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.

The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.

Recently I saw a Facebook post on a local marketing group about the best online marketing courses or where to get an accredited diploma.

Obviously, I added a comment recommending CXL Institute minidegrees as a better foundation going into this field.

But this made me think. Do these courses help you get a better job?

Let me tell you a story.

A few days ago, I saw a post from Peep Laja saying that he’s looking for a marketer for Copytesting. A new company that combines copywriting testing and data analytics.

I definitely would love to work with Peep, so I recorded a 2-minute video mentioning 2 things: I thrive on direct, brute feedback because I am a self-thought marketer and that I was doing the Growth Marketing degree.

I didn’t mention anything about my experience (big mistake) and focused on the fact that I am aware of the content from CXL minidegrees, thinking that this would open the door for a quick discussion on the job.

Even if the effort of recording the video was appreciated, I wasn’t good for the role since I was missing 5+ years of experience in the SaaS business.

And this is when I realized, marketing is a growing field, one of the few where certifications don’t matter as much as experience.

And let me define experience a bit. It is not about how many years of work you can add to a resume, but in this context, I define it as what you accomplished while working. So, the quality of work is more important than the level of studies or the number of years worked.

Some of the best marketers I follow are not necessarily the ones that graduated with marketing degrees, but the ones that build something on their own. I actually found a cool survey by SparkToro (via Rand Fishkin) addressing exactly this matter.

40% of the 734 responders are self-taught and with no formal marketing education.

Essential skills for marketing jobs

The experience of applying at Copytesting and reading round the essential skills to get hired in the marketing field helped me think around how to leverage this effort of getting the Growth Marketing certification.

Now, failure is proof that the desire isn’t strong enough.

I got lazy whit my application thinking that a pending certification would open any doors when in fact experience (as defined above) is the key.

As per the survey (which I highly recommend reading), I would say that probably about 50% of the workforce in marketing are self-taught and with no formal education.

Would a certification make de difference? Probably not.

The way resumes are screened today with automated systems and less and less reviewed by an actual human, sometimes you need the right buzzwords to pass. And “years of experience” is more of an arbitrary requirement which sometimes makes it hard for hiring managers to recognized talent, ambition, and powerful drive.

A one-page paper just gives some context, but is not the whole story.

And I know this by experience. This month I am celebrating one year in my current role as a data analytics. Even though I didn’t have prior experience in a similar role, in under one year I got recognized by my peers and stakeholders as one of the top specialists in the team. Results and facts speak for themselves.

Even if in the short-term I see the Copytesting job application as a failure, I also see the bigger picture. Now I am forced to get out of my comfort zone.

I might be well on my way to building something great. It’s like learning to ride the bike. Sometimes training wheels are a bad idea because it might confuse, distract, or stall (like a 3-year degree).

Sometimes all you need is to get a small bike with no pedals and practice.

The same thing is true for marketing. You don’t need to go to school or take online courses for years. Marketing is practice and experience.

And most of the time, failure is just good learning for something greater in the future.

Next steps

This week I’ve been skimming around the content since the big story was the Copytesting job and a lot of thinking around the next steps.

But I want to point out to a chapter, which you can get as a simple course on Maximizing audiences from PPC campaigns. In a previous article, I said that specialization in PPC is better left to the respective agencies, but as a growth marketer, everybody should understand the key concepts around improving PPC returns by leveraging multiple paid channels and the respective audiences. Here are some main ideas:

• Earn better ROAs: Define the target audiences and market more effectively with the existing PPC budget.
• Multiply the impact across channels: Use the newly super-powered audiences for retargeting.
• Get negative: Discover advanced strategies for negative audience creation and audience shaping.
• Write more specific ads: Learn how to write better ads from PPC audiences

For the next week, I’m planning to write a wrap-up article addressing the content that I didn’t have time to put in this series so that untile the 27th of July, when is the last day of the scholarship I would have bragging right on the final certification for growth marketing.

Talking about bragging rights, now I see in a different light the self-promotion and various claims made by experts (start-up gurus, growth hackers, and others). Reading this type of content made me think that I am missing on the easy paths of marketing.

In reality, overnight success takes 10 years, and a lot of work, study, time, grit, failers, courage, resilience, and belief in oneself.

Even if there is a lot of good content (online courses, books, articles, surveys), nothing will substitute the hard work of bidding, commitment, and dedication to understanding that there are no shortcuts.

So don’t let education block your ways of learning.

This article is the eleventh in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.

Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.

In the previous week, I talked about what does it mean to be a T-shaped marketer. An essential part of the T shape is channel expertise, so let’s talk about digital marketing channels and how they impact growth.

This is the first chapter I have mixed feelings about. I already said that the content is great, but I feel that there is no balance between the different instructors and the value prop. The module description says that it will show: how to identify the channel that clicks best with your business and optimize around that. You’ll also build the skills to communicate better on each channel.

Not really the case, since the channels are not grouped together or follow the scope. This is why I decided to group them on my own. I already did an article just for Account Based Marketing since I would like to specialize in this area. As mentioned in the previous article, I have a structure for the rest of the chapters, so here are some takeaways for:

Digital marketing channels examples

Email marketing

This one is a channel I did a lot of work around and honestly, not many things that are new, but if you are struggling with this one, I recommend the course, to up your game.

