Review: CXL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing 7/12

This is my review of the 7th week at the CKL Institute Mini-degree in Growth Marketing. It was another challenging week, trying to balance my work, study and some other projects I started during the first few weeks of lockdown.

But, on a good note, I was very busy the whole week and wasn’t feeling so limited with all the lockdown restrictions.

In the 7th week I dived into channel-specific growth skills, with individual units on Email marketing: from basics to best-in-class, Messaging strategy in public relations, and Facebook Ads.

Digital marketing channels examples

Email marketing

This one is a channel I did a lot of work around and honestly, not many things that are new, but if you are struggling with this one, I recommend the course, to up your game.

Content strategy and SEO

Here I bulked three chapters: Content strategy and SEO for lead generation, SEO driven editorial calendar, and Technical SEO. I feel that they go together, but without knowing, I think a lot of the content just structured a lot of things I already knew. Still, highly recommend the stand-alone course.

The key to building SEO content is finding content gaps (good volume low competition or low quality) and match the keyword intent to the content type.

Another important part of SEO is to choose a tool and stick to it. For example, Moz Explorer Tool is showing the Domain Authority score. Well, it doesn’t matter if this si true or not, is just a benchmark you can use to decide on the competition.

I am more inclined to use Ahrefs for SEO analysis. Each tool is great, but this one seems to have better technology and is product-driven.

Paid Ads

This is not a new territory for me. So, for me paid is a bundle of Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads, Google Ads, and Youtube ads. I will mention some things about the first three.

The Facebook Ads module is proposing a full-funnel strategy called B.E.L.T. which is an acronym for:

• Belief: make the audience aware of the problem and solution. The trick here is to just put a 2-minute video without linking to a website and later target the contacts that Facebook decided to show to content to and consumed it.
• Engage: The content at this stage should educate & entertain (edutainment) and should introduce or strengthen your brand to the prospect.
• Lead: Only the people that interacted with the brand are sent to the landing page. Usually, this audience will result in lower costs.
• Transact: Ask for the sale after the contact knows about you and your brand.

I guess it’s something that should be common sense, but the chapter made me think about how to approach Facebook Ads: use the platform for awareness and consideration stages (meaning do not send them necessarily to your website) and when the audience is hot, ask for the conversion.

When you are on Facebook you don’t want to leave it and read a post or fill in a form, so engage with the audience on the platform with videos — seem to work better for this particular idea. For Facebook Live this is a good resource to make the videos interesting — https://be.live/.

Another idea is that Facebook is or will be the next cable TV. This is why the ads are created as infomercials. I guess that Facebook users have similar behavior as the ones that watch TV. Scrolling the news feed is a comfy activity like sitting in front of the TV.

LinkedIn advertising. I guess everybody knows that Linkedin is for B2B, high-value deals. Something over $15 K. But similar to Facebook Ads, the sweet spot is to run campaigns for the middle of the funnel to control the costs.

If you target Top of the funnel you get a high cost per click just for a blog post. If you target the bottom of the funnel you will get a low conversion rate because why would you give your personal information and listen to a sales pitch.

Therefore, the middle of the funnel, usually a gated asset that resonates with the audience is the best approach for Linkedin Ads. As far as the chapters shows, the setup in Linkedin ads is not that complicated as in other platforms. As per the module, for Video Ads you cannot split the audience by percentage of video watched which is a bammer.

An interesting recommendation is to do retargeting by using Google Ads — Google Display Network — and Facebook. I guess it is cheaper.

There are two unique ad types: importing email list and/or company name. Both can leverage up to 300.000 units that can be targeted on Linkedin.

Similar to Facebook Ads, it seems that is better to train the AI to display the Ads when they consider is better, so it is not recommended to show Ads evenly.

Google Ads. Compared with the Facebook Ads course which is looooooong and somewhat redundant, Google Ads is a really quick one.

The bottom line is that the success is based on not overlapping the targeting criteria (similar keywords) and to match perfectly the search terms with the intent.

There is a diference between keyword and search term. I mean, yeah, it is obcious, but I guess I did mixed them up sometimes.

Similar to the ideas on Facebook Ads chapter, where you basically might “lose money” on some ads, in Google Ads you can check it by looking into the Attribution reports. Sometimes the Display Campaign might assist the search and it makes sense to keep it… so yeah… not every ad set need to be positive.

Messaging strategy in public relations and data-driven influencer marketing

In my opinion, influencer marketing and public relations go hand in hand. The difference is that public relations are mostly B2B stuff and influencer marketing is mostly B2C.

Most of the time PR will leverage traditional channels like TV, newspapers maybe some bloggers. On the other side, influencer marketing will leverage social media creators.

They can work toghter and none is better thean the other, but I really think that in the most fundamental way the two marketing channels are similar.

Choosing a marketing channel expertise

So, if you don’t know what marketing channel is the better one to specialize, I would recommend trying some online courses from CXL. Also, in my opinion, the Paid (from Paid Earned Owned) is better to be outsourced to an agency since it requires a really good understanding of the platform and technologies.

All in all it’s another great track at the CXL Institute Growth marketing Mini-degree and I learnt tons of new stuff. I’m also looking forward to continue my learning journey next week.