I got an email from CXL institute that my application for the scholarship has been accepted and that was the best thing that happened to me in the past week. Just a week has passed and I can already sense the changes that I have learned from the CXL Institute.
This blog post shares all the knowledge that I got from the courses and also the context that I will be using. So let’s begin:
Growth marketing foundations
Growth Mindset: Growth vs Traditional Marketing
Growth marketing focuses on the full-funnel strategy and runs through heavy experimentation. My job as a growth marketer is to drive growth across the business in any way that you can.
The way how growth is driven across all the areas of the programs, campaigns, products feature, etc. that increase conversion create better customer experiences generate data that you can then use to learn and improve constantly optimize the funnel.
Here are some important things to consider:
- Admit that you don’t know anything about your customer.
- Define a hypothesis of what the customer wants.
- Find the fastest and the most efficient way to test the hypothesis. Design an experiment to validate/invalidate it.
- Run lots of individual campaigns or experiments.
Experimentation as the defining trait of growth:
The ideal state of any growth process is to get to the point where you know what is the right message, right offer, the right customer experience for each individual customer to drive the best experience and results.
3 layers of growth experimentation:
- Knowing whether the XYZ conversion experiment is working, is it the right one?
- Figure out the right message, or the right offer or the right campaign.
- Tailor the message to individual customers.
Quick aside on Growth Hacking:
It’s about building a minimum viable marketing campaign. There’s no one magic hack. Growth is a process and is a series of hacks.
What makes a successful Growth Marketer:
- Channel level marketing: Handling specific channels like Facebook ads or email campaigns.
- Analytical capabilities: Excel or SQL skills extract data to gather insights, analyze their own experiments.
- Strategic thinking and project management
How to become a Growth Marketer:
Showing that you are a quick learner is a very powerful skill in growth hacking. Check growthhackers.com for case studies of the companies you are applying to or wishing to pitch as an agency. Learn how they grow, what were their frameworks, what are the channels they used.
Once all this is done then get into the interview with a strong understanding, probably of how this business actually thinks about their growth model. Go with cool ideas about experiments they should try.
Get some hands-on experience, test some stuff with your website/podcast or of your clients/previous internships, and show the results.
How to grow your career in Growth Marketing:
From the skills required for growth marketing, see what you are goof ar and what you like the most.
Building a growth process
3 main phases:
- Defining your growth model, mapping out customer journeys, and identifying all of your growth channels.
- Explore data, Identify your quarterly goals, start building the road map to execute and achieve those goals.
- Build experiments, ship your experiments, analyze them, and then either automate and scale them.
The most famous growth model, AARRR frameworks (acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referrals) This focuses on the full-funnel strategy, and improving each metric will lead to business growth.
Walkthrough the customer journey. What does it look like from their perspective to go through the entire funnel?
In the customer journey see:-
- How do they come to know about you? Assume an ideal way as there could be hundreds of factors. Also, find what’s the best way for them to find about your brand.
- What is the optimal experience you can imagine them having when they came to your site for the first?
- What do you want them to feel after they buy?
- What are the touchpoints that they got via email, or push, etc
- After their first purchase, What leads them to refer a friend.
The best practice is to do the above exercise quarterly.
Quarterly Growth planning:
Start with analyzing the data with the customer journey in view. Think through all of the different steps that your customer takes on their way from finding out about your products or service all the way through towards becoming a loyal, frequent habitual customer.
More important things in growth marketing are prioritizing the most impactful things and finding the most impactful ways to grow the business.
Explore data and set your goals. OKR: Objectives and key result
Identifying Quarterly goals:
Setting goals for every 3 months is the best way. In a growth team max, 4–5 people should focus on one metric like acquisition or engagement.
How to effectively brainstorm:
- Bring in people, do a meeting, and talk about a specific metric.
- Research other companies you admire to see what they are doing to improve XYZ metric.
- Reach out to people working in growth teams and learn from their experience.
Prioritizing:
- Estimate the impact of the experiment.
- See if you have tried similar experiments before.
- Understand what resources you have, what growth hack you can use, how confident you are about it then list out, which one will you do first.
In quarter execution:
Once you have a hypothesis, test it, and analyze it.
Experimentation Process:
Design your experiment: What are the objectives, what are your goals.
User-Centric Marketing
Why do we need a user-centric approach to marketing:
We use centric marketing draws on user research and user experience design. It draws on the fields and the things that we’ve learned in these fields to bring marketing into the 21st century.
How do we start to adopt a user-centric approach:
It’s about understanding the following things about the user:-
- What is influencing them?
- What are their goals and pain points?
- How they are feeling during this process.
How to better understand your audience without spending a cent:
- Start from the sales team, dg out information from them.
- Ask all the major sales objections.
- Get the commonly asked questions.
Building a picture of your audience using surveys:
- Get a very clear idea of what you are going to ask and have a specific goal that will be achieved if you get the data.
- Getting an idea of where your customers want to go is more important than who your customers are:-
- Ask people to fill the survey at the right time. In the case of a website let people finish why exactly they chrome to the website or at least give them some moments to settle in.
- Keep the survey short, often one ques is enough.
- Don’t ask personal questions and start from the easiest question.
- Try adding an incentive to the survey
- Don’t tell them at the start that you are going to give something instead give it as a gift. This will make them happier and they will get a feeling of giving something back and they will share it with friends.
Well, that’s all I learned in the first week of the CXL mini-degree program. The learning is just awesome. I’m super excited to complete the mini-degree.
Thant’s all for today, take care:)
