Strategic Alliance Between Your Advertising and Content Strategy - Review

Hi Folks,

This is my tenth week’s review of the Growth Marketing mini degree course by CXL. I?want to start my review by focusing on the importance of Online Marketing. With the changing trends in technology, there is a huge shift in consumer behavior who shop online or look for options to buy anything online before heading out. Especially, with the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a surge in online shopping and more businesses want to move online. Being a marketing professional, I have seen an increase in demand for creating a service marketplace and B2B businesses online. With this being said, the reason why I decided to opt for this course was because of its elaborated approach, stressing on all the important aspects of marketing starting from the foundation of growth marketing to focusing on each channel of Digital Marketing.

The Growth Marketing mini degree course is divided into seven different parts, beginning with the foundation to experiments, conversion, channel-specific growth to strategic management in the end. The course focuses on covering all the aspects of designing strategies for applying them for specific channels and then managing and modifying the current campaigns. For my first week, I finished part one of the courses- Growth Marketing Foundations.

For this week I finished Google Ads.

Google Ads

The Google Ads platform has a tremendous opportunity when you know how to use it correctly. It’s important when you get started that you don’t get overwhelmed with all the metrics that are available within the account. At the end of the day, we want this to be a business-level impact for you. So, your ROI, your profit, your profit margin, and also the volume of sales that you’re able to do are the most important. After that comes basically the cost per conversion, the conversion volume, the return on ad spends. And then below that are all the other micro-metrics like click-through rate, quality score, impressions share, and things like that. This course basically goes over the bigger picture things that you want to do from start to finish and how you also optimize your Google Ads performance to achieve the goals that you set.

This course was broken down by start to finish where I went through different lessons, how to create your account, how to set it up, how to build it, how to run it, then how to optimize it. The goal is not traffic, the goal is to make money at the end of the day.

Content Strategy & SEO for Lead Generation

I want to start by clearing up a common misconception about content marketing and content strategy. You see a lot of the stuff you read out there makes it sound like create good stuff, produce a valuable piece of content, attract visitors from the three main sources of traffic from search, from social, from email. And some visitors will subscribe and make them even more effective, and some will follow making social more effective, and you’ll attract links making search more effective. Create that flywheel and those visitors who read these blog posts will actually move onto your service pages and really need what you offer. Let me go from there to the about page and build some trust and find out what you believe, and what you are all about and then go to the content page and convert and become a leader. This is actually an extremely unlikely scenario. It’s just not what a lot of the articles out there make you believe, right. It’s not what a lot of people suggest. What that content that you create actually does is gives the universe something to link to.

A strategy is a plan to reach a goal. A goal you have to plan, that’s a strategy, right? Content strategy is a plan to use content to reach a goal, and reach a business goal, right? That’s how I define content strategy. Now before I go too far into this definition of content strategy, I want to acknowledge one of the truths about content strategy out there is that, which is there’s a lot more to it than just marketing. Sure, some content is marketing content but a lot of other content in the universe is just internal content. It’s your HR documents, your employee handbook. There are huge, huge bodies of work out there that are not related to marketing, and I do understand that this is still part of content strategy. Okay, so let’s start at the top and go through empathy. The science of connecting with the audience. Data-driven empathy which is going to be all about the audience themselves and the topics and what they care about.

Now there’s more to search than rankings. Of course, it has to begin with the key phrase and the visitor’s intent, and are people actually searching for that phrase. Ranking for a key phrase that no one’s searching ford doesn’t help you. You have to know what your audience is actually typing into Google. And of course, do you have a chance of even ranking for it? Then the next question, do you have a relevant page for that topic? Do you rank? And ranking, by the way, isn’t SEO by itself either. Because if you can rank all day long and no one clicks on it, you get no traffic. So really what we’re trying to get is the, you know, the click from that rank. There’s a separate set of tactics to trigger the click and increase the click through rate. And then finally, you know, did the visitor have confidence? Did they like the site? Did they take an action? So search is really, when done well, it’s not really a standalone thing. It’s kind of supporting a lot of other things and it’s related to many, many other things. But I have a strong bias toward It because I know from experience that search is a very durable source of traffic. Think about it this way. Every page on your website has the chance to catch traffic from search just like a sale catches wind. And you can keep adding more and more sales to this boat anytime you want. Email and social media on the other hand are much more labor intensive channels and you have to keep working at them. You got to put your back into it and row that boat. And you get blisters on your hands from tweeting and sending emails. It’s just harder work, right? You have to keep doing it. If you stop doing email marketing, you stop getting traffic from email marketing. PPC or paid in general, you got put more resources in there’ cause it doesn’t keep happening unless you keep putting resources toward it, right, as we said last time. Advertising might be fast, but it’s temporary.

Hitting the Right Balance Between Your Advertising and Content Strategy is the Key to Your Business Growth.

As a marketing professional, I was acquainted with the channels, and how to optimize by reading the key metrics, but during this course I have come across the importance of user research and why all the planning should revolve around the target audience. The Growth Marketing course in CXL is really comprehensive and focuses on every step that should be considered when planning campaigns. The fact that we get to learn from all the experienced users and how they have used all the concepts practically really helps in understanding the backend of how growth marketing helps a business. I am really looking forward to the next courses and applying the techniques I learn here to my actual work environment.

Stay Tuned for next weeks’ updates.