Content strategy and SEO

Here I bulked three chapters: Content strategy and SEO for lead generation, SEO driven editorial calendar, and Technical SEO. I feel that they go together, but without knowing, I think a lot of the content just structured a lot of things I already knew. Still, highly recommend the stand-alone course.

The key to building SEO content is finding content gaps (good volume low competition or low quality) and match the keyword intent to the content type.

Another important part of SEO is to choose a tool and stick to it. For example, Moz Explorer Tool is showing the Domain Authority score. Well, it doesn’t matter if this si true or not, is just a benchmark you can use to decide on the competition.

I am more inclined to use Ahrefs for SEO analysis. Each tool is great, but this one seems to have better technology and is product-driven.

Paid Ads

This is new territory for me. So, for me paid is a bundle of Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads, Google Ads, and Youtube ads. I will mention some things about the first three.

The Facebook Ads module is proposing a full-funnel strategy called B.E.L.T. which is an acronym for:

• Belief: make the audience aware of the problem and solution. The trick here is to just put a 2-minute video without linking to a website and later target the contacts that Facebook decided to show to content to and consumed it.
• Engage: The content at this stage should educate & entertain (edutainment) and should introduce or strengthen your brand to the prospect.
• Lead: Only the people that interacted with the brand are sent to the landing page. Usually, this audience will result in lower costs.
• Transact: Ask for the sale after the contact knows about you and your brand.

I guess it’s something that should be common sense, but the chapter made me think about how to approach Facebook Ads: use the platform for awareness and consideration stages (meaning do not send them necessarily to your website) and when the audience is hot, ask for the conversion.

When you are on Facebook you don’t want to leave it and read a post or fill in a form, so engage with the audience on the platform with vidoes – seem to work better for this particular idea. For Facebook Live this is a good resource to make the videos interesting – https://be.live/.

Another idea is that Facebook is or will be the next cable TV. This is why the ads are created as infomercials. I guess that Facebook users have similar behavior as the ones that watch TV. Scrolling the news feed is a comfy activity like sitting in front of the TV.

LinkedIn advertising. I guess everybody knows that Linkedin is for B2B, high-value deals. Something over $15 K. But similar to Facebook Ads, the sweet spot is to run campaigns for the middle of the funnel to control the costs.

If you target Top of the funnel you get a high cost per click just for a blog post. If you target the bottom of the funnel you will get a low conversion rate because why would you give your personal information and listen to a sales pitch.

Therefore, the middle of the funnel, usually a gated asset that resonates with the audience is the best approach for Linkedin Ads. As far as the chapters shows, the setup in Linkedin ads is not that complicated as in other platforms. As per the module, for Video Ads you cannot split the audience by percentage of video watched which is a bammer.

An interesting recommendation is to do retargeting by using Google Ads – Google Display Network – and Facebook. I guess it is cheaper.

There are two unique ad types: importing email list and/or company name. Both can leverage up to 300.000 units that can be targeted on Linkedin.

Similar to Facebook Ads, it seems that is better to train the AI to display the Ads when they consider is better, so it is not recommended to show Ads evenly.

Google Ads. Compared with the Facebook Ads course which is looooooong and somewhat redundant, Google Ads is a really quick one.

The bottom line is that the success is based on not overlapping the targeting criteria (similar keywords) and to match perfectly the search terms with the intent.

There is a diference between keyword and search term. I mean, yeah, it is obcious, but I guess I did mixed them up sometimes.

Similar to the ideas on Facebook Ads chapter, where you basically might “lose money” on some ads, in Google Ads you can check it by looking into the Attribution reports. Sometimes the Display Campaign might assist the search and it makes sense to keep it… so yeah… not every ad set need to be positive.

Messaging strategy in public relations and data-driven influencer marketing

In my opinion, influencer marketing and public relations go hand in hand. The difference is that public relations are mostly B2B stuff and influencer marketing is mostly B2C.

Most of the time PR will leverage traditional channels like TV, newspapers maybe some bloggers. On the other side, influencer marketing will leverage social media creators.

They can work toghter and none is better thean the other, but I really think that in the most fundamental way the two marketing channels are similar.

Choosing a marketing channel expertise

So, if you don’t know what marketing channel is the better one to specialize, I would recommend trying some online courses from CXL.

For example, after watching the Linkedin Ads chapter I wanted to open my own agency that focuses just on this channel. In my opinion, the Paid (from Paid Earned Owned) is better to be outsourced to an agency since it requires a really good understanding of the platform and technologies like Google Tag Manager.

This article is the tenth in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.

The difference between good and great marketing is having a deep understanding of customers.

Here I am, in the final three weeks of my 12 weeks journey into the Growth Marketing certification minidegree and it is getting better week-by-week.

There is so much to cover on the marketing channels topic therefore I decided for this week to write about what it means to be a t-shaped marketer and I will cover in-depth the channels next time.

A lot of things started to clarify and sharing a couple of them now maybe it will help any other stranger that will follow with this series:

1. research is the patch for a deep understanding of the customer. I really think that knowing how to do research is the key to growth.
2. time flies, tactics change but the fundamentals of marketing are still the same:
   • we are responsible for driving demand,
   • building brand distinction,
   • and we need to tell a story.

The main responsibility of a t-shaped marketer is to really understand the fundamentals and having knowledge in most of the tactics or activities. In my opinion, the specialization to focus on is data-analytics since a good analysis empowers the decisions.

Where does a T-shaped marketer fit

Generally speaking, when somebody hires a marketer they need one that knows how to write, not necessarily the one that is a writer.

