Do Online Technical Marketing Courses Deliver Real Value? Part 10

CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Review – Part 1O 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 10!

Landing Page Optimization - Michael Aagaard

Michael kicks off his class by explaining what a landing page is and the role it plays in the buyer’s experience. 

A landing page is the first page that the user sees after having clicked some kind of an ad source, it’s an entrance page. The ad source could be a PPC ad, a banner, email link or an ad from social media. 

The landing page works independently of the rest of the site or the app, and it is focused on a clear conversion goal.

Characteristics of an effective landing page include:

• shortens journey from click to conversion
• follows up on ‘’promises’’ made in ad source
• speaks to user motivation and addresses barriers
• answers important questions and creates clarity
• creates a clear path to the conversion goal

While it may seem logical that for us to optimize the landing page we should start by analysing the landing page to see what’s wrong with it, this is in fact incorrect.

The landing page does not exist in isolation. It is part of a bigger experience.

Typically, a user will search for something, based on that, there is a PPC ad for example that shows up, they will click on that, then get to the landing page. But, the landing page has to convince them to do something more, say fill out a form.

All of these steps have an influence on the final conversion goal. Therefore, if you just look at the landing page in isolation, it will be out of context.

For e-commerce, the process can be even more complicated.

At every stage there are opportunities of friction. So if we optimize the landing page without also doing the same to the other steps, we will fail to reach our conversion goals.

There are a lot of factors at play influencing the landing page’s success.

Looking at the optimization process, do not get fixated with running experiments at the expense of conducting research. Conduct your research, put together what you think is the best landing page treatment then experiment to validate whether you are right or not.

Use quantitative research to answer the WHAT and WHERE questions of user behaviour then use qualitative research to answer the WHY.

Michael drills deeper into each of the concepts that affect landing page optimization. Apart from the class being informative and eye opening, the delivery was engaging.

It was easy to begin implementing the teachings immediately.

Maximising Audiences for your PPC Campaigns - Michelle Morgan

Michelle shares her passion for audiences in an extensive session where she teaches how to improve PPC returns by leveraging your audiences across channels and in the search network.

The journey starts with finding audiences in your existing tools. This lays the foundation for understanding who your brand is interacting with. 

Without needing to spend a lot of money on new tools, there is a ton of information in the tools you are probably already using. Tools like Google and social media.

The data in these tools can help you find new audiences or validate that you are going after the right audiences. We can then build our personas from our findings, consider the persona worksheet example below.

Every business is different and every target audience you want to go after has different nuances. Knowing right off the bat who you should target is not easy. Fortunately, there are tools that can help us answer this question effectively.

Before diving into the tools, you can start by talking to the different stakeholders in your company ranging from sales, customer support, marketing, the CEO. It is interesting how these people’s views of the target customer will often differ.

Another way is to look into the data in your CRM. Look at what your CRM data has and how you can segment those users. 

Now diving into the tools, you can begin with referral traffic. If there are other websites who are sending traffic to your website and users are really engaging with your webpages , then you can utilize that traffic. 

You can create audiences from this referral traffic and do remarketing from people who have visited from these sources. 

From a display perspective, you can put ads on these websites since the visitors to these sites come to your website and convert frequently.

Unfortunately, you can no longer import URLs into the display planner to get a list of similar websites with ad spaces. However, we have Custom Affinity Audiences.

Look at your top converting referrals and create a new audience of users to target who have shown interest in these websites in the past.

Sticking with Google Analytics, you can head to the interest section paying particular attention to the Affinity and In-market segments.

Another area in GA is audience overviews where you can see your internal site search. From the search you can get ideas of who your users are and what their personas might be.

Facebook audience insights is another amazing tool for building personas. You can layer insights to understand based on people’s interests, the different targeting options.

LinkedIn offers their Insights Tag for your website. Connecting tag manager and LinkedIn will give you information on how your current users are interacting and who they are.

Go into your existing platforms and look at the audience insights capabilities, see what insights and information you can find. Get an understanding of how your existing audiences are using these platforms and leverage these findings. This can help you plan your campaigns and improve the accounts you are already running.

With this wealth of user information, it becomes easier to develop personas that are data based. 

Michelle deep dives into each of these audience options for a comprehensive explanation of persona research and how you can use it to figure out your ideal customers and ultimately to create better PPC audiences.

Check out these links for GA, Facebook and LinkedIn insights.

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2611404?hl=en

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2611404?hl=en

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2611404?hl=en

Next week’s piece will focus on all things Google Analytics. Looking forward to sharing my learnings with you.

See you next week!

CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree 

Part 9

Part 8

Part 7

Part 6 

Part 5

Part 4

Part 3

Part 2

Part 1