Do Online Technical Marketing Courses Deliver Real Value?

CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review – Part 8 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 8!

Account Based Marketing - Steve Watt 

"Don't count the people that you reach, reach the people who count’’

David Ogilvy

An enthusiastic Steve Watt began this course by sharing his experiences with ABM all of which had great lessons in them. 

As expressed by Ogilvy in the opening quote, ABM is all about identifying the right people in the right accounts and moving them forward towards becoming your customer.

It is a sustained, coordinated, strategic approach to identifying, engaging, closing, and growing the accounts that we know we should win.

A traditional big funnel demand generation can often be inefficient and ineffective. However, flipping the funnel changes every aspect of how you plan, execute, and measure. 

ABM starts with identifying the right accounts, then the right people within those accounts, then on to what we are going to say to them, what are the insights that we need to become highly relevant and move these people? And then how we are going to reach them, what’s our multi-channel strategy? The output of all this being a highly efficient, effective sales pipeline and revenue driver.

ABM comes in a lot of different shapes, sizes and varieties. ITSMA published a framework that breaks ABM into three powerful types.

Strategic ABM

• strategic one-to-one
• very complex, large deals
• multi year relationships, high-stakes

Programmatic ABM

• going after hundred to thousands of accounts
• less strategic, less customised
• more tech-enabled

ABM Lite

• researched, highly targeted
• focused on a cluster of accounts within a particular industry/ users of a particular technology/ those at a particular phase of their development

Deciding on which strategy is best for you will depend on:

• how large your deals are
• how complex your product/solution is
• the size and complexity of the customers you are selling into
• how many stakeholder are in each organisation
• the strategic importance of particular clients
• the current perception of your firm
• the competitive environment
• internal factors including budget, size and skill of your team

ITSMA also shares that most organizations are doing more than one of the 3 types of ABM. The most successful organisations are doing two and some mix all three.

Some common problems within companies that prevent ABM teams from realising full success include:

A lack of executive or sales alignment

•  ABM needs to be a collaborative exercise from start to finish.

Measuring the wrong things

• Marketing is metrics driven. Important metrics will include awareness, coverage, engagement, influence and penetration. An incorrect approach to metrics may lead you astray and incentivise the wrong behavior

Skipping the pilot

•  You need to run a pilot that is large enough to be material and small enough to be safe. Your pilot should not cost you your job if it fails yet it needs to be big enough to move the needle and get people’s attention.

ABM can blow open doors on hard to reach clients. Examine your existing ABM strategy, is it the right fit for your organisation? 

Technical SEO Martijn Scheijbeler

Technical SEO focuses on identifying all the issues, warnings, and errors that could hurt your performance within organic search. This is closely related to running a technical SEO audit.

Your audit will look at URL structures, internal linking, headings, SEO experimentation, and for international businesses, how to translate your content.

As illustrated in the pyramid below, technical SEO is the fundamental aspect of SEO because eventually if you don’t know how to approach technical SEO the right way, it could hurt the overall structure of all other areas. The pyramid will fall over.

According to Martijn, if you are a SMB that has about 20 pages on their website, then technical SEO is probably not too important. Chances are that you do not have the resources to dive into the technical fundamentals and make the needed changes. 

Big site SEO is for sites that automatically generate a lot of content. Sites like Reddit, Zillow and eBay for example.

It is important to conduct a technical audit at least once a quarter. A good audit is dependent on using the right tools.Martijn recommends Screaming Frog, their free version will allow you to crawl about 500 pages. 

By default Screamin Frog will crawl about 5 pages a second, you should adjust this to 3 to reduce the load on your server. 

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are two other powerful tools to get more insights on your website.

URL structure can influence crawl behaviour. Your URLs should not cause any issues, warnings, or errors for your technical SEO efforts. 

Things to consider are:

• top-level domain name; if it’s a .com, .eu, .org or a .net.
• does the keyword need to be part of your URL
• folder structure
• parameters and their different keys and values

At times when you are crawling you want to tell the search engine not to look at certain pages. This happens when the pages are irrelevant for the search engine.