I’m trying to avoid the term growth marketing because I feel this is something for startups with large investment capital. Still a buzzword in my opinion.

Most of the time, most of the companies need a T-shaped marketer to execute on a large range of activities. Not all of the activities should bring 10X growth or are worthy of case studies with triple-digit increases.

Sure, there is a time and place for marketing hacks, but what I am trying to say is that the number of companies that need growth hackers in the way it is “advertised” is limited.

There is a big pool of companies that just need a single person who can handle marketing end-to-end. Not necessarily from an execution point of view. A company with a good turnover and good margins just needs a single person touch-point that is not a manager.

From a business perspective, the value of a t-shaped marketer is as relevant as any other activity. Does it impact the bottom line? Was revenue generated out of XYZ activities?

How important is a diploma

I live in a country where having a diploma is more important than what you can actually do. A person with a marketing college degree and no experience has an edge over the person with experience in the field and a college degree in another field.

When I decided to focus on marketing I quickly realized that anybody can access the same information as I did. This meant that I was always learning something thinking that everybody does the same.

Reality check: less people than I though are avid learners.

A diploma is not as important as going thru the Growth Marketing minidegree. I was always interested in several topics but didn’t have the structure and didn’t know how to position myself. Now I feel comfortable saying that:

I am a data-driven marketer and I can build easy to medium websites WordPress websites.

A structured course that goes over most of the things a marketer should know is more important than a diploma.

Having clarified this simple sentence empowers me for what I want to achieve professionally. I can actually say that I want to build something that doesn’t require a team to manage, no overhead. Deciding quickly and implementing fast is a better way of doing business as a solopreneur.

The plan for the last 3 weeks

I am happy to report that the moment of clarity happened before finishing the minidegree. This just shows the value of the content by the CXL Institute.

Now I have enough time to go back and go over the things I want to definitely improve. This wouldn’t have happened without reading the great content Peep Laja puts on social media. I mostly follow him on Linkedin and I recommend the same for you.

I already covered the Account-Based marketing chapter because it is an animal on its own. So the plan is to regroup the remaining content to align with my goals.

I’m at the point where I know that I want to focus on email marketing and content writing. Knowing more allows me to identify the channel that clicks best with the business and optimize around that. Marketers need to align with business goals and not vice-versa.

Here is the next week’s article breakdown. And yes, the order is important because I think this is what you can leverage as a business as fundamentals.

• Email marketing
  • How to get 20x 20x returns from email marketing how to build lists fast, what to send that works, and how to make your email marketing data-driven.
• Content strategy and SEO:
  • Building a world-class content marketing program for lead generation
  • Maximizes traffic with an SEO-driven editorial calendar
  • Outrank competition with Technical SEO
• Paid Ads:
  • Facebook Ads – rethinking the new customer journey with Facebook advertising
  • Google Ads – master Google Ads, and make paid acquisition highly profitably
  • LinkedIn advertising – confidently generate huge ROI from your LinkedIn Ads
  • YouTube ads – build & scale profitable YouTube ad campaigns
• Maximizing audiences for your PPC campaigns
  • Go beyond keywords & reap higher returns on your PPC ad spend
• Retention: the most underrated growth channel
  • How to make customer retention your number one growth channel
• Messaging strategy in public relations and data-driven influencer marketing
  • In my opinion, these two go hand in hand. So get ready for the 10 step influencer marketing process.

Sure, there are probably more that can be added to the list and since marketing efficiency decreases year by year, it is obviously we do need to look for new channels, but these I consider to be the basis.

Concluding, what do you think would be an easier project for a T-shaped marketer: growing an already established business or one that is just getting started (not necessarily a startup)?

This article is the ninth in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.

If we have data, let’s look at data. If all we have are opinions, let’s go with mine.

For this week in my journey to get the CXL Institute certification for the Growth Marketing Minidegree I decided to focus on B2B Account Based Marketing.

Let me explain.

The value of any elearning experience (CXL minidegree included) is to actually use the knowledge in a practical way and improve the day-to-day work. Just being certified doesn’t help much when execution is missing.

These are sales driven organizations and sellers are the heroes. They bring in the deals and most of the time the value of marketing is questioned. I’m involved in an ABM pilot I wanted to fully understand this area.

[The pilot] How to start with B2B Account Based Marketing

The marketing organization is usually more data-driven compared with sales.

I feel that data is the weapon for the underdogs. When you present facts based on data, most of the stakeholders will listen. Even sellers.

Enter B2B Account Based Marketing as a cross-functional alignment between sales and marketing.

As all great stories go, the best way to get started with ABM is to have a solid pilot program. For this you need to:

• get some leadership sponsorship for B2B ABM.
• involve as co-owners of the program sales, customer success, and other vital stakeholders.
• go for the right size pilot: big enough to show relevant results but small enough to be manageable.

Here is the definition for B2B account based marketing to get everybody on the same page:

A sustained, coordinated, strategic approach to identifying, engaging, closing, and growing the accounts that we know we should win.

B2B Account Based Marketing Tactics

In terms of ABM tactics, I would say that account selection is what will determine the success or waste of time and money.

Selecting the right accounts and making sure that all stakeholders are fully on board with the decision is more complicated than it sounds. I feel there is more of a negotiation that a data lead approach.

What is clear after watching the module is that the sales or marketing list based selection is something to be avoided.

