Growth Marketing Minidegree with CXL Institute (Week-1 in Review)

Why Growth Marketing? - The background

If you are marketer or digital marketer specifically, you surely have come across a buzz word - growth marketing (aka growth hacking) over last few years for sure. For some, it's a glorified term for what they're already doing in the digital marketing space. For others, it's a series of hacks to deliver better campaign results. The truth is, it's both. But importantly it is more than that. I will come to it in a minute - first an announcement.

As a digital marketer for over six years, I have seen the field evolve at an unimaginable pace. Social media, programmatic, analytics, AI and ML have transformed the role of marketing teams. Gone are the days when we used to be a "support" function. Now, we are expected to lead or contribute in many aspects of business and deliver tangible results. In other words, we are expected to deliver tangible growth for our business in every conceivable way.

Being a digital marketing generalist with hands-on experience and working on strategies for various verticals, from e-commerce to D2C to social media to video, understanding the principles of growth marketing was a natural progression for me. And while I was familiarising with nitty-gritty of it, what I really wanted was a structured training from experts who have proven themselves in this still evolving space.

Growth marketing ‘Minidegree’ by CXL Institute

While there are plethora of courses available today, most don’t deep and merely scratch the surface. I was looking for a comprehensive course that is capable of picking every imaginable topic under the growth marketing umbrella and then directing it further and go several level deep. Getting equal insights into what, how and why was important to me. And that’s where CXL Institute became the natural choice. People who are serious about digital marketing learning will surely know about CXL and awesome training content they provide - so won’t dwell much on that.

Out of all the growth marketing courses I reviewed, CXL’s Minidegree was the only option that seemed to offer real value for someone who has already mastered the basics.

And the good news is, I recently got accepted to the scholarship program that CXL Institute offers - and I am pretty excited about it. However, this also means that I have only 12 weeks to learn everything that CXL has to offer on growth - mere 112 hours worth of super dense content comprising of videos and reference materials and also complete various assignments and clear the final exam. While this means a commitment of at least 12 to 15 hours per week, I'm really looking forward to this scholarship. I think Growth Marketing is the natural next step for my career from skillset perspective. It's tied in well with what I do daily, while also concentrating on how to get the best results possible.

As part of this scholarship, I am also required to write a detailed review of the course every week and I am taking the opportunity to share my learnings with anyone interested. So over the next three months, I will try and cover the topics this minidegree covers and will share my thoughts and learning on the same.

So here you go.

Growth Mindset

In this course, John McBride (Ex-Lyft, Obama for America) takes a look at growth marketing as an emerging discipline by contrasting it against traditional brand marketing. He also dwells on the philosophy behind having a growth program and outlines the value it can provide to a business.

Growth vs traditional marketing

I had started my career as brand marketer and hence can vouch that the traditional marketing approach mainly focuses on top of the funnel - awareness and acquisition i.e. stops post the primary conversion (acquisition) as it’s designed to ‘acquire’. To the contrary, a growth marketing approach focuses on the entire funnel AND goes beyond the acquisition - awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, revenue and referral (advocacy).

Growth marketers’ job is not to mere close sales but to continuously to deliver growth across the business key result areas that contribute in top line and bottom line and they achieve this or rather thrive on experiments.

This is very similar to the Lean Startup Methodology where you start with assuming that you don’t actually know what your customers want. Then define a hypothesis at the beginning and find a fastest way of testing it.

If you want to reach from A to B i.e. improve the marketing or business KPIs, a traditional marketing mindset tries to find a best (often single) plan to do this. Naturally this plan will be a a big, resource heavy initiave. If it delivers results then great but it doesn’t then one might not get the second chance as all resources were consumed with this one mega plan.

Most of the time we are not as correct as we think we are.

McBride explains, growth marketing, instead of putting all bets on one mega plan, runs a lot of small experiments to test one hypothesis per experiment. This allows growth marketers to learn more about consumers and generate more data.

If you’re right with your hypothesis and manage to improve it, then you move closer to your goal. But even if you’re wrong, your knowledge increases and failure is not as big of an issue as these experiments are quick and the stakes are relatively low. It's also a great way to uncover important data points that could help you out in the future.

Experimentation is the defining trait of growth marketing

Growth marketing is grounded in the Lean Startup Principle which is about building a minimal viable product then iterating on it over time.

