

·        confidence - how sure are you that you will see the impact you want to see.

·        effort - how much time, energy and resources are going into shipping the experiment and having it built.

 In conclusion, John walked through the experiment process. 

 He explained that you want to have a hypothesis, projected impact then you set up an A/B test. To jog your memory of high school science, the key components of a hypothesis are the independent variable, dependent variable and assumptions. 

 Being aware of assumptions is important because it forces the team to think through the experiment through the lenses of a customer.

 As for A/B testing, it is best to start with the most basic A/B test. After seeing the results from that you can then move onto the next hypothesis and carry on the process. That is ideally how you want to design your experiments.

Step two would then be to implement it. So, ship the experiment, get it set-up so you can measure the results, and then, step three is to analyse. 

 If the metric tested is successful, you want to automate it. Automation means that the value you have gained is now permanently added to the business, automated, and triggered it so it does not need to be maintained by a person.

 With that talk on automation, the course reached its conclusion! 

User-Centric Marketing – Paul Boag

 The last course I will review in this blog is delivered by Paul Boag, a user experience consultant with 23 years of experience in design.

 The biggest challenges that marketers are experiencing from digital is that it has levelled the playing field allowing big and small companies to compete on one platform. Secondly, customers have an unlimited choice of products when they search for what they need.

 As such, marketers have to abandon traditional ways of ‘campaign marketing’ and adopt user centred marketing.

 Paul identifies the first step into adopting this as using empathy mapping. Empathy mapping helps us learn what questions, objections, goals and pain points our users have. This is more valuable than just knowing what their interests are.

 The task of extracting user information often seems daunting and expensive for most companies. However, Paul lists ways organisations can extract insights from sources that already exist within the company, at no cost at all!

 Chances are your company has valuable data in the following sources:

·        The sales team

·        Customer support

·        Social media managers

·        Analytics team

·        SEO data

·        Competitor information from social media 

 Surveys are another great source of information. Just like brainstorming, surveys are done by many but not usually done well. I will list the key takeaways about surveys which Paul shared:

·        have a clear insight into what you want to know from the survey

·        focus on the actions your audience wants to take

·        keep it short, 1 question works great!

·        use closed questions 

·        do not ask for personal information

·        where the budget for incentives is not available, look for alternatives like gift cards, free downloads, free trials or competitions.

·        start with the easiest question to answer first.

 That idea of prioritizing information is discussed further in the next session on Top Task Analysis. Top task Analysis helps you prioritize tasks users want most to complete. It asks: what questions do users need to be answered before they take action; which of the questions matter to them most.

 On digital, addressing, these questions needs to happen in the first 8 seconds that a user interacts with your offering.

 Finding out information about your users is pivotal to being able to make them comfortable with your brand. As such, ensure your team is conducting one-on-one meetings with users every few weeks to draw information about their objections and goals.

 Traditionally, most companies would have personas of their customers shared across teams to ensure everyone knew whom they were creating products for. Today, personas have been replaced by Customer Journey Mapping. 

 Paul explains how this new way offers more information because personas are only a snapshot in the customer's journey and do not represent the changing needs, touchpoints and objections users have as they progress through their journey.

This course dedicates an entire session to teaching learners how to conduct a customer journey mapping workshop. I found it to be an excellent guide!

 Even after running a successful workshop, there is always the frustration of having the results of the workshop stashed away and never referred to by most people in the company. 

 I found the ideas Paul shared from his experiences dealing with this problem fascinating! These included having pictures of users used as company screensavers, mouse pads, sticking the journey map up on walls; anything to ensure that the user is not forgotten!

 You can go a step further with your user and involve them in your design in what is known as co-design. This process is about getting user expectations and perspective. 

 As you select your users, consider the following when deciding which users are best:

·        for tone of voice - focus on the users whom you want to reach, not users already using your product.

·        for key selling points - focus on new customers who have recently started using your products.

 Users should also be included in testing your campaign’s designs. The data you collect from this process will help you make informed decisions about your designs and hopefully cut down the time spent debating designs. (Designers would really appreciate this)

 When it comes to websites, Paul shared best practices and tools for conducting usability tests for prototypes. During the usability testing, you should look out for three things:

·        do the users get it

·        can they find stuff

·        can they do stuff.

 The debate over testing in-person versus remote testing for usability can be frustrating for designers. Whilst there is no replacing the values gained from human contact, we must embrace the opportunities that arise from remote testing. This method helps us better reach busy customers who may not have the time for a physical meeting. It is more flexible and allows us to test more people.

 Paul wrapped up the course by discussing the post-launch campaign period. Instead of just rushing from one campaign to the next, it is crucial to take time to reflect on and analyse your campaigns while they are running. This way you can make changes to the campaign based on the data you are receiving. Look out for drop-off points and identify why they are occurring. Instead of viewing a campaign as the end of a project, it is instead the midpoint.

 And that concludes it for this week’s courses. I must mention that Paul’s course ends with an exam.

Additional Reflections

 At this point, I must share that these courses are detailed. I was taking notes as I went and found this useful for exam preparation. Do not try to multi-task while listening to the video sessions, they are packed with information and it would be a waste to miss any of it.

 I am particularly happy with the fact that everything I have learned so far has been accompanied by a practical, industry-relevant way to implement it! In my experience, most courses are too theoretical. I want to have real skills to take with me from a course and I feel like that is exactly what the CXL Institute is offering its students.

 Let’s meet again next week!