After the selection, the next step is to define the tiers and clusters. And this is a strategy on its own because the next step is to identify the right contacts in each account.

Now data comes into place because developing a powerful Ideal Customer Profile leverages qualitative and quantitative insights.

Determining what channels to use for targeting the accounts is not limited to digital-only tactics.

Also, a big part that was not mentioned is data privacy. At least in Europe, I feel GDPR really hit B2B marketing. I mean, yeah, I determined the contacts in each account, the roles, the data sources to get the right contact information, the intent, social listening, and all the deep-dive research is on spot, but without consent to contact him what to do?

One approach is to plan the plays and the channel cadence in a way that moves an account from the initial state to a new one.

Another good point regarding ABM is that it is channel-agnostic. The decision on which one to use will depend on a wide range of considerations involving who the targeted accounts and contacts are, the FROM -> TO journey you need to take them on, and the budget and team size.

Now that you’ve got your account list, and your tier and cluster strategy, you need to determine who, exactly, you need to engage and what approach and message are most likely to resonate with them. Let’s look at some examples.

B2B ABM Examples

The module on ABM starts with a story about a little red Ferrari. After identifying the right contacts in each account, a box with a small gift was sent with a $30 miniature red Ferrari. This hit the ego of the right contacts and with additional touches, via digital, many demos started to be scheduled.

Key takeaway: the experience must be smooth, multi-threaded, multi-channel, multi-touch, and highly targeted.

Not all pilots are created equal, but once it is in the market there is still a lot of work ahead. No matter how good the selection is, it will still be inefficient and ineffective compared to what it will become.

The one thing that probably every stakeholder will ask is what results does it bring in. So in terms of testing, measuring, and communicating the work is never done.

Doing ABM can be hit really easily by the hype cycle and it is easy to get off track in the ABM journey. Some takeaways to keep on track:

• Maintain focus and momentum once your pilot is in-market.
• Build a predictable, repeatable results-driven machine.
• Ensure effective ongoing communication to lay the foundations for scaling ABM post-pilot.
• Master the strategies, tactics, metrics, and wisdom you need to become an ABM leader and accelerate the growth of your company and of your career.
• Clearly explain what ABM is to stakeholders and how it is different in terms of challenges, practices, and metrics.
• Evaluate the three types of ABM and determine which one(s) are best for your company (One-to-One, One-to-Few, One-to-Many).
• Gain enthusiastic executive and cross-functional alignment and co-ownership. Marketers who try to do it alone fail.
• Develop an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), tier strategy, cluster strategy, and contact identification plan that goes well beyond basic demographics and firmographics.
• Understand the ABM technology landscape, what tools may be right for your particular challenges, and when to introduce them. Don’t fall into the trap of buying new technology too soon.

Takeaways and resources

A great resource that was recommended is DemandBase, as a place for ABM related education.

Long story short the certification for ABM from DB is FREE until 31 July 2020. It is easy to join so I highly recommend it.

Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.

Landing page optimization is a part of the Conversion Optimization area, and as all things optimization, it relies mostly on research.

I am almost halfway through the Growth Marketing Minidegree and it is amazing how with each chapter I am learning more and more about research.

Either this is the most underrated part of the growth programs or is one that is never understood by professionals. I must say that not many people I worked with are able to do great research, either if we are talking about landing page optimization or product messaging.

So this is my rant on research, I really think I need to talk with somebody about this topic. Either this is the thing that makes a marketer top baller or the one that is wasting time and is a good selling point.

Landing page optimization

It seems that behavior psychology has a lot to do with landing page optimization strategies. Thinking, fast and slow by Nobel prize-winning Daniel Kahneman is the fundamental book that is referenced since the first videos.

I’ve tried to read it a couple of times, but it’s not a book that you can read in one night. So here is a video that goes over the main ideas of the book:

Research for landing page optimization

If you were to tell me that you can get insights from Google Analytics in less than an hour, I would have said that you don’t know what you are looking at.

Not anymore.

I was introduced to a custom report and methodology to get fast insights and to kickstart the research phase.

Another good tip for research is to get qualitative data from review sites. This is something that is really easy to leverage when we lack feedback from clients.

Landing page copywriting

Great landing page copywriting delivers on the following fundamental elements:

• Shortens journey from click to conversion
• Follows up on “promises” made an ad source
• Speaks to user motivation and addresses barriers
• Answers important questions & creates clarity
• Creates a clear path to the conversion goal

This simple approach simply kickstarts the writing process. Before finishing the chapter on landing page copywriting I thought that this was some kind of science, rather black magic.

Little did I know that each science has a method, so in order to get it, I just need to understand how to use information hierarchy, prioritize elements, and structure your copy:

• Headline: Message match. Capture attention. Trigger dopamine.
• Benefits/features: Present important information. Emphasize the value of your offer. Trigger dopamine.
• Credibility: Make the content trustworthy. Answer questions. Mitigate cortisol.
• Expectation manager: Ensure users know what to expect. Mitigate ambiguity. Avoid disappointment / negative reward prediction errors.
• Call-to-action Make users click.

These are similar elements used in the landing page design chapter and it makes sense right. These two are not separate, they need to tell the same story.

Landing page design

When it comes to landing page design, I feel confident saying that I have the response for the chicken and egg question: what comes first? Design or copy?

And the answer is copy.

The reason is that having a design that is limiting the message the copy needs to deliver can hurt conversions. So, next time when I start a landing will start with the copy, build a wireframe and then send it to the designer to add the glitter and unicorns.

