CXL Mini-degree Scholarship Week 1 Review.

This article is first in a series of 12 weekly articles that detail what I learn in my currently ongoing growth mini-degree scholarship with the CXL institute.

I have been deeply fascinated by the field of growth marketing ever since I discovered it and for a while I tried learning what I could about growth through blogs and YouTube videos but I struggled to stay consistent with my learning for two reasons:

• There was zero structure to my learning: I jumped from topic to topic so I usually missed a lot of context around what I was learning and often ended up being frustrated when I came across something that was beyond my depth.
• In my learning experience, there were very few resources that delved into the fundamentals of growth from a first principles approach.

What these helped me realize is that if I ever wanted to get serious about learning growth marketing. I had to look for a program that teaches growth marketing in a structured manner from the bottom up with the best minds in growth teaching the program.

Luckily for me, a couple of weeks after making this realization. I stumbled across the CXL Institute scholarship program (CXL is a world leading marketing institute founded by Peep Laja and their mission is to help determined marketers become the top 1% in the world. They do this by identifying the best marketing practitioners in the world and get them to teach what they know.)

The minute I came across the CXL scholarship program, it was a no-brainer that I had to apply.

My immediate research showed me that it was without a doubt one of my best options for learning growth marketing.

I applied for the program, I got in and so far it’s been one week of learning growth marketing from CXL and I can already say that it’s one of the best learning experiences of my life.

The lessons are easy to digest and taught by some of the best people in growth marketing.

Here is what I have learnt this past week:

The difference between growth marketing & traditional marketing.

Let’s consider a scenario where a certain Miss Adenuga owns an e-commerce platform for people to order wigs and have them delivered to their doorstep. Miss Adenuga’s customers pass through a top-down marketing funnel (they start out as prospects before they become customers):

• Awareness.
• Acquisition.
• Revenue.
• Retention.
• Referral.

While traditional marketing would usually be concerned with the marketing activities that happen at the top of the funnel i.e activities that spur awareness & acquisition for Miss Adenuga’s e-commerce platform.

Growth marketing on the other hand focuses on the entire funnel from the very top-of-the-funnel to the bottom-of-the-funnel, it’s a mix of activities from awareness to referral.

As a growth marketer, your job is to basically drive growth across the business through experimentation.

To give you more context on the preceding statement, think of it this way; marketing activities are usually driven by hypothesis. If you own a business, your marketing activities are based on a set of hypothesis around:

• Who your customers are.
• What they want.
• Your messaging points.
• The best channels to reach them on.

With traditional marketing, you would tend to invest heavily in your hypotheses. You bet on that grand marketing campaign that helps you hit your business goals in one swoop but if your hypotheses is faulty then your campaign fails and all the resources you invested heavily would have been wasted.

However with growth marketing, you have to start by admitting that you don’t actually know what your customers want and your duty as a growth marketer would be to come up with a set of hypothesis, identify the fastest and most efficient way to test your hypothesis and then run an experiment to test the hypothesis you came up with.

With the growth marketing approach, it’s fine to be wrong because you are learning. If an experiment based on a certain hypothesis fails. What you learn informs the next experiment you design and helps you to be better with it.

Experimentation as the the defining trait of growth.

Experimentation is at the very heart of growth marketing. Like I said earlier, your job as a growth marketer is to define the series of experiments that help you achieve your business goals.

Let’s revisit our earlier example of Miss Adenuga who owns a wig e-commerce platform. Say only 50% of her acquired customers come back for purchases on a monthly basis and she is trying to raise the figure to 60% monthly.

Her business goal in this scenario is to move retention from 50% MoM to 60% MoM

A growth marketer’s job here would be to run a series of experiments to make this goal happen.

In traditional marketing, they probably won’t be focused on this because it’s farther down the funnel and even if they were, the approach would probably be to just send a mail and then see if there is a lift in retention or if it drives traffic back to the website.

Now the problem with the traditional marketing approach is that it’s hard to actually pinpoint what’s driving improved performance of the metric if you don’t run an experiment.

Is it because the messaging point was based on pricing or maybe convenience? Was it the time it was sent? Did a certain segment of the customer base respond better to a messaging point?

All of these are things running an experiment helps you pinpoint.

The ideal state of any growth process is to get to the point where you know what is the right message, right offer, right customer experience for each individual customer in the business.

What makes a successful growth marketer.

There are three main components to being a successful growth marketer:

1. Channel Level Expertise: This refers to the depth of experience one has with a marketing channel e.g. Email marketing, SEO, Facebook ads etc.
2. Analytical capability: This is a super important requirement. Being able to extract data to gather insights and analyze experiments is the lifeblood of growth. As a growth marketer, you need to have experience using tools like Excel & SQL.
3. Strategic thinking/project management skills: This is a broader bucket, it’s about being able to come up with good ideas and pick the right experiments.

While you don’t have to necessarily go deep on all three (3) components. You can’t have zero skills at any of these and call yourself a growth marketer.

How to become a growth marketer.

There is no predetermined path to becoming a growth marketer. A lot of growth marketing is you getting your hands dirty. Test run different ads, do automations with MailChimp etc.

The content of this review covers lessons in my first course taught by John Mc. Bride, former senior manager of Growth Marketing at Lyft and current Senior manager, B2B growth at Calm.