CXL Institute: Growth Marketing Mini Degree Review #4️⃣
By: Evelina Califano
Tags: Growth Hacking, SEO, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, PPC Marketing

Main Digital Channels For Growth

Five main digital channels can burst growth for your business:

SEM, Search Engine Marketing

Google prioritizes businesses that engage in SEM best practices. According to Google’s search quality senior analyst, the company’s two most important signals to rank websites for search include high-quality content and link-building efforts. Credits to Merakist.

PPC, pay-per-click is also another term for it. When dealing with SEM you will use platforms such as Google Ads and Bing Ads. Paid search requires constant optimization where you need to look frequently at the keyword traffic, search relevant trends, and monitor the fluctuation in PPC cost.

There are two popular types of PPC campaigns:

Awareness Campaign: this is implemented whenever you need to promote your company’s digital presence to your audience, and PPC offers a great way to increase traffic online. Lead Generation Campaign: this is a campaign to let your users know that your business has solutions to their problems, and through PPC you can drive them directly to a landing page that lays out the solution they are looking for.

We have different PPC channels to invest in such as Google Ads (60% of market share), Bing Ads (less competitive) but also Google Display and Facebook Marketing and Re-Marketing option.

2. SEO, Search Engine Optimization

SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate (Hubspot); 69.7% of search queries contain four words or more (Ahrefs). Credits to Merakist.

SEO is the process of improving your website’s ranking on the search engine results page to get more people on your site, or said differently, to increase social appearance in organic search results. One of the perks of SEO is that compared to SEM, the audience here is more intent focused and the click-through rates are way higher when your website ranks on the first page of Google, especially for the first search results position.

A critical component of SEO optimization is keyword research and content gap analysis, this is done to create a roadmap for both the design and the execution of building your website and developing content to include in it.

The keyword research is basically finding out which keywords are related to your product/service, take a look at your content, your search volumes, and especially higher search volumes to prioritize keywords for your product that can work the best for your customers. Many tools assist you in keyword research, such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs, BrightEdge, all these tools assist you in search terms and volume data.

The content gap analysis is essentially taking a look at the opportunity you have when running a comparison between your business and its competitors, a good method is to jot down what components you miss and planning to achieve, following up by creating a roadmap that illustrates which tasks to prioritize to “fill the gap”. This content gap analysis is also useful when designing a content marketing strategy for your company.

Some of the KPI´s available for SEO are:



1. Session & Visits: how much traffic is coming from a dimension/source

2. Goal completions: depending on your goal, for example, it could be related to an event, such as click on your video or the user took a desired action such as downloading the free case study offered on your website (for instance you will look at the total number of conversions)

3. Revenue: what traffic source is generating revenue?

4. Goal conversion rate: how many users from the total amount of traffic actually resulted in converted users?

5. Bounce rate: this is a rate that describes the overall permanence of a user on your website, hence the higher it is, the lower engagement your website provides to users, and Google will definitely interpret that bounce rate in this way when crawling. To tackle this rate you can run user research or prototype testing that helps you optimize your website to drive more engagement and increase the overall conversion rate.



You can also work on SEO through the identification of specific stages to improve:



1. Awareness stage focus: Build an audience for your product and service

2. Engagement focus: How to drive engagement with your product and service via SEO optimization

3. Conversion focus: Hence, how to drive sales and leads from SEO.

3. Social and Display Ads

A difference between Native and Display advertising provided by Disruptor.

Display ads are the banner ads you see on websites, usually in the middle page or on the right-side, whilst social ads are the ads you see on social platforms such Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, YouTube, etc.



Social channels open access to demographic data but also to main interests and customers’ behavior data. Buffer and HootSuite are tools that help you manage your social media posts, while Twitter and Facebook are generally used for B2C companies, LinkedIn works very well for the B2B industry. Instagram is also considered as a potentially explosive channel for growth if you are in an e-commerce business.

🆕 Native ads are also a great way to raise brand awareness. Native ads are defined as those ads that appear as part of the design and flow of the web page they are located on. Conversely to hard-selling ads, native ads tend to have an editorial look and feel, with a softer selling approach.

4. E-mail Marketing

An example of Drip E-mail Marketing workflow, whereas you automate emails with content type according to the response. Credits to Uplers.

Although it is considered by many marketers a relatively “old” channel for growth, e-mail marketing still performs and converts really well today.

It is an effective channel when reaching new prospects and also throughout the funnel it is effective for a business to retain its customers and engage with them with customized offers, newsletters, and so forth.

Tools such as Mailchimp, HubSpot E-mail Marketing, Get Response, and Aweber are only some of the tools that help your team to ace ROI for the e-mail marketing channel by automation, for example by creating a drip marketing email campaign, whereas you create a set of marketing emails that will be sent out automatically on a schedule, once satisfied a set of given parameters.

We will talk more about this powerful tool to drive sales up in the next upcoming articles.

5. Content Marketing

The Content Marketing Matrix developed by Smart Insights.

Content Marketing is acting like the glue that sticks together SEO, PPC, and PR efforts. By investing in content marketing practices, you invest in the relationship you have with your customer.

Above the content marketing matrix by Smart Insights provide a comprehensive visual including all types of content we can create for our business, and it also categorizes them from least to most emotional/ rational and taking into consideration the funnel stages, from awareness to purchase.

There are great distribution channels for content writing such as LinkedIn, Medium, Slideshare, but you can choose to open a “Blog” section on your website where to directly inform your customers.

Like it or hate it, content marketing is essential if you want to grow your business and the higher quality content you are able to provide, the better it will affect your overall CRO strategy.