Sure, there is a lot more to understand the basics of designing high-converting landing pages. Here are the 6 most important landing page design elements to focus on:

1. Headline
2. Images / Video
3. Features / Benefits
4. Credibility
5. Expectation Manager
6. Call-to-Action

Even if as marketers we don’t design, we need a deeper understanding of the visual hierarchy and how it affects the experience for users.

How they interact with your landing page is your job.

Let’s take for example lead gen landing pages. Understanding the role forms play in the overall landing page experience and how important form design is can make or break the results. As marketers, we often fail to take into consideration that a form has to make sense on its own. Simply, consider it a standalone landing page.

Product Messaging

The copy might be the most important part of your website, so it makes sense to conduct a conversion-focused teardown with a method around it.

The best part of the product messaging chapter in the “Conversion” module is that each lesson has a resource, usually in the form of a Gsheet.

In the world of copywriting, this might be weird, but the way Momoko Price goes over the technicalities of sales copywriting makes it one of the best courses on this topic I’ve seen.

There is so much information in the videos it is better to just recommend this course. So, if you want to improve your messaging strategy through customer research and analysis I definitely recommend the Sales Copywriting and Product Messaging course by Momoko Price.

Key takeaways

Five more weeks to go and the saying is true. The more you learn, the less you know. True for me. I’m looking forward to some chapters from the next modules, like the Account Based Marketing one, but the key takeway is that being at the top of the industry I sure need to understand how to conduct great research. In whatever form it is needed.

So the next time when I won’t know what I am doing, I will just start researching.

This article is the seventh in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.

Winners don’t just learn the fundamentals, they master them. You have to monitor your fundamentals constantly because the only thing that changes will be your attention to them.

Some time ago I read a post saying that the majority of people that sign up for an online course don’t finish it. There are many reasons, but this week I want to share with you two ideas that are relevant in my circumstances:

• parts of the material I am watching is not relevant at the point I’m studying for the certification.
• some tracks of the minidegree are beginner level (I still watched them) but take time to go over the videos.

The review for this week is a bit different. I feel that the state of mind needs to be recognized in this journey to get the certification. First of all, the plan I started out with is not suitable. Just saying 2 hours/day to finish the material is easier said than done. I like to watch the chapters entirely and not break them into smaller groups. So if I want to follow a track that takes a couple of hours I need to make sure I have that block of time. This usually happens on weekends.

Why it is easy to get stuck

To address the two points at the start of the article, let me just say that studying with a deadline changes the whole learning experience. I have 12 weeks to finish the minidegree, therefore all subjects are important, even if at this point I am not interested in Google Tag Manager for example.

On the other side, the GA track was just a reminder for concepts I am familiar with. Sure, it helped me develop new opinions like always find a specialized agency that is doing GA setups. It’s so easy to miss some steps or forget to activate an option… It is better to let people do it all the time.

Now more than ever, I feel that the value of a growth hacker or data analyst is not in implementing GA, but in understanding how that data flows and addressing business questions.

Another point is taking tests. At the end of each chapter, there is a quiz that reminds me of why I didn’t enjoy school. And no, it’s not about being tested. It is about paying attention and not focusing on the act of taking a test.

And yes, the ego plays a part. I consider to be better than looking for the right answer and I go for the fast response even if there is no time limit. Most of the wrong answers are a direct result of a lack of concentration.

It is like I am playing a game of how fast can I finish the quiz, so when I fail a couple of tests, it starts to feel like I am not advancing.

How I overcome the moment when I get stuck.

I changed the learning experience since this week I will attend a meeting where we’ll talk about use cases for Google Analytics 360. Instead of continuing where I left off, I decided to jump to another track.

I think the full value of the minidegree is to “study” particular modules when I can tie them with a situation from the real life.

So, to overcome the moment, I decided to skip a chapter and dive into the Data and analytics track. I started with the beginner Google Analytics chapter knowing that fundamentals are essential for any professional. A great opportunity to go over them again, but some videos were 40-minute long.

Data and analytics key takeaways

Compared with last week when I learned about how to run growth experiments and I felt the need to take notes every step of the track, this time it was an easy-going lecture were I relaxed and listen to the teacher.

Not much I would add about Google Analytics (beginner and intermediate) and Google Tag Manager chapters because I am a firm believer that practice makes perfect (and this is what the presenter mentioned every time). Here are some key takeaways

• always open Google Analytics with a question in mind, find the information you need in order to deliver the answer. This is how you make the data valuable. 
• most of the analytics setups are probably broken and this is OK. Always test and adapt. Listening to Chris Mercer from MeasurementMarketing.io made me realize that it’s apparently impossible to have a perfect setup from the start.
• always test your setup and yourself (meaning that you check if the hits are recorded correctly)
• when in doubt use the documentation: https://support.google.com/analytics#topic=3544906, when curios use any of the following Google Analytics resources:

• https://support.google.com/analytics/community
• https://www.blog.google/products/marketingplatform/analytics/
• https://www.optimizesmart.com/blog/
• https://www.analytics-ninja.com/blog.html
• https://online-metrics.com/start-here/

For the Google Tag Manager resources, I will put forward only one YouTube channel because it is responsible for preparing into the world of GTM and collecting data: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClgihdkPzNDtuoQy4xDw5mA

It’s nice to get some confirmation regarding the go-to resources for data and analytics. Maybe just some links for some people, but I was following them already.

