Review: CXL Growth Marketing mini-degree week 2
By: Suman Chakraborty
Tags: Digital Marketing, Growth Marketing, Growth Hacking, Marketing Strategies, Cxl Minidegree

It’s been over two weeks now and my journey of learning Growth Marketing with CXL Institute continues.

I am not able to complete many modules, Failed in User-centric exam. But In this week, I am going to rock.

This week has been an exhaustive learning experience and one of the most insightful learnings I have derived from the courses I managed to cover in the second week.

While my first week’s review about this mini-degree covered the fundamentals of Growth Marketing and setting up the growth process, this week I would like to throw some light on the importance of marketing that caters to the end-user and learning about different digital growth channels.

This extract will cover my summary from the next two courses out of the 33 courses growth marathon. Have a look at the courses and the mentors that took me through extremely valuable insights from their courses this week-

1.User-Centric Marketing — by Paul Boag

2. Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels — by Sophia Eng

1A. 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.

The digital revolution has changed a lot for us in terms of marketing. Catering to users has become a top priority to sustain amidst the competition and to build a brand.

Unlike the traditional way of marketing that focused only on broadcasting the message, digital marketing is what actually gives you the power of listening to the user, collecting their feedback, and improving your marketing further.

1B. How do we start to adopt a user-centric approach:

It all starts with knowing your user well. No, I am not talking about their name, e-mail address, or their random interests. If you actually want to know your customer, you need to ask the right questions and solve the right issues.

Here are some of the parameters you need to understand before you want to influence their actions-

Tasks

Questions

Objections

Goals

Feelings

Journey

This is called Empathy Mapping, where you detect all the users’ pains and optimize your marketing to deliver them gains.

1C. How to better understand your audience without spending a cent:

User research sounds like an expensive process that includes advertising, collecting a lot of data, or just outsourcing the task to an agency, and paying for it. But that’s not at all necessary.

Ask all the major sales objections.

Get the commonly asked questions.

In fact, you can initially go lean and learn about your users free of cost. This you can do by taking inputs from your in-house team that interacts directly with your end-users or have enough data about your customers. These include,

Data analysts (learn about their behavior and actions)

1D. Learn more with Surveys:

Surveys are one of the best ways to learn about your users coming to your website. But overdoing surveys can also hamper their experience. Here are some quick points to remember while running surveys,

Make surveys short and quick.

Ask them close-ended questions, but the ones that will actually help you optimize and not just remain as a data

Ask them at the right time; ideally, after a conversion takes place or when they are about to leave.

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.

1.E. Top Tasks First

Every new user coming to your website has just eight seconds to decide whether he/she will get what they are looking for. Hence it is extremely crucial to focus on the most important tasks before redundant ones.

The right implementation of top task analysis makes sure you have the right information architecture on your website, thus improving the user’s experience with your business.

1.G. Customer Journey Mapping — What and Why?

Customer Journey Map is nothing but a visual representation of what phases a customer goes through before making a purchase with you. A customer is not a static persona as considered in traditional marketing. You must be able to see the variations.

Throughout the journey, you want to track the different phases and different parameters of a customer in each phase. These parameters are emotions, objections, questions, desires, etc.

1.H. Involve the User.

As mentioned earlier, it is actually a great hack to include the user himself in whatever you plan and strategize in your marketing journey.

By involving users in your design process, you get to know their feelings and instant reactions to your designs. By involving the users in your website usability tests, you actually come to witness user experience in motion. You can hear what they say, where they click, how long does it take them to complete the desired action, etc.

2. Identifying and Amplifying Growth Channels:

With digital marketing, any company can exponentially scale their business using the five most prominent and popular growth channels namely,

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Social and Display Advertising

Email Marketing

Content Marketing

2A. Identifying, Testing, and Measuring Growth Channels-

How to identify:

Look at where your competitors are growing. Also, make sure the growth channel is relevant to your business. You don’t want to waste time where you don’t have either your audience or your customer.

Measuring Growth Channels:

This depends on your success metrics. Channels that are eventually driving a positive success metric such as positive ROI, higher revenue, and profits, more number of leads are the ones you want to optimize on.

Emerging Channels:

This is an interesting concept while experimenting with growth. Many channels are untapped in a certain industry or have less saturation yet. This is where you can find your ideal customer and not so many competitors. It can be a technology like mobile or AR/VR, marketing techniques like SEO on long-tail keywords, or even social media platforms like Reddit.

So, That’s it for this week. In next week I am going to cover one more exciting articles, which I am going to learn through CXL.

After a long week of exhaustive learnings about user-centric marketing and growth channels, I have got a new perspective of looking at the way I must practice digital marketing.

If you read the article till here, thanks a ton for your time and engagement. I so much hope you learned some things for the first time. If you found value, share it ahead.

#KeepGROWing#growthhacking #cxl #digitalmarketing