Week 1 - CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Review

I recently got accepted to the CXL Institute Scholarship Program, which I am very excited about! I will spend the next 12 (11) weeks finishing the Growth Marketing Minidegree, which consists of 7 tracks, 33 courses, and takes approximately 111h to complete. 

I am excited about this scholarship because I feel Growth Marketing is the most natural next step in my career. Partially because it ties well into what I already do daily, but also because the growth marketing process focuses on results, optimization, and learnings. 

The most important part of the scholarship program is sharing what I’ve learned throughout the course. 

So every week for the next 12 weeks, I will write and share an article about what I have learned during the week along with my thoughts and reflections. I'll also share any templates I'll create to help me understand the process better. 

Why growth marketing?

Why not conversion optimization, customer acquisition, or digital analytics?

Well, being a solo marketer in a small company forces you to learn a little about a lot. You need to be able to run the marketing, hands-on, by yourself. Every activity included—writing copy, graphic design, building websites, distributing content, ideating campaigns, and so on. 

And since I have been the only marketer in Triggerbee for the last four years, I have learned that there is one thing more important than any of those single areas: 

Structure and process. 

You can have a book full of hacks, tricks, and tactics, but eventually, you will run into a problem that you can’t solve with a “hack.” You need a process if you want to win systematically. 

Being organized is something that I struggle with every day, and I try my best to become better at it. One of the most widely used productivity hacks is to add all your to-do’s in your calendar. But calendar schedules will only help you allocate your time... 

Even if it helps you structure your day, it won’t help you with the process.

In the beginning of my career, learned marketing through podcasts, audiobooks, blogs, and Youtube. I am 100% self-taught. And before I became a marketer, I was a construction worker. 

I developed the necessary skills to become a marketer by starting a personal blog and building an email list. I ran Facebook ads, optimized them, wrote articles, and sent out emails. That’s how I learned marketing. Looking back, I was just executing a bunch of activities, and if you ask me why they worked, I won’t be able to tell you.

I never developed a process (except learning how to learn). I have never had a rigorous process to follow. I have never had a mentor tell me what to focus on first, what the most logical next step is, and why.

The reasons I chose to specialize in growth marketing is because:

• I already have an understanding of the full marketing and sales funnel
• I know my way around most software and learn new technologies very quickly.
• I lack a structured way of running marketing.

I believe the growth marketing mini degree can help me tie together what I have learned so far, and help me become a better marketer overall. 

And just having gone through the first week of the mini degree, I am very confident this will help me take my marketing skills to the next level.

Here’s what I learned:

Week 1 of the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree

The focus of this week has been on the foundations of growth marketing. The instructor for this introductory course is John McBride—former growth manager at Lyft, Eaze, and now running B2B Growth at meditation app Calm. 

McBride talks about the differences between traditional and growth marketing and how the growth process works.

Here is a high-level overview:

The growth process

1. Define a hypothesis that can be validated or invalidated

Define a hypothesis based on data or insight

2. Define a goal or KPI

Define what success looks like. Make sure it’s a realistic goal, and aim for small improvements that compound over time. The most common metrics to follow are Dave McLure’s AARRR-metrics—Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue.

3. Define a series of experiments that could help you achieve the goal

Brainstorm ideas for experiments based on your hypothesis and prioritize them. A framework like ICE (Impact, Confidence, Effort) can be handy— especially if you need resources from other teams like engineering, design, customer success, or sales.

4. Gather learnings

Analyze the data and your experiments. If you don’t know why an experiment failed, go back to the drawing table. Failure is OK as long as you learn something new.

These four steps make up the foundation of the growth process. Then there are three phases of the process:

The phases of the growth process

Phase 1: Defining a growth model - Your growth model is unique to your business and consists of all the inputs you have at your disposal that can be used to grow your business.

Phase 2: Quarterly planning - Identify quarterly goals, building a roadmap, explore data. Build a preliminary plan for how to scale and automate working experiments.

Phase 3: Build, ship, analyze - The last phase is where you actually build-out and ship your experiments. Gather insight and learn what went wrong. Execute on scaling and automating experiments.

Sounds simple enough, right?

There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of upfront work that needs to get done before you get down to the sexy part of experimentation.

It’s the process that makes this approach successful, and the experiments are just the most efficient way to improve.

