CXL Institute Growth Marketing

 

Twelve weeks ago, I have started a journey with CXL Institute to learn more about digital marketing.

I had no idea about anything related to digital marketing before starting this journey. I mean sure, I knew some buzzwords like SEO, Backlinking, CPC, email marketing. But honestly, I had a vague idea of what it meant and even less of an idea how to do something about it.

By pure chance I stumbled across this course on CXL Institute. And it was a blessing that I did.

The course is divided in eight parts, or seven since the last one is the final exam. Ill briefly write about each part of this Growth Marketing Minidegree course.

1)     Growth Marketing Foundations

First part of the course is all about understanding the difference between traditional and growth-oriented marketing as well as understanding how to build your process.

Further I got acquainted with the notion of user-centered marketing outside of “the customer is always right” tagline I heard in every movie about sales.

Finally, I got a basic idea of how to identify all the interesting channels I might use for promotion.

This part was interesting for me as the course was just getting started. It had one exam for the user-centered marketing and honestly, I had to go over the materials several times before I passed. With the needed 90% completion rate to pass I felt like I learned something by the time I managed to pass the test as well that I have earned the certificate for user centered marketing.

2)     Running growth experiments

Moving on to the second part of the course I started to learn about research and testing. In the second course of this part Conversion Research, you learn the CXL framework for research. This is the most useful part of this part for me as I have no chance of running A/B experiments anytime soon.

Because to do A/B testing you need to have a certain number of traffic/conversions in a given timeframe. But at least learning about it had given me solid reference points for future planning and growth. Which is more important than trying to test without understanding the theory behind it.

Second part wraps up with fundamentals of statistical analysis which you must know in order to gain any insight from data.

3)     Data and analytics

To be able to do any statistics you have to have data first. Which this part of the course is all about. From Basic and Intermediate Google Analytics and Basic Google Tag Manager course I learned how to set up all the tracking I might need to begin gathering information. Of course, there is much more to learn regarding this topic, but I have a solid foundation to build upon after going through these twenty hours of videos.

Also, another important topic is covered in this part is Attribution and what models of attribution exist. To understand which channels, bring which conversions there needs to exist a company wide attribution model which everyone understands and follows. Now in my example this isn’t that much of an issue, however in a larger organization this might prove to be an issue in case there are various attribution models in different departments.

Finally, this part wraps up with Excel and Google sheets course which will be useful depending on your pre-existing knowledge. For me it did not offer anything I did not know before. However, the course is soundly structured, and it offers very solid foundations for data analysis in Excel.

4)     Conversion

Now this part offered me a detailed insight into Landing Page optimization and Product messaging. Both courses offer frameworks and premade documents with checklists you need to go through before going live with your landing page or product copy. Fundamentally important for success.

5)     Channel-specific growth skills

Well, this part was truly daunting once I have gotten to it. It has thirteen courses with over 30 hours of materials to go through.

Email marketing, messaging strategy in public relations, Facebook adds, Google Ads, Content Strategy and SEO for lead generation, Retention, Maximizing Audiences, SEO driven editorial calendar, LinkedIn advertising, YouTube Ads, Technical SEO, Data-driven influencer marketing and Account Based marketing.

Just typing all of them is a handful and going through all these courses took weeks of time and effort.  Almost every course had its own exam and I had to go through the material several times before passing all the exams.

However, this is approach of examining each individual growth channel and then some really drove home how large digital marketing is and how much more there is to learn.

Before the course I knew nothing but at the same time I had no idea of what it is I know nothing about.

Of this I still know I do not know anything but at least I have an idea of what it is I do not know anything about. Which honestly, is a substantial improvement.

6)     Growth program management

This part of the course, albeit short, explains how to plan and track a growth team and its activities. How to approach scaling and how to communicate data. Since there is only two of us in my organization for the moment this segment, outside of how to plan for eventual scaling, has not brought that many applicable insights to me.

But still, it is valuable insofar that I know where to look in the future.

7)     Management

Well, this segment, final one, had one of the more interesting topics for me at least. Which is how to set up and manage your data collection (outside of GA/GTM). It introduced many, many innovative programs, and tools you can use to automate and optimize your data collection and communication. This part also briefly covered Project management and Marketing Strategy. Which just provided specific insights related to marketing through topics which are common to project management in general.

 

Concluding thoughts on CXL Growth management course

It has been an arduous journey. Their tagline that this course is only for the serious and disciplined is truly spot on.

Unless I worked diligently there is no chance that I would have finished the entire course in twelve weeks.

However, I am genuinely happy and grateful to have had this chance. I gained a tremendous amount of knowledge which I am looking forward to implementing soon.

My next step is going to be to go over all the materials once more. Set up the documents and templates I got through this course and start from GA/GTM and SEO optimization and content marketing.

I do not believe implementation will be without its issues, but I have a lot of materials to reference should something prove to be outside of my reach.

I will recommend CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree to anyone who wants to learn something truly applicable in digital marketing.

It has been a pleasure to go through this course and I hope I can continue to keep learning from CXL Institute.