As someone who truly wants to ace the growth marketing game, help organisations achieve their business goals, think of out of the box, scalable hacks and overall become a cohesive, 360 degree marketer, CXL’s mini degree that claimed to provide just that, definitely caught my eye.
As I finish my first week into the course I think it’s important that I put my thoughts to words, both for my own understanding later on and for anybody who might be looking for a sincere feedback.
I’ll try to keep this as bulleted and concise as possible.
A few thoughts before I begin.
As someone with 1 year of experience as a marketer and another 1 year as a growth marketer I was already fully aware of whatever basic, theoretical knowledge you can expect a marketer to have. If you ask me definitions of what A/B testing is, user persona, GTMs, funnels, conversion optimization, Retention, Acquisition etc. there’s a good chance my hand would shoot up like a wannabe Hermione Granger in Snape’s class.
But what I needed was not sugarcoated, surface level know how that’d make a college fresher feel validated and important. I’m already aware that unless you know the practical stuff- there’s really not much you can do with theories except crack interviews and look cool at parties.
So after digging deep into CXL’s syllabus, course material, instructors, time, pricing and everything, I decided to give it a try. Here’s what I’ve learned so far —
Please be cognizant that this review is by someone who already has work experience.
Lecture #1
The first lecture is by John McBride, who is himself a seasoned growth marketer at Calm App.
Pros:
- Phenomenal clarity about the role of a growth marketer.
- Insight about what to expect in growth interviews.
- Throws light on what should be the mindset of a growth marketer.
- Clarity on Traditional Marketing vs. Growth Marketing
- How do you prioritize experiments?
- Power of personalization.
- How to plan and define your Growth Model.
- How to measure your growth experiments?
Cons:
- Plenty of new concepts with little attempt at digging deep.
- Almost like a coffee table conversation about growth.
But since this was only the introduction, let’s cut some slack.
Lecture #2
User Centric Marketing
This lecture had some pretty solid points about the right ways to conduct user research. Sometimes, even after having a significant sample size, your research doesn’t really help you get to a conclusion because you’re not asking the right questions, or you’re asking too many (or too less) questions.
Pros:
- How to: Move way from typical, traditional persona mapping like — what car does your user drive, what is their annual income, what kind of job do they have? Delve into deeper insights about your customer; what are their objections in life? What questions do they want the answer to? What are their goals and pain points? What interests them? What kinds of websites are they frequenting?
- What is the right moment to push a survey? Push too soon, you’re intrusive, push too late, you’ve missed your chance. Ideally the right time to push a survey is after a user completes a task or reaches an aha-moment. Chances of him willing to help increase.
- Top Task Analysis: This was a brand new concept I learned about how to prioritize which tasks or pain points to address in your product. Often, your hunches about what ‘could’ be the problem have a marketer’s bias. Remove all or any such assumptions by running a simple test.
- Jot down any and every possible question you can think of regarding your product.
- Group those questions into separate categories. Example: Payment, Navigation, Cart, Fee etc.
- Ask users to rate those categories between 1–5, 1 being the most important and 5 being the leat (or whatever scale suits you).
Benefits of this exercise are that you can use these learnings to:
- Know what ‘really’ matters to your customers.
- Redefine your website’s visual structure.
- Plan your social media or overall campaign strategy.
How to decide upon the right design for your customers?
Preference Test- Share mockups of your design variants, ask customers to pick whichever speaks to them the most.
Word Cloud Survey- Take a design mockup and mention a certain set of keywords underneath it. Request users to pick the keywords, phrases that suit the design the most.
First click test- Used for web design testing, you notice where the users click first. What grabs their attention first.
5 Second Test- To ensure users are taking away the right message out of a campaign.
Cons:
Some of the lectures could have been a bit more condensed. Less beating around the bush please. :)
Lecture #3
How to identify and amplify the right growth channels.
This was the most disappointing lecture so far. To speak in no depth but just scratch the surface about a topic as relevant and important as finding the right channels of growth- it was blasphemy.
Pros:
- Good introduction for someone completely new to growth and has no idea of what scalable growth channels are.
Cons:
- No insight, no case studies, no analysis.
- The course covered more on ‘what’ but never came to the ‘how?’ I was left with a 100 unanswered questions post this lecture.
One of the channels of growth was mentioned as PPC. What are the odds that I don’t already know that? So how did you optimize your PPC? What were your learnings?
SEO is a great channel for organic growth? Yes, I know. What crazy, new methods did you use to drive it for your organization? What did you do differently?
Since I’m really running short on time and have to squeeze out hours from my schedule (even compromise on my sleep time) to finish this degree, these unnecessary ‘discussions’ make me impatient and anxious. Please cut to the chase?
So this was my Week 1 at CXL Growth Marketing Mini-degree program. I have to agree the pros are definitely more than the cons so far. I’ve already started and finished the first lecture from Week 2 and boy, I am impressed. Some pretty solid insights there.
See you after Week 2!