The last chapter in the track is Attribution. And let me say that no track goes without finding some gold. There are some great points regarding the importance of (you guessed it) understanding consumer behavior.

I was under the impression that attribution is a numbers game. Reality and CXL minidegree proves me wrong. Attribution is aligining the business golas to the customer journey. Especially when this journey is not 100% happing online. I guess, as digital workers, we tend to forget about the interactions our clients take offline.

I’ve learned the meaning of ROPO – Research Online, Purchase Offline (or vice-versa) – and revisited the attribution models. A great chapter indeed.

In conclusion, I feel that the online courses industry is missing on something. I consider myself an avid learner, still, there is more to online learning – or maybe it’s just normal to have highs and lows when studying.

This article is the fifth in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.

If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.

It seems that if you want to run growth experiments user research is THE path. To write last week’s post I dedicated extra time to the chapter called user centric marketing thinking that I will learn everything I needed and next I would dive into growth experiments.

Little did I know that this week I will be learning about conversion research.

The good part is that now I understand why growth hackers get a bad reputation. When using listicles to “generate experiments ideas”, the chances to get relevant results are minimal. Also, this is why a part of the optimization program is to get deeper customer insights and can take up to three months.

Before jumping into the main topic, how to run growth experiments, it is time to include in this review series something about the learning experience at CXL Institute.

Let me be clear. The content is great. No doubt about it. It is so good that I consider writing an article about how I take notes. There is so much actionable information, I don’t want to miss it and going back to the notes is a path to master the fundamentals and process.

Yet the course management system is not the best I have seen. Before reviewing it, I wanted to understand the context. And Lady Luck visited me in a form of a comment from Peep Laja to this post:

In a reply to the question "What is your 5%?", he said: "For CXL Institute it's the network and content we produce. Not in the LMS business."

Now it makes sense and I don’t feel like critiquing the fact that I didn’t find a shortcut to the main table of contents and other shortcomings to the platform itself.

How to run growth experiments

The chapter on how to run experiments begins with a workshop by Peep Laja. It is a high-level overview of how to generate ideas, prioritize them, and decide when a test is winning. On the topic of A/B testing, I will write an article next week because the amount of information is over 9000.

First leson of growth experiments is that you simply don’t trust listicles. The articles are written by SEO people to get traffic and is a good practice to you don’t build a business on listicles.

But where do you start?

• best practices? yes. but it is not optimization. When you build a website it should follow the best practices
• design trends – not necessarily something to follow in general
• market leaders or competition – just copy Amazon? Not a great path and benchmarking is also not optimization

Start your own optimization process following these steps:

1. where are the problems
2. what are the problems
3. why is this a problem
4. turn these issues into test hypotheses
5. prioritize test and instant fixes

The discovery of matters is problem-solving 101. The foundation is the research with better data that answer business questions. For this you need a process and Peep Laja is presenting is the ResearchXL framework.

This helps you figure out what you should test and how to test the ideas. Here is in general what the framework steps are:

1. technical analysis
2. heuristic analysis – every page should have the only one desired action:
   • relevancy
   • clarity
   • motivation
   • friction
3. digital analytics
   • where are the leaks
   • which segments
   • what are users doing
   • which actions correlate with higher conversion
4. mouse tracking and form analytics
5. qualitative survey
   1. buyer groups
   2. which problem are they solving
   3. how are they deciding
   4. what’s holding them back
   5. what else do they want to know
6. user testing – ignore what the people say because what they do and what they say are two different worlds, especially if you pay them for the test. And try to give them three types of tasks: find a product – ecommerce – or a specific piece of information – for SaaS or lead gen. Find something broad – find a pair of jeans under $50 size 34 in black color. Finally, just go thru the funnel and ask questions:
   1. what’s difficult to understand
   2. what’s difficult to do
   3. what goes wrong

After working on discovering the problems, now we should have our own list of issues that we need to go and fix, not the listicles.

By the time I wrote down these notes, I realized that most of the information is in the form of blog posts on the CXL blog. But moving to the conversion research chapter, the content blew me away again.

I got actionable insights into how to approach each step. So it’s not only high-level but also an action-oriented content.

How to run growth experiments by prioritizing the right idea

Choosing models can be difficult. And having experience with implementing a NEW process in various teams, I feel that the model should be something that the team picks, not a copy of something that is popular.

Let me say it: sometimes stakeholders don’t care about your models and they might be right. Here is a quote from a famous British statistician:

Essentialy, all models are wrong… but some are useful.

George E.P. Box:

So I will leave you with a list of models and you should pick the one that is useful for you:

• CXL’s PXL Framework
• Chris Goward’s P.I.E Framework
• Sean Ellis’ F.U.D.W.M
• Bryan Eisenberg’s Plan, Measure, Improve Framework

For a deep dive on this topic, read this article.

Mistakes while you run growth experiments

1. Precious time is wasted on stupid tests (generate ideas that are relevant for your business)
2. Thinking that you know what will work
3. Copying other’s experiments (competition doesn’t know any better and benchmarks are just that, a point of reference)
4. Having a sample size that is too low
5. Run growth experiments long enough (always test full weeks and try to have it live at least 7, 14 or 21 days)
6. The data from the experiment tool is not sent properly to the analytics tool
7. Giving up if the hypothesis fails
8. Ignoring validity threats: the history effect, instrumentation effect, selection effect
9. Ignoring small gains (5% monthly increase in conversion rate will result in 80% uplift for the year)
10. Not running tests all the time.

