Growth Marketing, more of a Lifestyle <> Review

This is Part 1/12 of learnings that I gained from CXL Institute’s Growth Marketing Minidegree.

7 min readAug 2, 2020

I am thankful to the CXL team for starting a scholarship program during COVID crisis. I am fortunate enough to gain access to the Growth Marketing Minidegree. This article is based on some new things that I picked up in week #1

What is CXL Institute?

CXL Institute is a big deal, at least for me it is, but, first, let me introduce my background. I am into the Digital Marketing space for the past two years. Nothing serious, just a small startup hacked together by three friends overnight to earn some quick cash by doing SEO, SMM and absolutely anything for anyone. During this period, we served brands like CASIO, COMIO Smartphones, Google’s Developer Group, IIT Kharagpur, just to name a few.

Every time I had to hack a pitch deck for some client, I used to come across at least one article by CXL concerning the services that I was about to try to sell. I just use to pick some marketing jargons and ideas that I learned from CXL blog and get them onboard. Yep, that was me, we did this a lot. In my defence, all clients are satisfied, we worked very hard, gave everything we had to meet their demands, and that’s how we sustained.

A long answer short, CXL Institute trains you to join the league of top 1% of the extremely successful Digital Marketers. I knew about CXL since quite a long time, there’s this infamous Data-driven SEO group named SEO Signals Lab, and there you can see CXL posts being shared and appreciated quite often. It’s (CXL) quite reputed is what I had heard. Still, now I can feel that after having the first hand experience to their Growth Marketing Minidegree. Now let’s get right into the review.

Growth Marketing Minidegree Quick Overview

Total Sections: 7
Number of Courses: 32
Total Hours of Video Content(tutorials): 108 hours 01 minutes. (I like how they mention 1 minute, there could be a psychological or marketing perspective to it, or it’s just the course length, but in India, we always add 1 in front of everything to make it lucky
:sweat_smile: )
And let’s not forget access to CXL Conference videos which they don’t mention on the sales page. You don’t get access to all the talks but the ones that are related to the topic that you are learning.
Access to the CXL community forum that hides behind the paywall. You can ask questions, and there’s also a Facebook group which is open to all. (If you are interested then Join CXL Facebook Community from here.)

Growth Marketing Unleashed | Foundations

Growth Marketing foundations is the first section among the seven others that you need to complete to get your Minidegree. It has 4 courses. I feel like this section focuses more on creating a mindset and acquainting a learner to different marketing jargon while breaking them in simple and easy to understand examples.

Growth mindset: growth vs traditional marketing | John McBride

The first course is Growth mindset: growth vs traditional marketing where John McBride happens to be the instructor. This course is kind of different. It doesn’t teach you any practical skills but gives you a small talk on things that you must consider or expect in a Growth Marketing career. It is focused more on why do you need a growth program and the philosophy behind it. Here’s a brief on what I learned:

Design > Ship > Analyze > Automate
What exactly does the term Growth Marketing means and as a Growth Marketer what all things that you are supposed to do? Everyone seems to have started calling it a growth hack. It simply means to do something quickly that fulfils your marketing goals.
As a Growth Marketer, you need to have skills in many different disciplines of marketing such as Analytics, Landing Page optimization, Channel Specific skills like Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc. and even SEO, SEM, SMM. All of them, when combined, can help you hack a growth plan.
Additionally, what majority of companies miss is individual-level marketing. You study each and every prospect and design actions that lead to conversion. You can convert from anywhere between 40–60% of your user-base with such a powerful marketing tactic.
Focus more on experimenting. Be it A/B testing a landing page, running 2 campaigns a week, or anything, but keep on experimenting. As you do so, you will know more about your audience. All those little insights that you gain from each experiment can help you plan your campaigns more correctly.
People spend too much on advertising and half of which is wasted. To know which half to optimize, start experimenting. That way, when planning a big campaign, you already know when something isn’t going to work because you tested it previously.
(Strategic, analytical) thinking + Channel level Expertise = a perfect Growth Marketer. While building a growth team, one must not only focus on channel level expertise but also on strategic thinking and analytical skills. One must be enthusiastic.
There’s this one thing that got me thinking. Growth is just not in marketing, but it must be focused on our lifestyle as well. It’s essential to grow in every aspect.