Likewise growth marketing is about building minimal viable campaign to push the important metric up. There isn't one hack, but a series of hacks that fold into a broader process about constantly experimenting and learning so that you can accelerate learning and get to the end result and the end goal faster.

Build the minimum viable marketing campaign that you can run and test to learn whether or not it's effective or not. Hacking is kind of like the mindset of someone who wants to work quickly without finding the perfect solution to find the fastest, best solution to start getting learnings.

Building A Growth Process

In this course John McBride delves into more tactical specifics on how to get started implementing growth marketing ideas. Throughout the course, McBride stresses on importance of prioritizing experimentation as the modus operandi for your organization, and also shared structural guidelines for how to implement data collection to work for your overall growth strategy.

3-Step Process

There are essentially three main phases in building out your growth process.

1. The first step when you're starting out your team is to define your growth model, map out your customer journey, and identify all of your growth channels.
2. Once you have a foundation, you can move into your high-level strategy and then explore data, identify goals, and build a roadmap to achieve them.
3. Then you have your end-quarter execution, which consists of high-tempo growth processes, building and rolling out experiments, and their analysis. Then you either automate and scale them, or you scrap it because it didn't work, and then you move on to the next one.

AARRR Framework

AARRR stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue, and was coined by Dave McClure. It's widely used and appreciated when it comes to understanding your customers, their journey, and optimizing your funnel. It also sets some valuable and actionable metric goals for your startup.

Acquisition — Where Are Our Users / Customers Coming From?

Activation — How good is the user’s / customer’s first experience?

Retention — How many of your customers are you retaining and why are you losing the others?

Retention — How many of your customers are you retaining and why are you losing the others?

Revenue — How can you increase revenue?

AARRR is widely accepted as the five most important metrics for a startup to focus on. That is because these metrics effectively measure your company’s growth while at the same time being simple and actionable.

Defining the growth model

Growth model is like setting growth metrics through the context of the stage in a user's lifecycle. A lot of people like different metrics, but there are a few that are the most helpful to track. These usually end up in a growth model because they're easy to compare and they effectively inform others. The sub-metrics that you can use to better understand those and drive growth, but they also represent discrete stages in the customer's lifecycle.

For example, if total revenue is the high level metric, you could focus on revenue per user, you could focus on number of users who are paying. Both of those things will ladder up into total revenue, but they're different ways to increase total revenue.

Growth Planning

While exploring the data is important, doing so through the lens of your customer journey and the growth model is all the more critical. But this doesn’t need to be very complicated, on the contrary it’s fundamental - think through all of the different steps that your customer takes on their way from finding out about your product or service all the way through towards becoming a loyal, frequent habitual customer. And then actually look at the funnel, explore your (first-party) data, and try to identify the biggest areas of opportunity.

• Where are people falling off the most in your funnel?
• Is it that they're visiting your website and then none of them are converting or very few of them are converting?
• Is that the biggest area of opportunity?
• Or are lots of people actually converting from web visit to their first purchase, but very few people are coming back for their second purchase?
• Or do you have cart abandonment issues?

One of the most important things to being effective at growth is prioritizing the most impactful things and finding the most impactful ways to grow the business. And this is where the ICE framework comes handy.

ICE Framework

It stands for impact - confidence - efforts.

Estimate the impact of the experiment, your confidence that you'll see the result that you're projecting, and then the effort that will be required to implement that.

Projected impact is probably going to be a lot higher when it's much bigger audiences affected.

Confidence is about how sure are you that you're going to see the projected impact that you are expecting to see.

Effort is how much time and energy and resources are going to go into deploying this experiment and getting it built and in front of customers.

Execution and Experimentation

This is all about like the builds, measure, learn cycle and there are four steps in the process:?

1. Designing your experiment - This is where you take your hypothesis and you put it into your experiment doc and get it set up to run as an experiment.
2. rolling out your experiment
3. analyzing the results
4. If it works, you automate it,?you scale it and If it doesn't work, you take those learnings to inform your next task

The Growth Mindset and Building A Growth Process modules were designed as an introduction to the growth marketing space, and they were very dense with information and actionable tips. And if these are any indicators, I am sure, I am going to enjoy the learning experience with CXL Institute.

Stay tuned for my next post on this blog about what I've learnt in the Growth Marketing Mini-Degree by CXL Institute, where I will continue to share my thoughts and learnings of the program.