Growth Marketing Minidegree Review Week 1 of 12

About the series:

I was lucky enough to be accepted in scholarship program provided by CXL Institute in the Growth Marketing Minidegree program for 12 weeks.

The CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree Program

Growth marketing (Growth Hacking) refers to the art and science of persuasion, messaging, marketing and proper ad placement to raise awareness about a product, educate the customer enough to consider purchasing or opting in for the service and finally converting the customer.

 The CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree is an online training program designed to be “the gold standard for Growth marketing”. It is taught by a number of reputable instructors (including its founder Peep Laja) as well as a collection of the leading marketing practitioners in the business.

In its own words, CXL Institute describes the key objectives for students of this course as the following:

• Become a qualitative and quantitative researcher to identify bigger, more profitable wins.
• Apply processes and frameworks for growth regardless of the industry you’re working in.
• Learn technical skills like Digital Analytics, channel specific skills like Google ads, Facebook ads, Linkedin ads, excel and much more

The approximate total time for this course is: 111h 41min.

 You can find more information here: https://cxl.com/institute/programs/growth-marketing-training/

 A Note on the Structure of this Series

In this weekly series, I will be documenting everything that I have learned in my Growth Marketing Minidegree program in the preceding week. 

To provide some structure, I will include the following information in my review of each course:

-      The Instructor

-      Total time

-      Difficulty/Skill Level (on a simple scale of Basic, Intermediate and Advanced)

-      Key Takeaways

Course 1: Growth Mindset: growth vs traditional marketing

 Instructor: John McBride

Total time: 35 Minutes

 Difficulty/Skill Level: Basic

What does this course cover? 

-How to become a growth marketer, Traditional marketing vs Growth marketing.

Traditional marketing or brand marketing focuses on Acquisition and Awareness, top and bottom funnel activities to simplify it.

Growth marketing, however, focuses on the entire funnel and retaining users. 

The best approach to any growth process is to get to a level of understanding about the market and your target audience that you present the right message, the right offer and the right customer experience for each individual customer your business is exposed to, in order to drive the best experience and the best results.

Moreover, We need to understand what campaign, what offer and what particular message resonates with customer A better than with customer B. Because when you’re trying to treat all your customers the same, assuming that share interests and that they prefer your brand for the same reasons is a big mistake.

Now with the data every company collects, it is possible to run experiments and learn exactly what each customer responds best to, in terms of the offer or the message. So it’s a quick and big win to improve and test different messages or different campaigns against each other and get 10% or even 20% improvement just from testing.

Building a growth process: The 3 phases of growth management: high-level strategy, quarterly planning and in quarterly planning.

 Instructor: John McBride

Total time: 46 Minutes

 Difficulty/Skill Level: Basic

The instructor speaks about the three essential phases in building a growth process. The first is the beginning when you’re building your team, it starts with defining the growth model, mapping the customer journey, identifying all growth channels. Once this foundation is laid out, the high-level strategy is set. 

Then we move to quarterly planning, that’s when we start to explore data, identify quarterly goals and start building a road map to execute and achieve these goals. Then comes in the end-quarter execution, This is described as the ‘high-tempo’ growth process.

Dave McClure’s frame work codenamed “pirate-metrics” for startups (AARRR) is the one we’ll follow, which focuses on acquisition, activation, retention revenue and referrals.

It is exceedingly valuable to go through the process of mapping the customer journey from the customer’s perspective, rather than looking at how can we increase value to the business, we should think of how to increase value we’re delivering to our customers.

This helps us come up with the right hypothesis to test and the valid experiments to run to improve our conversion rate.

What are the metrics to monitor in your overall growth model?

There are several ways to increase total revenue, but what should we focus on, is what stage is our customer in at their journey, then this should give you an understanding what channels should you use to invest in. Picking the right channels helps increase activation and retention, Activation is taking the first action or making the first purchase, retention is sticking around and coming back to using the site regularly, revenue is the purchase value. 

How to identify growth opportunities on a quarterly basis?

• Explore the data and doing so through the customer’s experience.
• Thinking of different steps your customer takes on their way to finding out about your product all the way through becoming a loyal customer.
• identifying the biggest area of opportunity, is it from visiting the website and no conversion happening?
• Gather qualitative data from surveys, focus groups and more.

The ICE framework: impact, confidence, and effort.

Estimating the impact of your experiments, the confidence that you’ll see results and the effort that will be required to implement.

User-Centric Marketing:

Instructor: Paul Boag

Total Time: 2hrs, 46m

Difficulty Level: Basic to Intermediate 

What’s user centric marketing and how does it help solve fundamental problems in marketing?

We use this approach to focus on user research and user experience (UX) design.

This approach seeks to use digital tools to better understand our users and their journey so that we can design our marketing strategy around them. 

How do we start to adopt a user-centric approach? 

Consumer behavior is rapidly changing, digital has changed it, so we need to be up to date in terms of asking the right questions about our customers? Do we really know them and understand their pain points?

This is made possible through mapping a customer journey.

We need to encourage people to take action, and to do that we need to know them, understand their questions, their objections, their goals and their feelings, most importantly, we need to understand the journey that they’re on. It also helps in presenting the right message to them at the right time on their journey.

How can we better understand our customers?

By performing Top Task Analysis, this helps us in understanding and analyzing what people look for when they’re visiting your website or using your service, and what is their top task when it comes to navigating the service. This helps in creating a more detailed marketing campaign, where you answer the audience’s questions about what they’re looking to achieve when they use your service.

Customer Journey Mapping. What is it, and why it helps?

Customer Journey Mapping is what helps you understand where you should invest your marketing budget, from identifying points of weakness and where are we letting the customer down. Cause this is where you need to be investing. 

Customer journey mapping steps: (5-6) steps

1- Recognizing a need for a service

2- Researching my options 

3- Making a purchase

4- Getting that purchase delivered

5- Post sales support

How to test your campaign’s design with users?

We can use first click tests, which are tests that shows where the user would interact and click on first and if it easy to make a purchase with just one click, because chances are, if a user completes the action correctly in the first click, there’s an 87% chance of converting. However if they’ve made more than a click to buy, there’s a 46% chance of converting.

You can also use:

• Five-second tests
• Card Sorting
• Prototype testing
• Unfacilitated usability testing 

What I Loved:

Even though the first few courses are focused on foundations and best practices, they didn’t feel like box-ticking exercises or not necessary and It helped to refresh my memory about certain foundational tracks.

There was good context provided as to where best practices fit into your approach. 

 Thanks for taking an interest in my learning experience. I look forward to sharing more insights next week.

 Wael Ali