Growth Marketing is not just a Buzzword: CXL Institute’s Mini-Degree Review 1/12
“If you ask 10 people what growth hacking means, you’ll get 10 different answers. Some people think it’s about taking shortcuts and these little workarounds and ephemeral hacks that get you kind of quick wins without having to do any of the efforts and I completely disagree with that. The second way is that people think it’s about hustle, you know, doing the things that don’t scale and I also disagree with that, you can hustle for a long time without getting any growth. A lot of people think it’s just a fancy name for conversion optimization and I think it kind of is and then other people think it’s about engineering-led marketing and it kind of is as well. My definition though of growth hacking is, experiment-driven marketing focused on how the product itself creates growth.”
This was Morgan Brown explaining growth hacking 5 minutes into his 28 minutes talk at the ConversionXL Live 2016 conference. As I watched, I knew that taking the growth marketing mini-degree at CXL Institute would be a great learning experience. I’m excited that I’ve been allowed to take CXL’s growth marketing mini-degree as a participant of their scholarship program and for the next 12 weeks, I’ll be sharing my learning experience.
What is the Growth Marketing Mini-degree about?
This mini-degree is one of the six mini-degrees CXL institute offers. The one on growth marketing is the lengthiest collection of individual self-paced video courses with over 113 hours required to complete it. It is designed to help you learn how to accelerate your business by running growth experiments, optimizing the channels that work best for you, and scaling your growth program. It is broken down into 3 key parts: data and analytics | growth channels | experimentation.
What I love about the method of teaching is that it’s a holistic approach ensuring that learning is varied, easy, and engaging. You go through event videos, video tutorials with transcripts, and exams.
Why Growth Marketing?
Whether you’re a generalist, specialist, or a beginner in any area of marketing communications, the question should be, Why not? There was a time when traditional marketing was revolutionary - print, and radio ads were the coolest ways to advertise until digital marketing changed the way marketers communicated their products or services and how consumers reacted. But in a time where technology continuously evolves, it is not far-fetched to say that conventional marketing is phasing out. Right now, if you want to help your business grow, rapid experimentation is a fast and efficient way to get there.
Growth Marketing vs Traditional Brand Marketing
Hacks and quick results have been associated with growth marketing but that isn’t what it is. Rather, it is the process of carrying out experiments to help discover new insights that can be used to make improvements, and built upon for future experiments. As John McBride says, “growth is all about the process”.
Growth marketing is a structured approach to customer-centric marketing. It focuses on the entire customer journey and ways to optimize scalability for a business. It involves understanding your customers, their journey, optimizing your funnel, and setting actionable metrics.
To fully optimize and scale a business, growth marketing leans heavily into focus and experimentation. These 2 are the significant differences between growth marketing and traditional brand marketing. They help to identify challenges and unlock growth in the customer’s journey.
Focus
What do you focus on when it comes to growth marketing? The entire funnel! As a growth marketer, your job is to drive growth across the business in any way that you can. A framework strongly suggested to adapt is the AARRR framework — Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.
On the other hand, traditional brand marketing is focused on the top of the funnel which is just awareness and acquisition. It’s about promoting a product or service through campaigns without tracking all the significant metrics to determine if the campaign was successful or not.
Experimentation
The way to drive growth across all areas of the funnel is to constantly experiment with different programs, campaigns, product features, etc. that increase conversion, create better customer experiences, generate data that you can then use to learn and improve so that you can continually optimize your funnel, and grow the business.
As for traditional brand marketing, John McBride explains it best, “It would be to come up with the best single campaign that’s going to take you from A to B in one fell swoop. If you’re right, that’s great, you’ve won, you’re a genius, you get a promotion and a raise. But if you’re wrong, you don’t get a second chance because you’ve spent all this time and resources, you’ve put all of your chips on the table with this one campaign.”
Setting and Achieving High Impact Growth Goals
Goals move teams forward. It keeps teams focused on maximizing the highest leverage opportunities to achieve set goals. Sean Ellis gave a 29 minutes talk at the CXL live 2017 conference which stresses how goals are critical to sustainable growth. Now, you don’t need to be a growth marketer to understand the importance of setting goals. However, what I enjoy about his talk is how he breaks down goals that are critical to sustainable growth. So, how do you set and achieve these goals?
1. Define the core experience of the product that delivers value to the users.
2. Figure out your north star metric (this reflects the overall value being delivered to your customers) and set that as your measurement for success.
3. Have relatively short-term goals that will lead to the north star metric. Be specific about what you want to achieve (this is where we are and this is where we need to get to). Remember your SMART objectives?
4. Focus team and resources on achieving that long-term goal. To achieve this, have 1 or more short-term goals/objectives assigned to each team member and be sure that they’re passionate about achieving it.
5. Rally the team around the overall goal. Growth is cross-functional and will require the insights and skillset of different departments, from product to business development to customer support, and marketing all connected to that overall goal.
6. Find a proven process and apply it to achieve your goal:
- Define the objective.
- Analyze the situation.
- Generate ideas.
- Prioritize those ideas.
- Test the ideas and have a hypothesis around them.
- Learn through the tests, refine your analysis, and share progress reports.
- Improve your tests as you keep going until you achieve the goal.
Adapting the Lean Start-up Methodology for Growth
Another quote from Morgan Brown which I love is, “Rapid experimentation is the fastest way to growth.” Let me break down what this means using the lean start-up methodology, one of the founding philosophies of Silicon Valley which can be applied to growth.
1. Define a hypothesis: You define upfront about what a customer wants. For example, our customers care about X, so we are going to run an experiment to see if X is something that they care about.
2. Find the fastest and most efficient way to test the hypothesis: How the message will be crafted and the channels to use. You can decide whether it’s going to be a messaging campaign, a video, or a newsletter and see if they care about X.
3. Design an experiment that can validate or invalidate your hypothesis: The way customers respond determines whether you’re right or wrong. If you’re right, you learn that they care about X, then you can double down on your confirmed hypothesis and if you’re wrong, go back to the drawing board and let what you’ve learned inform future experiments.
One thing John McBride reiterates severally is the fact that failing experiments is part of growth as long as you take the learnings from that failure and compile them into a better understanding of your customers, how channels perform, what people like about your brand and messaging, and put them to use when creating the next experiment.
CXL is a top-notch online marketing training institute with instructors who are among the top 1% in the industry, they aim to train fully equipped marketers who know their onions. You get access to in-depth programs that require considerable effort to complete them but I promise you that you’ll be better for it!
