Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels(CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Review)

Marketing has always been about the same thing—who your customers are and where they are.”

― Ryan Holiday, Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising

You see, since this course started, we’ve talked a lot about your users, how to make them the focal point of your marketing and satisfy them.?

But nothing about the media for implementing all. Thankfully, that’s what this week’s course focused on.

To make it easier to understand, Sophia introduced us to the five core Digital marketing channels.

These channels include Search Engine Marketing(SEM), Search Engine Optimization(SEO), Social media, Email Marketing, and Content Marketing.

As a marketer, you might get too excited to implement your newfound knowledge without actually researching the channels.

So, start by identifying the top 3 channels that will work for you/your brand.

A good way to go about this is by:

- Audience Research: have a solid understanding of your customer persona and find out the channels you're more likely to find them. And not just about existing on those channels, are they actually active. This way, you can easily tap into their activity and generate engagement for your brand.

- Competitor Research: in your industry, who are the people that count as competitors? What channel do they use?

While this may not be a solid technique to use, it also helps. This way, you are tapping into the existing demand and working on getting the lion’s share.

For example, if you're a B2B saas company, using SEO as a channel to grow will be more favorable. As it is heavy on information marketing and traffic generation, which will help your brand in the long run.?

But know that you don't have to limit yourself to one channel.

A pro tip is to focus on the top 3 channels and scale them up, so you don't spread your team too thin and overspend your budget.

Now, let's take a deeper look into two of these core growth channels:

1. Social media

Social media has become one of the fastest-growing channels in this age. Especially as it helps with branding, engaging, and bonding with the audience. Plus it can also be used in sharing informative content.?

Sadly, many people still misinterpret and underestimate its function when it comes to marketing.

For instance, there's the myth that:

• Social media’s Return on Investment(ROI) is not quantifiable: with the relatively unstable nature of social media when it comes to reach and engagement, this misconception is almost understandable.?

However, it’s unfounded. This is because the platforms have now been modified in a way that you can enjoy the functionalities of the app, the peculiarities of its audience, and measure your brand's activity. All within the same platform.

Your Google Analytics can even be linked to your social media channels for data analysis. For example, Facebook (now known as Meta) has its own analytics platform embedded in it. So the belief that social media's ROI is unquantifiable is borne out of ignorance.

• Secondly, since social media has a wide range of users from different works of life, it's usually considered to be too informal for certain industries. So the serious business of sales and conversion doesn’t look like something to be discussed in the same sentence as social media.?

However, social media marketing comes to the rescue. This is why social media platforms offer dedicated courses. Even educational institutions and social media experts offer all sorts of training. This way, people can be professionally trained to handle and milk out the benefits of social media for their companies and even personal brands. Case in point, the Minidegrees, and courses offered by CXL.

The key to not losing focus on social media is focusing on what's important. Vanity metrics like likes, shares, views, etc are the minimum if you're using social media for business. The marketing department doesn't pump money into social media marketing just to get monthly reports on a number of likes, views, and followers. What matters is the revenue. Conversion rate and the brand rep on these platforms.

Now, onto SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business in Google, Bing, and other search engines (Search Engine Journal).

So three key things matter here; keyword research, on-page SEO, and link building.

1. Keyword research: the goal of the search engines whether Google or Bing is to cater to the needs of its users. Who from the brand's perspectives are the readers or consumers. Therefore, the need to create content that speaks to them in their own words.? Thankfully, there are tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Google keyword tool, and even BrightEdge for enterprise companies. Use these tools to find the phrases, words searchers use to look for information in your industry. Plus you can find the best format for delivering the information.

SEO is a broad and challenging field but with so many long-term benefits to motivate you to get on the train now.

2. Linkbuilding: this is another step to building authority as a thought leader with SEO. It's like gaining validation from competitors and even the audience on the value of your content. So yeah, the more backlinks you get on your page or blog post, the more the search engine recognizes your brand and pushes you to the top.

Again, use SEO tools to look for link-building opportunities and create a strategy(preferably by email) to reach out to those sites.

3. On-page SEO: here's the thing about on-page SEO. For many, SEO is a 50-50 game. Some aspects of it are within your control, and the other half is in the hands of the search engine.?

So, on-page is one of those parts that are totally in your hands. It's one thing to understand your reader’s needs, it's another to ensure that their viewing experience on your site is topnotch.?

If readers keep leaving your page, may be out of frustration from how disorganized or unpleasant the reading experience is, the search engine takes note of such behavior and penalizes your site by reducing your ranking.

So today, tomorrow, or whenever, make it a duty to check that your page title, meta description, header tags, and URL are well optimized for a pleasant viewing experiment. And that they heed to the rules of the search engine.

Finally Paid Per Click.?

It's easy to mix up PPC with Search Engine Marketing. At least I know I was confused about the difference initially. But just like the name implies, PPC is a paid strategy while SEM is more organic.?

With PPC, you pay a fee every time someone clicks on a link leading to your site.?

And the interesting part is that the more valuable your ads and PPC landing page are to users, the less you get to pay for Ad campaigns. Search engines are really not your enemy after.

Plus just like other ads, the ROI can even be 300times of what you invented. Big brands understand this and go-ahead to hire PPC specialists to make sure they are utilizing their PPC campaigns as much as possible.

In conclusion, growth channels present a beautiful opportunity for growth marketers to hone their skills and properly understand their user’s needs and behaviors. And learning should not stop with courses like this. The real work and result are in the implementation.

You can focus on just SEO and come up with a strategy for your brand. Every one of these channels has incredible opportunities for growth and revenue. The secret is just in learning how to hack them.

Hopefully, we’ll learn more about growth and measurements in subsequent courses. Till next time, read, learn and implement!