Week 12/12 - CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree Review

Takeaways and reflections

This is the final and very last article reviewing the CXL Growth Marketing Mini degree. 

I've always believed that fundamentals and principles are more important than any given strategy or tactic. 

There are 100 ways to explain how a sales funnel work. There are 100 ways to visualize how marketing works. There are 100 ways to drive your audience through a funnel. 

One particular strategy or channel is not necessarily better than others — every channel works differently. 

And that is exactly what you’ll learn by completing the CXL Growth Marketing Mini Degree.

Look:

Facebook ads will give you greater insight, control, and costs less compared to print ads or TV commercials. 

But, if 70-80% of your audience reads newspapers (and not blogs or social media) to stay updated, you'll want your company to appear in those publications. 

And in Sweden, if you're interested in investing or the stock market, you're likely to spend most of your time connecting with other investors on Twitter — not reading blogs or financial newspapers. 

Twitter in Sweden is extremely popular among certain groups of people — but it's not a widely used social networking site compared to Instagram, Facebook, or Linkedin.  

You can’t blindly assume that one channel will convert best just because your audience spends their time on that channel — in some (rare) cases your audience will actually spend time on a platform because they like connecting and talking to other people. In that case, you need to find out how to become a trusted source in that community. 

Here's the deal: 

A lot of good marketers swear by digital marketing, social media, and niched tactics like video marketing or podcasting. 

But the best marketers swear by established principles and foundational beliefs.

For example, these…

• "Your customers will tell you everything you need to know about how to sell to them" 
• "Tell stories, not facts" 
• "Clarity trumps persuasion" 
• "Good writing is structured thinking" 
• "Retention is the key to growth" 

...are all examples of principles and foundational beliefs. 

They don't focus on specific channels, tactics, or formats. 

Instead, the principles act as a reflection of the individual strengths of the marketer.  

By completing this course in full, it's clear that a growth marketer needs to establish a set of principles that can help them make strategic decisions.  

These principles will be unique to every person depending on their skillset, except for one: 

"Never make an assumption, unless it's the assumption that you don't know."

It's a way of thinking. An approach to execution. A mental model that helps you understand what you need to know before you start looking for answers. 

This is a core principle of each and every course in the growth marketing mini degree. 

Every course starts with some kind of research. Of course, you don’t need to spend weeks researching your audience just to run a Facebook ad. But before you set up an experimentation program or if you’re building out a marketing strategy you need to make sure that you are looking for answers to the right questions. 

One of the most valuable insights and takeaways for me is that you always need to start with research and ask the right questions. 

Because if you’re just looking for answers, you will find answers that support your biased opinions, not necessarily the truth.  

Courses, the good and the bad

I am beyond amazed by the quality of every course. Every course is well-structured, and even though some are recorded with a laptop camera the content is super high-quality. 

Some courses were extremely in-depth, and the length of each course ranges from 20 minutes up to almost 9 hours. So there’s a big variance there, and I personally think that some of the shorter courses could cover a lot more than they did.

The project management course is a great example. 

The course is about 1-2 hours long, it covers a couple of frameworks and the instructor explains how she plans and runs projects. However, I felt there is a lot more to learn about running projects. Nonetheless, the project management course is incredibly useful. 

On the other hand, the A/B-testing mastery course was extremely in-depth — almost 8 hours of calculations, statistics, math, and consumer psychology. It covered a lot more math than I first thought. So even though the course was incredibly detailed and walks you through every single step from how to know when you actually can run A/B-tests, to how you can calculate the business value of a testing program — the focus on math and statistics in my opinion made it a bit too advanced. 

Somewhere in the middle, you’ll find the Conversion Research course from Peep Laja, where he walks you through step-by-step how to find bottlenecks in your conversion funnel, and how to fix them. 

Here is a list of my favorite courses that make the whole mini degree worth going through:

• Conversion Research
• Landing Page optimization
• Content marketing and SEO for Lead Generation
• Maximizing PPC audiences
• SEO driven editorial calendar
• Retention: The most underrated growth channel
• Google Ads

Why you should take this course

A growth marketer is someone who should run your digital marketing efforts. If you find a great growth marketer with leadership skills, you have someone who not only knows how every channel works but also someone who knows how to iteratively get results. 

And whether some activities might be outsourced, the growth marketer knows how to kickstart a program and let someone else build upon it. 

CXL describes Growth marketing as a systematic process. And any marketer who systematically approaches his marketing will get better results compared to someone doing everything ad hoc. 

Growth marketing is very similar to the agile development principles — both follow a spring model, but growth marketers optimize and re-evaluate their marketing efforts.

And like mentioned above, I’ve yet found another course that can even be remotely compared to CXL when it comes to quality and structure — at least not in the marketing world. 

I can only speak for myself, but every course that I quickly felt would be valuable, I took notes like a maniac. 

I actually summed up my notes from the entire minidegree, and I just came to the conclusion that I’ve written over 45,000+ words of notes (about 90 A4 pages, or 200 pocket-sized pages). Add up 12,000+ words with each weekly review as well and I’ve practically written a book. 

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve gotten into the habit of writing again which is really nice. I will definitely keep this up as a routine.  

Combined with at least 10 spreadsheets and slides from every course, this is definitely a resource I have to refer to going forward. 

As far as the scholarship — Taking the full minidegree while working full-time, balancing family-time and play-time with a 2-year old takes a lot more dedication than i first imagined. 

However, for me personally, writing a weekly blog post of 1000 words is the easy part. Balancing study with work and family time was the hardest part for me. 

If you’re considering applying for the CXL scholarship, you’d be wise to take into consideration that you’ll be spending a lot of time on this. But you’ll be happy you did at the end. 

Thanks for one of the best online learning opportunities available, CXL!