You can use robots.txt files to disallow things and tell the search engine not to look at any of the pages that contain your specified part of the URL structure.

As for parameters,you can tell search engines a little bit more about what a specific parameter is being used for. In the Google Search Console, for example, you can define what URL parameters have what intent. Are they being used to filter or paginate certain pages or are they tracking things? 

One of the things that search engines focus on in their communication is site speed. Improving site speed is first of all about getting better insights into what you can improve for your own website. Lighthouse, a Google Chrome Plugin is a tool effective for this. A sites images, CSS files, fonts, and the number of DNS lookups will all impact your site speed.

There are some interesting developments happening in the field. One of these is the introduction of A/B testing for SEO. This differs from traditional A/B testing because it involves testing things under the hood and instead of bucketing users, we are bucketing pages.

Technical SEO is not about fixing one specific issue, it’s about getting all the things right and creating the perfect page from a technical SEO point of view.

The perfect page has:

• structured data
• has all the answers in the content
• has the best markup 
• has all the relevant meta text
• has pointers to all the different other versions in the different languages

Remember, you can only win the SEO game if your basis of your pyramid, the technical SEO is done well.

SEO Driven Editorial Calendar - Dan Shure

Dan shares lessons on how to use keyword research and the right content types to build an SEO driven editorial calendar.

The first step to this is building a seed keyword list. A seed topic is a term that has broad intent. An example being productivity. Productivity has a wide variety of definitions or possibilities for content. You could write an article about productivity checklists or productivity tips etc. 

The seed topic should also have a high search volume and ranking potential. Keywords Everywhere and MozBar plug-ins are useful extensions to help select seed topics based on these metrics. Once you have your seed term, brainstorm the different terms you can associate with it. Write down all terms even those which may seem unrelated to your product or service as they can give you an opportunity to explore different topic areas.

The next stage is to identify your content competitors, niche websites that publish similar blog and article topics. You should find a content competitor that has a weakness in relation to your site. Weaknesses could be domain authority, a lower quality of content, or a lower quality of UX.

When you are gathering your topics from the seed topic, list as many as you can then rank them according to their traffic potential, SEMrush is a great tool for this. Going back to productivity as a seed topic, a specific topic derived from this could be time management tools.

All this work of identifying seed topics, content competitors and prioritising topics is futile if the content you then create does not align to what searchers want when they search a topic.

There are different content types to choose from:

Basic broad search e.g marketing

• difficult to know what the user wants
• best avoided

Topic/ Subject list e.g Facebook ad tips

• user has told us exactly what they want
• great type of topic to base your content off of

Object/ Thing list e.g piano apps

• user ic clearly telling you the intent of what they are looking to find.
• do good research and provide data to the user

How to or process type keyword

• user intent is clear
• avoid long verbose, get right to the point

Versus keywords

• use this opportunity to exceed user’s expectations by comparing 3 or more things instead of just 2
• give honest objective opinions

Before you jump into creating your content, make sure that you map your keywords to the content type, and the content medium that should be included in your piece of content. This is how to ensure that your content does not veer away from the original intent of the keyword.

At this stage you are now ready to make your content calendar. Your calendar will have these columns:

• publish date
• topic (from your list)
• writer and editor
• status
• content
• promotion ideas

Think about how much content you can publish a month without compromising your content quality. A good 700 word content piece requires about 10 hours of work. Shoot for 50% of your overall content being for SEO. Anything between 3 to 7 pieces per month is a good number to aim for.

Lastly, Dan shared some best practices of content-based SEO.

1. Content structure - keep it aesthetically pleasing and easy to read. 
2. Use clear, scan worthy headings, bullets, call out quotes.
3. Use images to break text
4. Include internal and external links
5. Publish well-written content 
6. Mention author and publish dates

This week's modules were eye opening in many respects as some of the concepts were entirely new to me. I found their delivery easy to follow and was happy to successfully complete the exams for each.

See you next week!

CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree 

Part 7

Part 6 

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1