Do Online Technical Marketing Courses Deliver Real Value?

CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review – Part 5 of 12

Founded by Peep Laja, an entrepreneur who was voted the most influential conversion rate optimization expert, CXL Institute is an 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.

Welcome to week 5!

I will be continuing with the focus on channel-specific growth skills, tools and strategies necessary to improve SEO, Content and SEM.

Linkedin Advertising - AJ Wilcox

LinkedIn stands out from other social channels as offering the most precise business to business targeting. However, it has one big challenge of high costs. In Spite of these high costs, the pros of this channel make it ideal for certain businesses, particularly B2B businesses. Some of these pros include:

1. Users keep their LinkedIn profiles up to date with any developments in their professional lives.

2. The up to date data on LinkedIn is valuable for targeting purposes as advertisers are able to segment users based on their current positions and interests.

3. When someone is on LinkedIn, they are focused on either their job or career. They are in a great business mindset which often results in higher conversion rates.

4. Most executives are guarded with their LinkedIn accounts. The result is that when you get a lead from a CEO, you are probably going to be talking directly to the CEO.

5. Research shows that LinkedIn closes the largest deal sizes and Google Ads always closes deals the fastest.

The most notable cons are:

It is quite clear then that LinkedIn is not suited to every business. The ideal fit for LinkedIn Advertising is a business:

● providing B2B services/products

● whose lifetime value is above $15 000

● in the recruiting white-collar talent

● higher education recruiting for PhD and MBA

AJ uses AMO - Audience, Message, Offer, to guide his marketing content. These should be considered for all of the different Ad units available on LinkedIn. You can use:

● text ads

● sponsored content

● sponsored InMail

● lead generation forms

● video ads

Targeting is one of the key factors that will determine the success of your advertising on this platform. You can target profiles based on the list below. You can either combine items listed which will act as a Boolean operator, or you can exclude the items to filter them out from our audience.

The utmost important part of conversion on the platform is content. What works on LinkedIn are things on the very low friction side, a free checklist for example. AJ illustrated this in the following diagram where he shows that webinars, ebook downloads and whitepapers/guides are the ideal content to offer in your advertising. Engagement from users on these items demonstrates interest and if nurtured, that interest can lead to a conversion.

After discussing the strategy discussions, AJ walked us through how to set up a profile and how to navigate the advertising platform including setting up UTM tracking, managing bidding, analysing the data from ad activity and marrying that data to data from your CRM systems.

It was an engaging and informative course that fully equips you to implement the lessons learnt.

YouTube Ads - Tom Breeze

It is reported that the average YouTube session by its over 1.3 billion users, lasts around 40 minutes. This means as an advertiser, you can really get in front of your customers at the right time when they are looking for what it is that you do.

Using Google Ads, we can explore the different targeting options available to us for YouTube

ads. These are:

● Affinity audience

● Similar audience

● In-Market audience

● Custom Intent audience

● Topics

● Keyword

● Video and channel placements

● Website and video remarketing

People visit YouTube with because they want:

● to know (tutorials)

● to do (how-to videos)

● to buy (reviews)

These activities form the three main types of searches on YouTube. Tom advises us to keep these in mind when we think about our customers and the information they are looking for. By doing so, it becomes easier to create videos that address those searches and contain offers that connect with those types of searches.

These same search types also assist us in finding our customers on YouTube since normal keyword search does not work well for YouTube ads. Users do not use YouTube as a search engine as they do with Google for example.

Tom shares a very clear way of getting in front of customers on the platform.

Step 1

Get 5 keywords for each search type:

5 want to know keywords

5 want to do keywords

5 want to buy keywords

An example of keywords for baby sleep products would be:

Step 2

Take each of the keywords and search that exact phrase on the YouTube platform. Make notes of about 5 video titles that come up as results. Use these titles to give you inspiration for new keywords, because there are YouTube-friendly keywords. You will end up with 25 keywords.

Step 3

You would have noticed that as you entered your search terms in stage 2, there was a list of suggestions that YouTube made as you were typing your search terms. Pull 5 to 8 of these suggested phrases per each of your now 25 keywords.

Ultimately, these brainstorming sessions should result in about 200 YouTube friendly keywords which we know users are using.

Now that we can find out customers, the next step is to create relevant ad experiences for them.

Using the ADUCATE method, Tom walks learners through how to create consistently engaging Youtube ads.

1. Aim - the aim of the viewer, how can we help the viewer’s aim, what are they looking for?

2. Difficulty - what is their difficulty, what are they going through in their minds? Explain

the difficulty to them to show you understand them.

3. Understand - Show the customer that you understand what they are going through,

build an emotional connection.

4. Credibility - build your credibility to show them they can trust you.

5. Action Plan - share a simple step formula you have to solve the problem they are

facing.

6. Teach - pull out one part of the action plan to teach them. It’s about demonstrating

good value.

7. Exit - your call to action, make sure the offer is relevant and fast to implement,

something they can immediately begin to work on.

Tom followed these lessons with a screen share session where he walked through the step by step process of setting up your advertising account up to where it is optimised for data collection.

The course concludes with a practical campaign-building session where you learn to build, optimize and scale your YouTube campaigns.

I have found the screen share moments with each instructor valuable, especially for areas where I had little familiarity with the topic. It has helped me build confidence to set up the different optimization techniques in my own work knowing that I am implementing techniques that are tried and tested.

A few more channels to go to which I will share in next week’s post.

See you then!