Review: CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing 10/12

Happy New Year everybody! Let this year be filled with joy, happiness, health and lots and lots of new knowledge!

This in my 10th review of the CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing. This week (again) I was a little bit lazy, but it was also a holiday week so I didn’t want to push myself too much. Also, I have two weeks left at the CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing and I’m positive I can catch up with studying. :)

This week I went through the 7th track of CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing, which focuses on the topic of Management. As I said, I was a little bit lazy and I only manage to finish the 1st course Optimizing your marketing tech stack, taught by Dan McGaw.

What’s a marketing tech stack?

Marketing tech enables you to piece together different useful tools to track the full customer journey while measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Your “martech” stack might include marketing automation software, tools for analytics and data piping, a CRM, support and live chat systems, community forums, prospecting tools, and more.

How to choose the right stack?

With dozens of competing tools to choose from in each of these areas — and the teeth-gritting, time-wasting frustration of integrating multiple platforms using code or APIs —

During this 8-class course, marketing expert Dan McGaw will show you how to evaluate, eliminate, and integrate the tools that will drive growth for your business.

What will you learn in this course?

• Choose and set up the right tools — No more throwing away your monthly marketing budget on forgotten or useless subscriptions
• Build a taxonomy guide to scale your business — Imagine the confusion you’ll sidestep by helping all your team members use the same words for the same concepts
• Integrate tools to build a holistic marketing machine — Stop exporting and importing data from one platform to the next
• Set up segment.com to put your customer data to work — Use your existing data to create a better customer experience that drives higher revenue
• Track lead and engagement scoring to identify hot leads — Instead of guessing who might be ready to sign up or buy
• Get shit done without engineering — No coding required
• Convert more customers using your tools — Set your stack up once and watch it do the heavy lifting for you

About Dan McGaw

Dan is a seasoned veteran of the growth marketing and analytics space. His expertise lies in helping businesses extract and interpret the right data to grow their revenue exponentially.

He’s the founder and CMO of Effin Amazing, an analytics and marketing stack agency specialized in using data and analytics tools to increase mid- and bottom-funnel conversion rates. He’s also the CEO and Founder of utm.io, a leading tool that helps brands track their marketing campaigns with UTM links.

Course overview

1. What is a Martech Stack and how does it solve my marketing problems?

Contrary to common practice, a marketing tech stack is more than just the motley collection of tools you’ve been using to run campaigns. This class will cover:

• How to think about your stack, and the types of tools it should contain — You might just be overlooking a platform that can grow your business
• What problems the right stack can help you solve — Freeing up more time through automating your lead-gen and follow-up processes is just the beginning

2. Choose the right tools for your stack

With over 7000+ tools to choose from, the selection process can be confusing or overwhelming. Dan’s step-by-step approach will help you evaluate and choose the best marketing and business intelligence tools for your needs. Here’s what Class 2 will include:

• Ways to discover new tools to keep pace with innovation — So you’ve always got best-in-class tools on your side
• How to keep your stack organized — No more hunting for data in the wrong platforms, or wondering “Which tool does that again?”
• How to choose the best tools for your business model — Not all marketing tools are created equal, and not all will fit your unique business
• Dan’s straightforward way to choose tools and present findings — It’s not enough to find the right tool. You need buy-in from your team, too

3. Integrating the stack

Everything in your marketing technology stack needs to be integrated with your site, product, and other business tools. Get it right by knowing the shortcuts, longcuts, and pro secrets. We’ll go through:

• What the integration process for different tools looks like — And how you should set up integrations for faster data transfer and less redundancy
• Why tag managers are a godsend for marketers — Your Google Analytics team will be jumping for joy at this one
• Whether or not you should be using a customer data platform for integration — Not all businesses need this type of tool. But if you do, it can be a game-changer

4. Building your stack taxonomy

From automating marketing and sales processes to helping you obtain reliable, meaningful intel, your tech stack should power your business for the better. But if nobody knows how things are named or where to find information, you’ve got no chance getting your team to embrace new systems. Occasionally boring, but wildly important topics include:

• How to build a taxonomy and schema sheet — Standardize your stack structure and names in an easily scalable, referenceable document
• The proper way to name the actions your users take — So that things like “sales-qualified lead” mean the same to everyone in your company
• How to store important demographic, technographic, and firmographic data — The right classifications make it much easier to search, sort, and segment
• How to maintain data governance in your marketing stack — Make sure your tools generate untainted, reliable data at every step of the process

5. Data driven analytics

With the right analytics setup, your data can tell you a ton about your customers. Whether you want to understand demographics, firmographics (organizational insights), or simply know more about how people behave, it all starts with the correct analytics setup. Dan will show you:

• How to improve your reporting and KPIs — Stop tracking vanity metrics, and start running more meaningful reports
• Which analytics tools can help you track behavior — Often, customer and prospect behavior can tell us more about their needs than the customers themselves
• Why Google Analytics just isn’t enough nowadays — Supplement your main analytics platform with tools that fill in the missing holes
• How to track phone calls in your analytics — Paint a more complete picture of where your wins are coming from

6. Capture emails and generate more leads

No matter your line of business, capturing emails should be one of your highest priorities. This class will show you tools and tricks to generate more leads with richer context. We’ll answer questions like:

• What are some of the main providers to help you capture emails? You’ll want to consider how these tools integrate with your email marketing platform, and what data is most valuable to your marketing team
• What are the different types of lead-generation solutions? Choose the right tool for your audience, your business model, and the information you need from prospects
• How can we collect email addresses and enrich them with valuable information? Getting someone’s email is good, but getting someone’s email while learning more about them is much better

7. Automating your marketing

Automation is eating the world — and businesses that don’t use will get eaten too. Learn the main players in the marketing space and how you should go about choosing an automation tool for your business. Dan will also reveal easy, effective marketing automation hacks that help personalize your marketing (and clear busywork from your calendar). You’ll learn:

• The main features you should look for in a marketing automation tool — Sort the genuinely good players from the sea of copycats
• How to map the fields in your automation tool to the rest of your stack — So form field values land where they should, every time
• How to present the cost of a tool to leadership — Make your case for a valuable tool in the most persuasive way possible
• Create a progressive profiling onboarding program to improve personalization — We’ll talk about what questions to ask customers and when
• Personalize each touchpoint for your customer journey — So that not only are YOU generating higher revenue, they’re happy with your service or product, and loyal to your brand

8. Relationship management with CRMs

The line between marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) tools is becoming blurred. That said, there are still “worth it” CRM tools that enable you to better manage your customer relationships. If you have a sales organization, you have to have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. In this class, we’ll cover:

• Your main considerations when choosing a CRM — Including whether your team will be able to adapt to it or not
• Why the CRM is not longer just a sales tool — It’s time to break down the departmental silos and work as one team
• CRM attributes that matter most — Overlook bells and whistles in favor of tools that enable real, useable insights
• How to port Salesforce “action tracking” into your analytics tool — Know who customers are, what they’ve been up to, and what you need them to do next

I can say I’m very happy with the new-gainde knowledge and I can higly recommend this course to anyone interested in the topic of Growth Marketing.