Sidenote: 

Besides marketing, I am very interested in the stock market. I mainly invest in dividend stocks because I want to take advantage of compounding interest. The growth marketing process is kind of similar to investing, because you want small consistent wins that eventually become huge gains.

OK, back to the course contents.

One part I had trouble wrapping my head around was how to write a good hypothesis. I might be over-thinking this part (probably), but after attending Conversion Jam for several years in a row I feel that I finally want a good understanding of how to create a strong hypothesis. 

McBride is very good at giving examples of different hypotheses, how to set goals, and what to think about in every step of the process. 

But it turns out, creating a strong hypothesis yourself was harder than I thought. So I decided to create a couple of hypotheses for myself and read some blogs to complement the course material. I found this blog post where @Chris Goward from Widerfunnel explains it very clearly:

“Changing _______ into ______ will increase [conversion goal], because:”

Creating a hypothesis might be covered more in-depth later on, but moving forward I'll use Gowards example and try to adapt it to the content and examples in the course. 

Together with McBride’s explanation of the growth process, here’s a full example of how an experiment could be conducted: 

Step 1: You realize that your churn is too high, so you want to fix it.

Step 2: You read through some support tickets, read the reasons for cancellations, and look at some charts. 

Step 3: You form an initial hypothesis as to why your churn is high, and you think that your customers think your product is hard to use

Step 4: You define a goal, “decrease quarterly churn from 8% to 5% by the end of Q2”

Step 5: You gather your team to brainstorm ideas on how to reduce churn

Step 6: You prioritize your ideas, and start planning experiments

Step 7: You build, ship and analyze the data. You automate what worked, learn why the other experiments didn’t work, document your findings and repeat the process

This process seems very logical to me, and I feel it would be applicable in almost any organisation, and situation. 

I  built an experimentation spreadsheet based on the introductory course, to understand every step of the process better. Here's a link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZSD8EibgHrf8gJ5D4peG2P63mNU_ga8Sn1A79_JI148/edit?usp=drivesdk

Personally I need to work on brainstorming and prioritization—something I think a lot of organisations struggle with. 

Both brainstorming and prioritization is covered briefly in the introductory course.  Here are a few notes on those topics:

How to effectively brainstorm

• Focus the conversation on specific goals
• Do not bring several ppl into a room to “talk about how we can grow the business”
• Focus on a specific metric, and go deep.
• Do separate brainstorming sessions for different metrics. 

If you bring on people from other teams, give them some background to the brainstorming session. Show them your findings, tell them about the customer journey, why the specific problem needs to be fixed, and which topics to focus on. 

The goal of brainstorming is to maximize the generation of ideas, not to make a decision. 

And you don’t want to limit the ideas. Even if some ideas are impossible, write everything down and remove it when you sit down to prioritize.  

And last but not least, try to have some kind of thought process behind your ideas. 

Bad: "Spotify does X, we should too".

OK: "Spotify did X, and I think we could improve on metric Z by by doing the same"

Great: “I think by doing X, we could see Y improval in metric Z, because of reason 1, 2 and 3”. 

By stating your idea in a very specific way, you get the basic structure of a hypothesis that in most cases is testable.

How to prioritize ideas

Driving growth is about choosing the right experiments, and then being able to run the experiments faster. 

This means you have to become great at prioritization. 

This minidegree covers the ICE framework for prioritization: 

ICE - Impact, Confidence, Effort.

(Projected) Impact: roughly estimate the impact on a scale of 1-5.  

Confidence: how confident are you that this experiment will work? 

Effort: How much time / energy / resources will go into building this experiments. 

High impact/low effort experiments should get prioritized.

I would have liked to have some more examples of real prioritized experiments, with explanations to why they were chosen. 

However the ICE-framework more or less gives you everything you need in order to generate buy-in and an understanding of what it takes to implement an experiment. It's more or less self-explanatory — which is a good thing. 

----------

I'm very excited about the coming weeks. I'll spend today (Sunday 16 Aug) watching some event videos and pick up where I left off with the lesson about customer-centric marketing.  

Two of my most insightful takeaways from the fist week: 

1. “You don’t know what your customers want”

2. “We aren’t as right as we think we are.” 

These two quotes, for me, embodies the concept of growth marketing. I mean, most of the time, we as marketers think we know what to do. But in reality, most of us don’t. 

If every marketer knew what to do or what works, we would see billion-dollar companies everywhere.

So… 

Not knowing what your customers want, and realizing that you don't know, is a good thing! 

See you next week!