Growth Marketing Management and Technology Stacks: My Review of CXL’s Growth Marketing Minidegree
This blog post covers my 11th week studying CXL’s Growth Marketing Minidegree.
In the first 10 weeks of the course, I learned:
- The key foundations of the growth marketing philosophy
- How to organise marketing experiments and use data analysis
- How to succeed with every major digital marketing channel today
Since starting the first modules on the growth marketing framework, I’ve absorbed so much actionable content on so many different marketing channels.
This has transformed how comfortable I feel working with different marketing tools. But it does come with a risk of overwhelm.
After all, it’s hard to stay focused when you have so many new things to try out!
For this reason, I was happy to see the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree pivot back to growth program management this week.
As after many weeks exploring different growth marketing channels, I felt like I needed to organise my new skills back into a framework.
The first course I took this week was the GrowthMaster Training Workshop.
GrowthMaster Training Workshop by Sean Ellis
Sean Elis is a legend in the growth hacking space, so I was excited to learn his perspectives on putting Growth Marketing to work. Especially as he’s displayed repeated success at a number of awesome start-ups.
This module was pretty short but full of gold. And it was the perfect way to transition back from channel-specific skills to growth strategy and program management.
This module helped me figure out how to implement what CXL’s Minidegree has taught me over the past few weeks. Especially in terms of uniting the different teams and people in your company to achieve your growth goals.
To achieve this, Sean touched on an important concept called ‘The North Star Metric’.
Establishing Your Company’s North Star Metric
A company’s North Star Metric is the fundamental or most important metric for people in your company to improve.
As Sean said, it should show the value being delivered by a company. For example, ‘Nights Booked’ in the case of AirBnB.
This is very different from just setting a catch-all revenue growth number. Why? Because it focuses your attention on what you need to make your platform more valuable and achieve growth.
I was already familiar with the concept as it was covered in ‘Lean Analytics’ under the name ‘the one metric that matters’.
However, I thought Sean explained it particularly well. And I really enjoyed the exercise where you have to brainstorm a North Star Metric for Dropbox.
As it goes, my answer was very similar to Sean’s!
Growth Marketing: Back To The Fundamentals
Sean then tacked back to the core framework at the heart of Growth Hacking.
Which can broadly be summed up as:
- Make observations / identify problems
- Come up with ideas (potential tests)
- Prioritize ideas
- Carry out tests
- Observe results
- Repeat
Sean gave some great pointers on how his growth teams work through this process. But I also noticed something funny during this section, as I found myself critiquing some of his points against other frameworks I’ve learnt in the CXL minidegree.
Let me give you an example…
Sean made some great points on asking team members to identify their ‘best ideas’ as a means of prioritising tests. But overall, I decided that I liked Peep’s PXL prioritization framework better as it seems more objective.
Why do I mention this?
Before taking CXL’s minidegree, I probably would have taken the advice in any of the videos at face value. Nowadays, I feel better equipped to think for myself and weigh up the material against other frameworks I’ve learned.
In other words, the compounding effect of CXL’s content seems to be paying off!
The Importance Of Qualitative Data
One of the biggest wins I’ve had from the CXL minidegree is being able to use Google Analytics with confidence. But it’s very easy to get too deep in data and forget the human side of things.
One of my key takeaways from Sean’s GrowthMaster Workshop was the importance of qualitatively understanding what’s going on.
After all, your quantitative data can tell you what is happening. But you can’t really change and improve things unless you understand the qualitative reasons why.
Overall, I found Sean’s course extremely helpful. It was also very watchable and full of great examples. This made it a highly valuable stepping stone back into the frameworks and management side of the course.
Optimizing Your Growth Process By John McBride
Next up was ‘Optimizing Your Growth Process’ by John McBride. John leads two of the earliest modules in the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree. So it was great to check in with him again.
The content here closely followed on from those modules. But for the reasons I stated earlier, I’m glad they were split up into separate sections either side of the channel-specific content.
This short course focuses on the two key ‘levers’ for getting better growth results in less time:
- Running or choosing better marketing experiments
- Shipping and turning around these experiments faster
An important takeaway here was that it’s vital to prioritize the quality of tests before looking for ways to do more of them. Otherwise, being able to ship a lot of experiments per month is more of a vanity metric than a growth driver.
To achieve this, John stressed the importance of learning from every test (even those that don’t succeed). So you can:
- Combine your personal experience with data
- better understand your users
- get better at identifying high-potential tests
When you’ve got this nailed, you can then use John’s tips for improving the efficiency and turnaround times of your testing programme.
This section had a lot of tips of managing the different people and teams involved in your growth efforts. So it chimed in really nicely with the content in Sean Ellis’s GrowthMaster Workshop.
John also touched on the importance of quarterly planning and queuing up a number of experiments in advance. And as always, John’s videos were full of actionable gold. Even if they were a little on the short side.
This course is definitely worth watching (and re-watching), if you want to organise your growth marketing efforts and team more effectively.
Optimizing Your Marketing Tech Stack by Dan McGaw
The next CXL course I took this week was Optimizing Your Marketing Tech Stack by Dan McGaw.
The previous two courses had a big focus on organising your growth team. Or in other words, managing the people you’re working with to achieve growth.
In Optimizing Your Marketing Tech Stack, Dan focuses on managing the tools and software you’re using. Or more specifically, how they all work together.
In doing so, Dan aims (and succeeds) in demonstrating how you can transform your collection of tools from “a messy hairball” into an integrated marketing machine.
Choose, Integrate, and Automate Your Marketing Tools
The core learnings of Dan’s course are how to choose the right marketing tools and how to integrate/automate them.
As well as a great overview of the key tools you need to know about when it comes to integration and automation, you get actionable ways and examples of how implementing these things can push your business forward.
Naturally, the material is pretty technical at times. But it’s delivered in a way that is engaging and easy to follow.
As for ‘big takeaways’, I had two main ones from this course.
First was just how big a deal integration is in the modern, software fuelled economy. Second was that any company of a decent size simply must hire or consult an integration specialist.
Need a place to start with it all?
Watch Dan’s CXL course! This module is a must-see for anyone responsible for buying or choosing business technology. Or for managing those who do.
Looking Ahead…
This week’s courses sculpted the channel-specific skills from previous weeks back into a manageable growth marketing framework. Both in terms of people (i.e. managing your growth team) and tools (organising your technology stack).
Once again, CXL’s instructors were world-class. On one hand, we had Sean Ellis and John McBride’s short but nugget-laden talks. Where you always feel the urge to rewind and capture something new.
On the other, we had Dan McGaw’s meticulous deep-dive into integration and choosing the right marketing tools. So it was definitely a varied and valuable week of learning!
All going well, next week should be my final week on the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree. As I’ll round off the Growth Program Management section of the course with modules on project management and marketing strategy.
