My First Week of the CXL Growth Marketing Mini-Degree — Review
By: Mary Donné
Tags: Digital Marketing, Growth Marketing, Lean Startup, Marketing, Growth Hacking

I have been lucky enough to be awarded a CXL scholarship on their Growth Marketing mini-degree. Over the next 12 weeks I will be documenting my experience working through this.

About Me

Just some background first; I began my career back in the 90s in media and old-school marketing, before taking a sideways move into education. Then, a few years ago, I found myself rejoining marketing via my work with the Curly Hair Project (an amazing social dedicated to helping people with autism). This time around, however, marketing was taking place in a new digital landscape.

Fast forward three years and I have indeed learnt how to do digital, code websites, and measure data, but I wondered if I’d missed anything — because you don’t know, what you don’t know, right? The CXL mini-degree offered a brilliant opportunity to consolidate my existing knowledge and develop it. I was excited that it is led by industry experts who really do walk the walk. The degree is approximately 110 hours of trainings. My target is to complete it by 5th March so I’ve decided to study for approximately 9 hours a week and do 50/50 theory and practical, e.g. analytics, work. Fully prepared for it to be a brain-battering few months I was keen to get stuck in.

Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash

First Impressions

My first impression of the CXL mini-degree was that the course is well laid out and intuitive with a good blend of theory and practical information e.g. how to properly run an A/B split test. I was really pleased to see the Google Analytics trainings were led by Chris Mercer. I know Chris from Social Media Examiner and have listened to his stuff many times in the past. GA is a monster of a platform and you can never know too much about it, and Chris is brilliant at demystifying it.

The degree’s first opening ‘mini lecture’ was from Sean Ellis. Now just in case there is anyone out there who doesn’t know, Sean is the marketer credited with inventing the term ‘growth hacking’. He has been successful at Facebook, AirBnB, and Dropbox.

Sean’s talk focussed on how to properly set and achieve the growth objectives we want. He reminded us that we need to be crystal clear about what our goals are. If we don’t know what we’re trying to achieve then we can’t get there. It’s also really important to transmit this to the whole team so we are all working on the same page.

Sean explained that marketing traditionally existed in its own little bubble. So, for example, IT would develop a website which marketing would then work with. Marketing wouldn’t change anything on the website because that was IT’s world. Similarly, marketing would bring the customers to the door, but drop out the minute they crossed over the threshold when Sales took over. Growth marketing being a full and holistic process is very much a theme I am picking up from this course. It makes sense.

Sean continued that despite his having invented the term ‘growth hacking’, there isn’t really any hack. It is a matter of setting goads and simply testing and retesting our theories to try and hit our targets at least 70% of the time.

Sean talked about the ‘North Star Metric’ and said he thought this was the most important thing that Facebook ever did in terms of their growth. I have recently been reading ‘Growth Hacker Marketing’ by Ryan Holliday and he also discusses this in relation to Amazon’s success.

A real lightbulb moment for me was Sean saying that ‘creative brainstorming’ type meetings really should be about problem solving and not just coming up with cool and crazy ideas. I have sat in so many meetings like this! People coming up with amazing ideas but, half an hour later back at my desk, I’ve realised that we haven’t really solved any problems. That’s definitely something I am going try and challenge going forward.

The First Training

After Sean’s mini-lecture, I logged on the first ‘proper’ training material from John McBride. John is another super-experienced marketeer having worked with Lyft and Eaze.

John began by consolidating and expanding on what Sean had been talking about, discussing the difference between traditional marketing and growth hacking. Traditional marketing focusses on ‘top of the funnel’ but growth marketing is holistic and looks at the entire customer lifespan from acquisition to post-sale.

It occured to me at this point one big difference between an old-school marketer and a growth-marketer is mindset. ‘Old school’ marketing was limited in that you had to work with the product you were given. If the product wasn’t any good then that was a problem. But with growth marketing you are continuously tinkering with not just marketing, but the product too to make it the best you can. You really do need to expand your thinking.

John discussed this at length and explained that growth marketing is all about continuous experimentation. The Lean Start up methodology is a great model for this as you have to start by admitting that you don’t know what your customers want — you are just guessing. If the product doesn’t sell then you need to start again. Again, another lightbulb moment here! I have always felt that there is so much pressure on business start ups to get things right right away. People want to see five year plans, what your plans for scaling are, how much you think you’ll make in your third year, etc. The truth is that we don’t know! It is all guesswork, in my experience, for the first year at least. With the growth and Lean Start-Up methods we continuously monitor and make changes. It doesn’t matter if the changes don’t work as we haven’t spend a lot of money. Every change moves the needle one way or another. By testing you are doing something and not just sending emails, crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.

Finally, John talked in some depth about how to become a great growth marketer. He felt the three key skills were:

Channel expertise

Analytical capability

Strategic thinking/Project management

This is a summary of my first impressions and first week of the CXL mini-degree. I have already learnt so much and had a few lightbulb moments. I’ve loved it so far and can’t wait to share next week’s learnings!