Yes, we need to be aware of what happens after a client is acquired, but the pricing and product have a lot to do with its success.

Could an enterprise startup become a product lead growth company in the digital ecosystem since its price and the sales process’s complexity might not provide meaningful experiences that “show and don’t tell”?

And it speaks to what I believe.

Data analysts’ job is to solve a problem. Adding context to the numbers is something that we should all do, no matter the request.

Nobody understands data better than you, the analyst.

That being said, I feel that we can fall into a trap easily, where we start to believe that data can provide the absolute truth.

This is false.

Data analytics, especially marketing analytics, is not accounting. The numbers, some of the times, are a bit fuzzy.

So, be sure to explain the limitations of data when presenting numbers to your stakeholders.

E.g., 1.000 visitors/month could mean that you could only track 1.000 visitors, not necessarily that these are all that landed on your pages.

Yes, you can get your message across faster, and at the same time, you will not cover a range of keywords. Most of the time, informational or navigational will not be part of paid campaigns since a budget will not cover all potential long-tail keywords.

Talking about budgets, nobody has an unlimited budget to cover all keywords. Therefore SEO is better at generating leads since the buyer journey starts with informational searches and this is where SEO shines at generating more leads even if they are in the learning phase.

Also with paid you might lose money before you find a campaign that will generate positive ROI.

It seems that the bigger the company, the more critical seniority is.
But is there a way for a new hire to become relevant to the company quickly?

The advantage of a new hire is precisely that. You are not aligned with the mindset of the company… yet. All the experience, vision, and understanding of your profession are worth more than competing with an existing employee with more years of experience inside the company.

So, as a new hire, you need to find colleagues with the biggest seniority and try to learn from them while bringing the “outside” perspective into discussions.

And this is a fine line, really hard to execute, especially getting the trust from the peers.

So, the way I did it is to plan the first 90 days right.

Step 1: try
Step 2: have you tried harder?
Step 3: when I doubt, follow steps 1 and 2.

Yes, this is learnable. I used to stop at step 1 or find excuses to procrastinate.

And if you want to develop a growth mindset, just build better corrective feedback loops.

People favor saying what they think you want to hear. It’s not their fault. Ensure the feedback loop includes negative feedback (or radical candor), even for things you are emotional about.

Nobody makes something great by giving another impactful presentation or building a one-pager deck.

Put yourself out there: fail -> keep learning -> grow.

A final note: for some of the things you want to learn, don’t rely on the current company to pay for knowledge or provide opportunities. Pay it out of your pocket and make the next company compensate for the new skills.

We usually refer to it as remote working, but this is a system for the individual worker. Distributed work is a design for the entire organization.

The base for distributed work is the autonomy to do the job. This also means that you can pick a schedule and the work is asynchronous.

Remote work, on the other hand, represents a small number of people that are not at the office but need to be available during office hours.
Most of the time, remote workers don’t have access to the same context, information, and social opportunities as on-site colleagues.

Ideally, the location should not be a factor in performance and participation. But for remote work to accommodate everybody, projects need to be documented so that the on-spot decision we make while at the office doesn’t need in-person meetings (or Webex calls for that matter).

Documenting work is just a way to help people pick up from where you left off. This way more people have visibility into goals and project status, the less they have to ask someone for it.

Also, communicating online is key. We already do this as Slack and Webex are part of our day to day activities even if we are at the office.

Working from home has a bad reputation because it implies you need to be home. But to help build a remote work environment location should not matter. When working remotely (or as a distributed company) we should benefit from an allowance to cover costs like working from hubs (if we choose to do so) or rent a meeting room if it is absolutely necessary to meet in person.

Similar to agile, distributed work needs a new social contract.
Co-locating is not key to deliver and perform, and remote work is possible, but expectations need to be set. On-demand, ad-hoc meetings are not always the key to success.

Step 1: try
Step 2: have you tried harder?
Step 3: when I doubt, follow steps 1 and 2.

Yes, this is learnable. I used to stop at step 1 or find excuses to procrastinate.

And if you want to develop a growth mindset, just build better corrective feedback loops.

People favor saying what they think you want to hear. It’s not their fault. Ensure the feedback loop includes negative feedback (or radical candor), even for things you are emotional about.

Nobody makes something great by giving another impactful presentation or building a one-pager deck.

Put yourself out there: fail -> keep learning -> grow.

A final note: for some of the things you want to learn, don’t rely on the current company to pay for knowledge or provide opportunities. Pay it out of your pocket and make the next company compensate for the new skills.