Resources:

The Fogg behavior model is mentioned in the workshop video. I wanted to mention it as a resource because it explains how or why a customer takes action. It’s never something that you control but is something that you can guide.

This article is the fourth in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.

Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?

This article is the third in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.

The customer is always right, right?

This is something that we as marketers should be used to. But how do we get a more user centric marketing approach to digital marketing?

Usually we do marketing research.

In my personal experience, even if user research exists, most of the time it usually sits somewhere and nobody uses it.

The reason I decided to focus on this particular chapter in the Growth Marketing Minidegree is that probably this is the most underrated type of information that we can use to drive growth.

As far as I understand growth comes from running experiments and with each one we better understand the user.

User centric marketing strategies

When you want to disrupt a niche, usually Facebook Ads and/or Google Ads are just a way to burn money if you don’t know your customer. Starting the strategy with a user centric marketing approach is much better because some of the growth channels are the ones where users already are present and enjoy their digital life. Ideally, the product is just a cool nice finding for them.

At the end of the day user centric marketing draws on user research and user experience design and it seeks to use digital tools to better understand users and their journey so that we design our marketing strategy around them.

How to map the customer journey (and understand it)

The result of marketing activities is usually an action a user takes (to move down the funnel). In order to ask any type of action from anybody, it is crucial that we first understand them.

Understanding the audience with frameworks like buyer persona or the improved empathy maps builds on assuming what is the customer journey.

The way I would represent it is something like this: the customer journey is the path to a win (getting revenue) and the buyer person (or empathy map) is the road to find the ideal customer.

The urban legend says, that at Amazon, in every meeting, there is an empty chair to remind everybody of the customer. It sounds like a great way to avoid forgetting about user research.

Some keytakeaways:

• digital has changed a consumer’s relationship with businesses and the impact of that on the sales and marketing funnel.
• our current approach of running marketing campaigns is inefficient in the light of the capabilities that digital tools offer us.
• a more user-centric approach to marketing has the potential to improve conversion and create happier customers who will recommend you to others.

Inbound marketing uses buyer personas a lot, and I thought that it was an industry standard. It seems that this representation can be improved by using an empathy map to better understand the audience.

Since doing growth marketing, usually revolves around improving the product, not just the marketing campaign, I would add to the following list of resources on user centric marketing the Jobs-To-Be-Done framework.

User Centric Resources

• https://lookback.io/
• https://alistapart.com/article/what-really-matters-focusing-on-top-tasks/
• http://sensible.com/rsme.html

In the chapter, something struck me. A simple and fail-proof way to embed user research in teams is to do it on recurring bases.

This is the first time I heard somebody look at the process of mapping a customer journey like a story. And like any story is not meant to be 100% accurate, but it should help us understand the user and context.

Think about it, when you look at the matrix below, it feels like there is science behind the customer map, but what if we start to treat it like a story with different turns.

Resources for usability tests:

• https://usabilityhub.com/
• https://helio.app/
• https://ethn.io/
• https://www.userinterviews.com/
• https://www.testingtime.com/en/
• https://usabilityhub.com/examples/site-intended-audience
• https://usabilityhub.com/product/first-click-tests
• https://www.optimalworkshop.com/optimalsort/
• https://lookback.io/features/self-test/
• https://www.userzoom.com/
• https://maze.design/

Let’s split the tools we use in two types: analytics and screen recording tools. A simple approach to growing the campaign post-launch is to use:

• analytics because they are useful for finding drop-off points: where on the site are users leaving or abandoning?
• screen recording tools are useful for identifying why people are dropping off at a particular point.

These 2 simple steps will help identify the problem, but it won’t tell you how to fix it. For the next step, A/B testing is the key. But what can you do if you have low traffic website? Here are some hacks:

• test a smaller number of variations
• go for bigger changes that will result in a visible increase, not nuance small ones.
• reduce the statistical significance
• test close to the point of conversion if you have a low traffic website.
• if you still want to test something that is not at the conversion point, test for micro-conversions – actions that lead to the main conversion.

For example, the goal is to have sign-ups to the newsletter. Start experimenting with the wording of the form and of the submit button.

But if you want to know what blog post title works better to increase sign-ups, maybe it is better to look at micro-conversion goals like if people scrolled through the article to get to the newsletter form.

But never rely only on A/B test…

Going through the user-centric marketing chapter reminds me of a small conversation I had with John Maeda at WordCamp Paris. He said something that stuck with me regarding the difference between quantitative and qualitative data. When you close a deal in Asia, you first go out and eat, talk about life, and basically get to know the person, before going into the meeting room to talk business.

In western offices, you first go into the meeting room, close the deal, and after that go out to eat and celebrate.

It made me think, why should I ask a person something before I get to know him?

Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

In the first article about CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree I mentioned the difference between growth and traditional marketing. The main takeaway is that a growth mindset is key.

How to build a growth marketing process

To build a growth marketing process, you need enough data to understand something about what’s working and what’s not working for your customers. There are three main phases to start a growth marketing process:

1. defining the growth model
2. mapping out the customer journey
3. identifying all of the growth channels

Every growth marketing process needs to deliver on business goals. There are many ways to set goals, but a good method is to use baseline goals (to help keep people accountable) and stretch goals (to push you to get more results). There are three layers for implementing the growth marketing process:

• defining a high-level strategy and identify quarterly goals
• quarterly planning to build a roadmap and execute
• in-quarterly planning and high tempo execution

Defining the growth model

Most of the time, a customer goes thru similar stages: awareness of the brand to the acquisition (e.g. signing up for the site for the first time, or visiting the site for the first time), activation which is taking that first action.

