My Growth Marketing Journey with CXL Institute - A Review of my First Week
By: Olusoji Oyewole
Tags: Growth Mindset, Digital Marketing, Growth Hacking, Growth Marketing, Growth Strategy

My growth marketing mini-degree program has begun. An excellent initiative by CXL institute to nurture serious-minded individuals who will go on to become the top 1% experts in growth marketing. I’m grateful for the enormous opportunity to be a part of this program, as it will serve as a springboard for becoming a smart growth marketer.

In a bid to stay accountable and preserve everything I learn over the course of this program, I’ll be sharing on a weekly basis, the highlights of my learnings.

My first week of the growth marketing mini degree program opened up with a course in Growth Mindset. Here, the instructor dissects and analyses key rudimentary aspects of growth marketing such as; the role experimentation plays in differentiating traditional marketing from growth marketing, the value of experimentation in deciding the most successful way to increase users’ engagement and conversion, growth hacking, and how to be a successful growth marketer.

The first lesson details what makes growth marketing different from traditional marketing. Traditional/brand marketing essentially is focused on the top of the funnel, i.e awareness, and acquisition. On the other hand, growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel, so my job as a growth marketer is to drive growth across a business in any way that I can. John Mcbride expanded on the foregoing by stating categorically that while a focus area is definitely important and a defining trait of growth marketing as a function. Even more important, is the second characteristic which is that the process of growth is driven by experimentation and that is like the main difference.

According to John Mcbride, the underlying magic of growth marketing is experimentation — to grow a business, you have to constantly experiment with different programs, campaigns, product features, et cetera, that increase conversion, create better customer experiences, generate data that you can then use to learn and improve so that you can continually optimize your funnel, grow the business regardless of what your focus is. For context, as a growth marketer, you have to start by admitting you don’t know what your customers want and if you think otherwise and invest in a product based on flawed hypotheses, you would end up investing lots of time, money, and resources in something that generates no results and that’s generally bad news. For better understanding let’s consider a hypothetical scenario: I’m a growth marketer at a Fintech Startup looking to facilitate more customer acquisitions say in the thousands — firstly, I’ll start with a hypothesis that our ideal customers based on the personas I have coined for them, care about x. So I’m going to run an experiment to see if this is actually something that they care about whether it’s a messaging campaign, a video, and see if they actually care about this thing that I’m putting out there. If I set it up as an experiment, I can actually learn what is the response and if it corresponds with my hypothesis. If the customer behaviour aligns with my prediction then I can double down on that — this way, I’ve learned that this is something they care about or If I’m wrong, go back to the drawing board, but at least I have those learnings that I can then use to inform future campaigns and future experiments.

The second part of my first course delved into growth hacking — hacking is essentially how you can build a minimum viable product, the most simple working version of some sort of technology product, as quickly as possible using minimal resources. That’s why hackathons are weekend-long marathons. With growth hacking, you don’t take time to come up with the most perfect, elegant solution, you hack something together as quickly as possible to see if it works, and that’s what the lean startup methodology is about. You hack something together really quickly that is the least, or that is the minimum viable product that you can use to learn if customers actually want what you’re building. The same methodology applies to growth, it’s like how can you build the minimum viable marketing campaign that you can run and test to learn whether or not it’s effective or not. Hacking is kind of like the mindset of someone who wants to work quickly without finding the perfect solution but to find the fastest, best solution to start getting learnings.

And lastly, the final part of my first course describes three key components for a successful growth marketer: channel-level expertise, analytical capability, and cross-functional strategic thinking. To become a smart growth marketer, you must have at least a basic understanding of the general workings of the common marketing channels — so whether it’s email marketing, Push, SEO, Facebook ads, just understanding how the channel works will always come in handy for you. The next one is analytical capability. I think this is really important, whether it’s just like Excel skills or SQL skills.

A growth marketer should be able to extract data to gather insights and analyze their own experiments. Data is like the lifeblood of growth. So being able to get your hands on data and interpret it and use it to make better decisions is super important.

The final key component is cross-functional strategic thinking. This is the sweet spot of a growth marketer — It’s being able to come up with good ideas, figuring out how do you actually pick the right experiments, how do you prioritize your roadmap, how do you actually think about your customers’ experience, and the customer journey to identify big opportunities. Plus how to work with other stakeholders because growth is cross-functional and if you are not particularly good at working with creatives or an engineering team or an analytics team, you’re going to have a hard time driving projects end to end. By and large, cross-functional ability and strategic thinking are crucial skills for getting to the next level in growth.