First Week Journey with CXL Institute (Growth Marketing Minidegree Review)

This article is a part of my CXL Institute scholarship and covers my first-week experience of growth marketing mini degree. For the next upcoming 11 weeks, I am going to post a new article about what I have understood of the content discussed through the mini degree courses. Each week I am covering multiple courses within each post. If you are interested in the field of Growth marketing or anything related to this scholarship and courses feel free to ask me.

What is CXL institute and its Scholarship Program?

CXL Institute is a leading training platform for Digital Marketers and the world’s most popular conversion optimization agencies. This institute is a paid training program and also provides scholarships. They help to build smarter marketers throughout the world through their training program.

Their mission is to help marketers to get the best skills and become great in their field. This institute provides scholarships to those people who can’t afford the cost of the programs but willing to fulfill their requirements to get certified.

They provide Minidegrees in five areas of Digital Marketing. They are:

1.      Conversion Optimization

2.      Customer Acquisition

3.      Digital Analytics

4.      Digital Psychology and persuasion

5.      Growth Marketing

Who should apply for the CXL Institute Scholarship?

·        You are looking for a serious transformation in your career

·        You are not afraid of hard work

·        You are a self-driven individual

Why I have chosen Growth Marketing Program?

I have chosen the Growth Marketing program so that I can learn about it deeply. My passion for Digital Marketing and liking this field get me here. I am looking for the best possible ways to fulfill my targets. I am trying to reinforce myself with positive energy to produce fruitful outcomes.

I am looking for a transformation in my career, and I am willing to push myself to get the best out of this program. I know this scholarship program is not easy. There are time frames. There are 114 hours of content of Growth Marketing. I have to post blogs upcoming 11 weeks. But I believe I can fulfill all the requirements of this course and get the certification.

Course 1:

 There are six lessons which complete the first course. The course started by showing the difference between traditional marketing vs growth marketing. It describes what a growth marketer should focus on and the job of a growth marketer. What he or she should focus on growth marketer. I also get to know about the Lean Startup Methodology. This methodology shows me that the most effective way of growing your business is to know the demands of your customers, and what you have to do to fulfill their requirements.      

The author of this course made me realize that there are so many wrong assumptions of people about growth hacking. Growth hacking is not about shortcuts, or there is not one hack. It’s always a series of learning, experimenting. The experiments will always not lead you to success or it can lead you to success. The result of the experiment will help you to learn and progress.

What makes a successful growth marketer?

Obviously, you need some skill sets to be a successful growth marketer. But what is most important is the hunger in you to getting better. The hungrier you are to learn new things and confident enough to put your strategies to grow your business is the quality of a growth marketer.

However, someone can be hired as a growth marketer. The skill sets he needs are:

·        Analytics Capability,

·        Channel Specific Expertise,

·        Strategic Thinking,

·        Cross function project management,

·        Leadership type of stuff.

Understand the functions of how growth works in the context of the business you are interested in. Learn from others. How they do grow, how did they start their business, what were their frameworks, what channels they use? These were the key things I got to know.

If you are already in a job in the position of growth marketer. The suggestion I can provide you from what I have learned from this course is, you have to know what you are good at from all the skill sets you already have. This is very important to know what do you like. And on what side you have lacking’s. Figure out your weakness and develop skills to solve them. And keep learning from others, for example, you can learn from your seniors of the company you are working for now. Just talk to them and learn from their experience. This is the most effective way to grow yourself in this field.

Course 2:

The first course was all about the basic ideas about growth hacking, how to start as a growth marketer and which direction should focus first to continue the process of learning, and growing yourself step by step. In this course, I got some important tactical ideas and how to implement them. The process of developing and maintaining growth is the main part here.

This course started by saying that there are three main phases in building the outgrowth process:

1.      Defining your growth model

2.      Mapping out your customer journey

3.      Identifying all of your growth channels

I also got to know about Dave McClure's Pirate Metrics for startups, which is the AARRR framework. Every business is different from one another. But the target is quite similar like getting new users or customers and playing good strategies to make them their first purchase and make them a loyal customer.

How to make them be a loyal customer, how to grab their attention, and how to make them stay longer to your growth channels is the challenge.

We got SEO, Sem, paid ads, content marketing for acquisition channels. For increasing your first-time purchases, point out the barriers for the customer's side, and then think about how to reduce the barriers. Making customer experiences better will be beneficial for your business.

Channel plays a vital role in making your business famous or keeping your business in the competition. That’s why choosing a channel is a great task. For example: if you are running an e-commerce company you have to focus on social media marketing (so optimizing your website is crucial here). But what if you are running a game developing company then you have to focus on email marketing more rather than website marketing and push notification, in-game marketing.

Once you have made your team, plan for progress, and start setting up your goals. You can’t just guess and do your experiments. You have to gather a huge amount of data. Data is very essential for setting up your goals.

You have to set the timeline and the number of team members for achieving your goals. Business and customer demands change so quickly and rapidly nowadays. So yearly goals are not going to work. That’s what I got to learn that small teams with short periods of time on specific metrics are effective.