Retention is sticking around (e.g. coming back and using the site regularly), revenue is the first purchase (or repeated purchases), and then referrals are when they share with somebody else.

Defining a growth model is essential for the growth marketing process because it sets metrics for each of the stages in a user’s journey. You could have main metrics for acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. Also, you can define sub-metrics that can drive growth like revenue per user, the number of users that are paying – with different tactics to increase revenue.

A good point is that you don’t start a growth team until you have product-market fit and you’re trying to accelerate an already existing and working business.

Growth teams can be split between the acquisition and activation side (demand team) and the engagement side (focus on retention, revenue, referrals) of the funnel because they operate differently and use different channels and different expertise.

Another way to do build a team around the growth marketing model is to focus on improving existing programs or look for totally new growth hacks. First optimize what you have currently, and then once you’ve squeezed every ounce of growth out of that, then find the next big growth unlock.

Define a hypothesis and start experimenting

You achieve goals by building and shipping experiments, analyzing them to either automate or scrap them.

The worst way to come up with experiments is to focus on growth metrics, rather than solving customer pain points that lead to an increase in performance.

So, walk the customer journey, and understand what is their perspective, focus down on a specific growth metric and come up with ideas to achieve the growth goals. Generated ideas with an effective brainstorming session:

• never just look for inspiration at companies in your industry
• don’t limit the ideas, it’s ok to have broad themes, but try to rephrase them into potential hypotheses for experiments: by doing x, we are going to see y improved in a metric because of z reason
• prioritize ideas using the ICE framework – try to predict the return on investment

If you don’t know what metrics to focus on in your overall growth marketing process go for either user growth or revenue growth.

The key components of any hypothesis are the independent variable, the dependent variable, and the assumptions.

Let’s take an example. The hypothesis would be: by increasing the number of emails about our premium membership in the first 30 days after signing up, we are going to see an increase in the percentage of new customers who make a purchase by 10% because people will be more educated about the benefits in terms of price, convenience.

The independent variable is the number of emails or communications that you send to new customers about the premium product. The dependent variable is the percentage of new customers who purchase. The assumptions are that people will buy more because they will be more educated about the benefits of that service to them, in terms of price, convenience.

Mapping out the customer journey

There is a chapter on user-centric marketing. This had so many nuggets of information I want to go over it again. The plan is to deep dive into the subject next week.

Now it is clear to me that the focus is on the customer journey, so having some tactics and frameworks is worth reviewing in a single article.

Before watching this chapter, I thought that you map the customer journey upfront and only once. It seems that we need to do it repeatedly in our growth marketing process. Maybe even once a quarter, because you can lose sight of what it actually looks after different iterations.

Key takeaways when you get deeper into the growth marketing process and customer journey:

• a customer doesn’t care about your industry, they want the best experience. So for example, if you ever had an awesome experience with a service provider, all of the next experiences, no matter the industry, would be compared with this one.
• to identify the biggest areas of opportunity and the biggest pain points for your customers explore the data and look at the AARRR funnel to find the biggest areas of opportunity: Where are people falling off the most in your funnel?
• other ways to look at data, try to find some more qualitative data to look for opportunities: talk to your users, conduct user surveys, call your customers, do focus groups.

Identifying the growth channels

What varies across growth models is the channels that you use to influence the metrics, but there are very few examples of businesses that have different growth models.

The answer to the question: what is the channel that amplifies growth?like any other expert answer: it depends.

Generally, there are 5 main growth channels that can amplify your business growth: SEM (PPC), SEO, Social and Display Ads, Email Marketing, Content marketing.

When picking channels consider groping them by shared patterns. For acquisition, there is SEO, SEM, paid ads, content marketing, and for activation email marketing, push notifications.

Key takeaways for picking the growth channels when implementing the growth marketing process:

• study the channels where users already spend time and exclude channels that are a big mismatch
  • Facebook works great for B2C
  • Linkedin is usually for B2B
  • Twitter can work for both most of the time
  • Instagram is great for eCommerce
• when in doubt, pick SEO and social media marketing
  • always start with keyword research and content gap analysis
  • targeting the right keyword is more important the highest volume keyword
  • there is an overlap with SEO, UX, and CRO
  • link building guide: https://backlinko.com/link-building
• main types of PPC campaigns
  • awareness campaigns
  • lead generation campaigns
  • pre-awareness
  • awareness & trigger
  • consideration
  • engagement
  • pre-sales
• content marketing is not just about writing articles, it is about all of the content that a company and brand puts out there.
• try new channels like mobile devices, apps, and virtual reality systems when you get to have fatigue channels.

Resources

• https://searchengineland.com/google-now-handles-2-999-trillion-searches-per-year-250247
• https://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-optimisation-seo/seo-analytics/comparison-of-google-clickthrough-rates-by-position/
• https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/
• https://ads.google.com/home/tools/keyword-planner/
• https://moz.com/explorer
• https://ahrefs.com/
• https://www.brightedge.com/

This article is the second in a series of 12 reviews of studying Growth marketing Minidegree at CXL Institute. Follow the minidegree tag for the entire series.