Data quality matters. It matters for analysis, it matters for decisions but *most* of all it matters for trust. Low data quality breaks trust and breaks down data driven choices. Don’t underestimate it!

Source

The smaller your reality, the more convinced you are that you know everything.

CXL Growth Marketing minidegree. Week 12. Final review of the journey I started on 3th of May. It’s actually a story that I want to share with as many marketers as possible.

I should recognize that the past 3 months were intense. Even if I was familiar with some of the topics covered in the course, others were completly new. I didn’t enjoy every chapter, but the whole experience helped me get to the next level as marketing profesional.

For me, the CXL Growth marketing minidegree started when I realized that the marketing reality is getting smaller if I am only to read marketing articles. I needed a marketing structured course.

Having a 12-week time limit forced me to deep dive into the content, Week by week I learned a lot about what a T-shaped marketer should be like, and somewhere in week 10, I realized who I am as a marketer.

Now, falling into the resolution, it is time to share the random thoughts I didn’t manage to cover in the rest of the articles.

Final thoughts on CXL Growth Marketing minidegree

1. Documenting the journey is the best way to learn. Now I realized that if I just had access to the content, probably I wouldn’t get the same value from it. The next step is to document the ABM certification from DemandBase and the Behavioral Economics & Psychology in Marketing from MINDWORX Academy. I’m planning to finish these by the end of August.
2. We can always get better at communicating and writing. For the moment being, it seems that most of the bottlenecks in growth marketing are generated by poor communication, not necessarily for picking a bad tactic, channel, or experimentation method. There are two parts of poor communication: internal and external. Not being able to push the internal programs that boost growth and the lack of proper external communication to users or clients.
3. The buzzwords are for marketers. What matters is the bottom-line. Full-funnel, lifecycle marketing, growth marketing are just variants to do good marketing. You cannot be in the top 1% without knowing everything and deciding on a pillar to specialize in.
4. MarTech is not about knowing how to integrate the stack but to build the strategy to be able to make data-driven decisions. Now I realized the power of Hubspot which is probably the best product to use for a standardized MarTech Stack. And it makes integrating a new marketing person really easy. You just need to ask the person that wants to join to get the relevant Hubspot certification 🙂
5. Research is the most underused marketing action/tactic. Almost every chapter mentioned market research, user research, research research. And prioritization. Along with communication, this is another topic that we, as marketers, can get better at.
6. Marketing strategy and project management go hand in hand. A strategy without a plan is just a wish and being able to manage resources is key. And no, being Agile doesn’t make you better at project management, and for sure it doesn’t mean that the work can be done in one day until the next stand-up meeting.
7. Using 2x speed to watch the videos could make you feel like a superhuman and is the best way to cover the material in an online course.
8. Start the chapters with the exams to understand where you are. Some of the questions are detailed some are more general. But this is how you will know what to focus on. With this in mind, you can go thru the chapter at 2x speed.
9. Using the exam to verify your knowledge forces you to pay attention and get perspective. I just hate taking tests and for the first part of the journey, I set them aside. I enjoy work that involves: theory, speculation, creativity, imagination, and a creative approach to problem-solving. The work should allow me to utilize my ability to analyze and make objective, logical decisions, and tests don’t do this. But in the context of the CXL Growth Marketing minidegree where there is so much good content and information they actually bring some clarity and make you put things in perspective.
10. Now I know that you first write the copy and after that, you design the landing page. This was a chicken and egg problem for me but now is 100% clear. The copy is the one that communicates the message, not the design. Design is there to give superpowers to the sales page.
11. The hardest chapters were A/B testing mastery and Statistics fundamentals for testing. They made me realize that understanding the methods behind what the A/B testing tool says is a winner or not can make or break the experimentation process. Even if there are a lot of numbers involved, this is more of a grey area.
12. The easiest module was Data and analytics. Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager and Attribution are the bread and butter for a data-driven marketer. A lot of interesting approaches, but it was by far the most comfortable module to watch. In the second place, it was the chapter on Martech stack.
13. The chapter that I enjoyed the least: Data-Driven Influencer Marketing. But now I know when influencer marketing is relevant in the context of a marketing campaign.
14. The chapter that was the most useful Research and testing Conversion Research by Peep Laja. I basically got a step-by-step guide on how to offer conversion audits for clients.

In conclusion, when you think you know everything, it is time to do something different with your career. I really think that the next unicorn marketers will be the ones that code and can leverage small changes that developers hate to implement, but that can make the biggest difference in growth. You could basically build your own marketing stack, which is most of the times better than waiting for the developers.

This article is the twelve (and final) in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.