What is Brainstorming? And how to effectively brainstorm?

brainstorm is a creative process to think about and try to come up with ideas or solutions to a problem, either on your own or in a group.

Just bringing a group of people and starting a discussion for growing your business won’t help you to get the best result. Do brainstorming with your team and also do it by yourself separately. The best way is to bring people from other teams.

Research is the best way to brainstorm. For this looking at other’s business and getting inspiration will be helpful for any business team who are trying to grow their business. Research on similar companies like yours. For example: How they are doing their email marketing? How they are promoting their products or services.

While finishing this second course. I came to know about in quarter execution. It’s all about the build, measure, and learn cycle. This process includes four steps.

1.      The first is Designing your experiments (here you take your hypothesis and using them to plan an experiment)

2.      Ship your experiments (do your experiment)

3.      Analyze the results (after experimenting see what you get. Is that helpful for achieving your business goal or not)

4.      Learn from the result (whether the experiment succussed or not, always learn from it. That will help you to inform your next task. And then you just keep going through the learning cycle)

After that, I go through some more discussions about the experimental process.

Course 3:

 To me, the third course is more interesting than the previous two courses. I enjoyed this course a lot. This course begins by describing how important the user-centric approach is, how digital has changed the playing field of business or anything, and how you can grow your business digitally.

There is no doubt that Digital marketing is more beneficial than traditional marketing. Because traditional marketing is very campaign oriented and as a result that has some flaws. But on the other hand, Digital marketing has great opportunities than traditional marketing but it also has some flaws. Like, while growing your business digitally, you may also get hurt digitally.

Digital has given your customers a voice to appreciate as well as to complain. For example, one can easily complain about your products or services through digital channels by writing a blog, posting a status, or commenting on your posts.

What is a user-centric approach?

A user-centric approach is a process that needs a design based on understanding users, tasks, and environments. This approach addresses the whole user experience.

This course made me realize that for marketing user-centric approach is important to improve conversion and create happier customers who will recommend you to others.

Why users or your customers should be your first concern?

Users or customers are the ones who should be our first concern. Because they are the ones who are buying our products and our services. They are the only way of growing our company. They can make our company to set our goals or to fail our goals. The more we know about their taste and background the more we can provide what they need. By understanding their way of thinking we can design our campaigns and make them successful. Every user is different, their taste, their background, their experience towards our company.

Every time we are planning our goals, we have to keep in mind that:

·        What audience want to do?

·        What their goals?

·        What are their demands?

·        What are their objections?

·        What are they liking or disliking?

To know your user better there are so many digital tools out there. Like, google analytics, search engine optimization tool, heatmap tools (Hotjar- for counting heatmap on your website), screen recording tools, google optimize, etc. They are easy to learn and use.

Through the next lessons of this particular course, I got to know that users can also participate in your campaign design. The main is to grab more and more users for your company. So, why not we involve them not directly but, in a way, so that we can get their perspective, understand what their expectations are and what their perspective is on our company. It will help your team members for performing their roles.

I learn some exercise from here that helps me to understand what tone I should use or what strategy I should follow to get the user's perspective for my company. For example, if I am decorating my company interior side. I can ask a group of users by showing some pictures of the company’s inner look, by saying what word will you use for defining the wall design of our company?

As people answer the question will use words like poor, cozy, nice, cheap, or minimalistic. This helps me to get keywords and counting and measuring them, can help me to create my next campaigns.

After that, I also got some ideas about how I can test my campaigns with my users. And got so many resources for getting this thing to be done smartly. Resources like Word cloud test, Semantic differential survey, Sample five-second test, First click test.

Prototype and Testing

We mostly create most of our websites with a view of how our company views the world rather than from the user’s perspectives. There is an exercise called cart sorting that will help us to create our website around the user's mental model rather than our company’s mental model. 

And then comes prototyping and testing our website. What is a website prototype?

Website prototypes are interactive demos of a website. Before launching a website, you can do website prototyping. It can be a mockup or demo of what a website can look like. It can be a paper sketch or a design using an application like illustrator or photoshop, or a clickable HTML prototype.

Mostly interactive prototypes are in demand nowadays. Because using them we can get feedback from the users. We can be made a clickable prototype with PowerPoint, PDF documents. But there are a variety of prototyping tools available on market. Tools like Balsamiq, Axure and Mockingbird, and many more.

For testing, you can use anybody friends, family, or anyone outside. There's been research by Jakob Nielsen, who's a big usability testing expert, he says having more than six people while testing can Cause problems. So, six is a sweet number for testing. And another thing we can’t just ignore how many rounds we should perform testing. Multiple rounds of testing are effective with a small number of the tester. There are many more small and important things related to testing which I have learned through this course.

Whatever a very important note I also want to share with you is, for a better website, we have to keep three things in our mind. They are:

1.      What are we offering?

2.      Can users find the stuff on it?

3.      Can they do things they need to do?

If all three things are going well then you are on the right track and doing the right thing.

Conclusions:

To be honest, while learning these three courses of this mini degree, I enjoy it a lot. I have learned so many things that I was not aware of. I am super excited about the upcoming courses. I hope this scholarship will help me to reach my goals.