Growth is about a process. There isn’t one hack, it’s a series of hack that fold into a broader process about constantly experimenting and learning so that you can accelerate learning and get to the end result and the end goal faster.
— John McBride in Growth mindset: growth vs traditional marketing

Building a Growth process | John McBride

Second Course was on Building a Growth process by our beloved instructor John McBride. Now that we know the importance of a growth program, here’s how you can get started with growth marketing initiatives. It’s about sustainable growth and how to go after your marketing goals.

We must have goals. But it’s equally important to not have unrealistic goals. You may have nailed one year with a good turnover and expecting a 3x or 4x with no actionable plan is just not going to get you anywhere. There must be a defined growth model. It’s whether to focus on the web or go mobile. You need to answer those questions right.
Hence, it is essential to have quarterly goals. And realistic, achievable. You must define it precisely and progressively work towards it.
Also having multiple small campaigns can be more beneficial rather than putting all your efforts on one big campaign. No one knows if it will boom or maybe not. So having multiple experimental campaigns is a great tactic that you can implement.
We usually have tons of meetings that are not necessary. Anything that can be concluded with an email must be kept that way. You need to have a clear agenda on mind while having a strategic discussion. Right when you start the meeting, it must be focused in and around your growth goals.
Next good thing is to prioritize. You might not have a huge budget to organize a big campaign as it takes a lot of work and efforts for not only marketers but even for engineering teams to deliver that piece of work. So it’s always better to start off with small campaigns that you can start right away. Also, keep experimenting.

Use-centric Marketing | Paul Boag

The third course is on User-centric Marketing by Paul Boag. Again as the foundations, this one takes a theoretical approach on being more user-centric. It merely means to give what the user wants, and you can identify this with different methods. It is a perfect mix of User research and marketing tactics.

Digital marketing has changed customer relationship with brands. Now people are more vocal about their experiences. If some brand fails to acknowledge them or ignore their users, then it will be the end of it. With the user-centric approach, the chances of such events are minimal. Changing digital channels is easier plus You get more feedback from digital channels.
Going beyond the user persona is essential. You must know the objections of your customers and not just someone who has 2 kids and drives an Audi. It’s almost irrelevant to the changing times.
A step further is to create empathy maps. You get more objections, and feelings of users which may drive important decisions while designing campaigns.
Considering user research in the design process is quintessential. You do that by multiple ways such as one to one meetings, remote meetings, and even by running surveys. Just don’t ask emails and names while you plan to run surveys. Keep it short and only have closed questions. To get brownie points to focus on User tasks, Goals, Pain points, and objections.
Top task analysis must be done to improve product representation. It can be used to inform the visual hierarchy of key landing pages, decide what calls to action must be prioritized, and most importantly, to shape the information architecture.
User research is out of budget, that’s a myth. You can do it with absolutely zero cents. Ask your colleagues in marketing about users, ask the front line staff (customer care) and anyone who deals with users daily. Collect all the freely available data from social media, and when everything is combined, you have our research ready.
One to one meetings with customers is highly underrated. It can completely change your perspective. Have them alt least once every few weeks.
Design your campaigns with the users. Involve them in the customer journey mapping and keep everything in mind to make a remarkable product.
Card sorting is another excellent method to reflect what’s going on in customers mind.
Always use prototypes as it replaces specifications. Do a usability test to quickly identify how it feels and looks.
Run Semantic differential survey to check if your designs tone matches with users thought process. A five-second test is also the right choice. Most importantly, avoid having focus groups. It’s just not that insightful.
Bring heat maps and analytics into the play to analyze post-campaign success.

After User-centric design, you are challenged with a Test of 30 MCQ’s. You need to score 90% for passing the course. Also, there’s a lot of reading material that is shared with each lesson in a course.

Access Growth Marketing Minidegree to know more about the curriculum.

That’s it in the first review. There’s one more course remaining in the first section which I will cover in the next one as I haven’t yet completed it.

Thanks for reading, I hope you learned some new terms.