Why I am Taking CXL’s Growth Marketing Minidegree (Week 1 Review)

Week 1 of CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree. I’ll be posting 12, 1000 word essays for my CXL Scholarship. This is pretty smart solid user-generated marketing (they target the keyword review in their headlines and make sure we put CXL institute in our body), so other companies should take note. Plus it gives me the opportunity to “pay” for my degree in writing which is amazing for me. It also helps me synthesize, and add my own original thoughts to what I’ve been learning.

Shoutout to CXL for a solid scholarship program that both serves them and the student.

About 6 years ago, I found myself in a series of doctor’s offices. They had given me GI cocktails, empty promises, and assured me that there was nothing wrong with me.

There was obviously something wrong with me.

And as I went from doctor to doctor, I realized I had to solve this for myself.

Initially, it was incredibly overwhelming, but I read everything I could get my hands on.

I created a series of data dashboards to run experiments on myself to figure out a problem nobody knew anything about.

I had a full-time job as a healthcare technology consultant where I was doing high-level consulting and working analyzing data. However, I felt like there was something missing. As a supplement to my full-time job, I started working in the emerging field of online education.

I created online courses and helped others do so. In order to grow these courses, I learned the basics of copywriting, content marketing, and email marketing. I learned how to film marketing trailers, design curriculums, and how to design user behavior.

Initially, I considered these things as three separate parts of my life: my health issues, my full-time job, and my side gig. However, after I read literature about growth marketing, I saw how they were all connected.

My job taught me the fundamentals of statistics and analysis. In fixing my health, I was running growth experiments. And in marketing my courses (and reducing churn), I was optimizing the funnel.

Because of all these skills, I worked with various creators to grow and optimize their online courses.

Repeatedly, I bumped up against an important fact about the world.

I realized there is no lack of innovation, useful guidelines, and life-saving products. We have the knowledge, services, and products to change the world, but it is unevenly distributed.

In healthcare, I came across many patients who knew what to do, but they could not do it. The companies that employed them lacked the behavioral change strategies to sustain healthy populations.

In online education, I came across a lot of fantastic offerings that could help many people. However, creators didn’t know how to grow their audiences in a sustainable and authentic way.

We need marketers.

We need marketers to enact behavioral change, to grow audiences for potential life-changing products, and to evenly distribute the world’s innovations.

Marketing, growth, and all its synonyms have become dirty words. In the public, it’s seen as greedy, manipulative, and wrong.

However, after working with many of the most successful creators in the education industry, I realized there is a new type of marketing that is emerging.

Marketing 2.0 is honest, empathetic, and analytical. Its foundations are based on growth marketing and its emphasis on meeting the customer where the customer is at. Marketing 2.0 isn’t convincing, it “hires” the right people. It’s not manipulative or coercive, rather it’s generous. Marketing 2.0 isn’t a means to an end (just a way to sell extract money from a potential customer), but an end in of itself (even the marketing in itself is educational and useful to customers).

I’ve been calling this type of Marketing, Sincere Growth.

I’m taking CXL to learn the Growth parts of this and I will be adapting it based on what I believe works through testing and learning from other top people in this space.

Marketers today (especially in the creator space) need to be much more than what they were before.

These new marketers have to be end-to-end marketers. They need to deeply understand the funnel metrics, create the necessary content/product change, get buy-in from a team, promote the content, and then iterate based on the results of the experiment. They need to be scientists and artists simultaneously.

I have many years of experience working rigorously with data to create analytical software tools. I also work as a content creator and copywriter. So I can take what I see in the data to create strategic creative content (podcasts, blog posts, emails, press releases, video, etc.)

This mini degree is meant to be a capstone for all my previous work. It’s meant to take what I’ve learned scrappily and give it structure and foundation. It’s meant to help me understand how to “speak the language of growth.”

Because I am currently working, I used CXL in a just-in-time way. I learned about Email Marketing and various content strategy.

We went over various things from the more routine side (such as how to increase delivery rates) to the more creative ways to use data and storytelling to increase engagement add purchases.

One of the main things I learned is how useful my data analytic abilities are in email. It seems that every aspect of email marketing is heavily dependent on analytics. It also is fascinating how important creativity is. Creativity borne out of a deep understanding of analytics seems to be the key.

Next time, I will have more discussions about the content of the courses. See this as an introduction to what I’ve been learning and the general ideas behind the future of growth. Next time, I will also be diving deeper into the content to get a general understanding of what CXL is defining as growth marketing.

And on a final meta-note.

Apparently, this must forever stay on the internet as my terms of the deal with CXL, so I’m glad I will be able to look back in the future and cringe at my naivete.

More thoughts (“reviews”) to come. This is only 1 essay of 12.

Thank you CXL for the opportunity and the scholarship. Look forward to learning from your very talented and prestigious teachers.