Growth Channels & Other Stories-CXL Week Two Review
By: Zeenat Gbadamosi
Tags: SEO, Online Education, PPC Marketing, Product Management, Cxl Minidegree

I started my growth journey last week learning with CXL. The Growth Marketing mini degree begins with the Growth Marketing Foundation which consists of three event videos, an Introduction to Growth Marketing, course in User Centric Marketing and Identifying & Amplifying Growth Channels. I was able to cover the first three . The review is right here.

In my previous post, I stated that I was offered a scholarship for my mini degree in growth marketing and I am required to write 12 reviews in 12 weeks. This is the second series of my twelve weeks marathon. This week I continued with Identifying & Amplifying Growth Channels, 2 event videos and Part one in A/B Test Mastery.

IDENTIFYING AND AMPLIFYING GROWTH CHANNELS- SOPHIA ENG

Did you know that Reddit had 40,000 people registered before launch?

Q: How did they do it?

A: They went to where their customers were- Blogs

Content Marketing isn’t just about blogging. It consists of photos, social posts, SEO, PPC, blog post, press releases.

SEO is the process of improving your website ranking on search engines result page in order to get more people on your website. It main driver of most website traffic because the searches coming from there are intent focused.

SEM/PPC consists of social display ads, e-mail marketing, content marketing, Google ad word which takes as much as 60% in PPC

How do I pick the right marketing channel? Decide if your audiences are on those channels. For B2B, start with SEO. Check insights for keywords and what your competitors are doing but do not copy blindly. LinkedIn is also a great place for B2B.

MYTHS ABOUT SEO AND SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

1) Social Media ROI is difficult to track and it is hard to put a real value

2) Social Media falls under demand generation falls under demand generation

3) SEO is automatic

TIPS ON IMPROVING YOUR GROWTH MARKETING CHANNEL

- For SEO, acquire hyperlinks from other websites to yours- .edu or .gov websites gives higher authority.

- When people go to your website through PPC, get information in a less aggressive way with an e-book or a checklist

- Targeting the right keywords is better than using one keyword with the highest volume.

- Look for content gaps by conducting content gap analysis

My take:

1) Know where your customers are, what they are reading, what website they are looking at and what social websites they are.

2) It is rare for a company in early stage to be great at all the channels- Pick your battles

3) Small companies should use underutilized platform. E.g ranking on Bing also instead of Google only. Chances are that your competitors isn’t looking at Bing

4) Be present on your social media pages

5) Test time to post, offers, content and CTA’s of your links

6) Do not go for vanity metrics

TRACK TWO: RUNNING GROWTH EXPERIMENTS

This track started with two event videos:

A better way to prioritize your A/B test- Loho Kraav :Well the video was rather short and kfkrnjjbn,emlrmbjk. My take was; stop guessing at things, use data.

What to test next- Pauline Marol and Josephine Foucher- Product Managers at Hotwire

This event video was more explicit and it showed me a practical way of prioritizing not only test but also ideas.

It begins with reasons to prioritize tests:

1) To manage stakeholders

2) Bring transparency to optimization

3) Builds trust from the company

4) Empowers employees

Before you set up your framework, you need to know your destination, know yourself and structure your ideas. There are so many prioritizing framework but Hotwire uses the Points Model. The Point Model is in form of binary questions.

Points Model Questions

1) Is it above the fold?

2) Would it be seen by customers?

3) Is it supporting a main metric?

4) Is it adding or removing from the page?

5) Is it from customer research or Google Analytics?

6) Is it benchmarking?

7) Is it going to bring in more money?

8) Is it going to improve the customer experience?

9) Does it follow the theme of the company?

10) How easy is it to implement?

These ten questions are answered in form of yes which gives 1 point or a no which is 0. The score determines over 10 determines what idea should be implemented and in what order. Any idea below 5 is discarded. With this framework, a junior employee can implement an idea while a stupid idea from management can be thrown away.

A/B Testing Mastery-Ton Wesseling

This course consists of 15 lessons with an exam. I divided it into two parts. I will continue the part two in my next article. This course begins with the history of A/B testing.

A/B TESTING TIMELINE

Before 1995- No web, no a/b testing

1995–2000- Web changes and redirect scripts

2000–2003- Expensive tools which used cookies sprang up.eg optimist, memetrics

2006–2010- First affordable tool ; Google Optimizer, found a way to inject codes

2010- VWO, Optimizely made it easier to test.

2013- People wanted to test apps and developers used frameworks like angular framework

2016-More tools sprang up

A/B testing helps in making sure the right decision is made It can be used for deployment especially for website, research-conversion signal maps.To start