CXL Growth Marketing Review (Week 7)

6 min readJul 4, 2021

Hey there!

Welcome back to the CXL Growth Marketing course review.

To give you a brief, I am taking this course on Growth Marketing by CXL. Every week, I publish my review on what I have learned from this course. If you are new here, please go through the previous parts.

In this blog, we are going to talk about product messaging by Momoko Price. The course takes about 4 hours to complete and is one of the interesting courses from CXL.

How to Conduct a Copy ‘Teardown’

The objective of the lesson is to conduct a conversion-focused copy teardown of your own sales page, quantify the persuasive power of your existing copy and improvise the copy in a short span of time.

Momoko explains the power of MECLab’s Conversion Heuristic Formula: C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) — 2A in the process of the teardown.

In the formula,

C is (probability of conversion)
M is Motivation
V is Value
I-F is (Incentive — Friction)
A is Anxiety

Price has provided a helpful teardown checklist template to use in the process.

Introduction to message mining

The objective of this lesson is to find prospect-generated messages about your product online, identify promising, powerful instances of these messages to “swipe” and use them as the future sales copy.

Customers are often more effective at recognizing and explaining the real-world value of a product than the company that makes the product. That’s where ‘message mining’ comes in — it’s the process of scouring the internet (Trust Pilot, G2, Amazon, etc.) or other sources for instances of a target customer voicing what they care about most when it comes to a product or solution.

Mining is great for identifying key messages, and ‘swiping’ memorable copy. This can be an especially valuable approach if you don’t have customers yet.

The process of mining for ‘swipes’ is literally copying and pasting (‘swiping’) messages found during research that will later be reworked into useful product messaging. Swipes are extremely useful if you want to write:

Relevant, value-focused headlines
Authentic lead paragraphs & hooks
Market-specific terminology & slang
Emotionally-engaging purchase prompts
Laser-accurate objections

Mining messages from your customers

The objective of this lesson is to extract the foundation of your sales narrative through surveys, design high-response-rate, messaging-focused surveys to extract messages from your site visitors and customers, and understand critical dos & don’ts of conducting messaging-focused voice-of-customer interviews.

Crafting Effective Unique Value Propositions (UVP)

The objective of this lesson is to sharpen our understanding of what unique value propositions are and why they’re critical to any sales narrative. It also helps up understand the way value propositions fundamentally change with the product type and audience awareness.

Calling back again to the MECLab’s Conversion Heuristic Formula of C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) — 2A, it’s clear that motivation (M) is of highest importance (multiple of 4), but the majority of motivation outcomes are well beyond a brand or product’s control.

As such, energy is wisely focused on the next most important element, which is ‘value’ (V, with a multiple of 3). Value can be conveyed in the form, clarity, and power of a unique value proposition (UVP). UVPs are interchangeable with the following ‘reason to buy’ questions — all ultimately asking, “what’s in it for me, and why should I choose your product?”

“Reason to buy”
“What’s in it for me?” (WIIFM)
“Why should I choose you (over X)?”
“What’s your differentiator?”
“What’s your unique advantage?”

While UVPs fundamentally change with the product type and audience awareness, devising strong value propositions for virtually any product — even new products — is possible if you use a logical, repeatable framework.

Message Hierarchies

This lesson focuses on:

Understanding how the fundamentals of the story can greatly improve your sale page’s persuasive impact.
Constructing a killer value proposition for your product with some strategically collected voice-of-customer data.
Using Google Spreadsheets to instantly transform dry survey response data into a complete messaging hierarchy for any sales page.

Shaping raw, rambly customer-generated comments into surprisingly compelling headlines, subheadlines, and body copy is relatively simple when utilizing a data-driven approach to your first draft. We MUST know our audience’s awareness level first, to figure out how extensive our messaging flow needs to be.

Low awareness => more, high awareness => less (usually)

Writing the first draft

This lesson helps you understand:

How to create a customer-informed, data-driven ﬁrst draft of your sales page, without having to battle the blank page.
Shape raw, rambly customer-generated comments into surprisingly compelling headlines, subheadlines, and body copy.

Editing & Punching Up Your Copy

In this lesson, you will learn how to make your sales copy by following certain customer focussed editing principles.

While editing your copy, you need to vary of:

Are you being as CLEAR as possible about what you’re offering and why?
Did you make sure that your page’s hero copy (above the fold copy) is closely aligned with the copy that compels most users to click over to the page (ad copy, SERP copy, etc.)?
Did you overwhelm the reader with awesome value? Would someone read your page and think “holy crap, this is an amazing opportunity that would make my life SO much better”?
Would your copy stand up to and clearly address a skeptical, grumpy prospect’s questions of “So what?” and “Prove it”?
Did you remove dull, abstract, or generic descriptions with word pictures (i.e. copy that paints a picture)?
Does your copy explicitly call out things that should be noticed in your imagery & video?
Does your imagery & video explicitly support the messaging of the copy?
Have you gone through and cut EVERYTHING that isn’t doing at least one of the following tasks:
Reflecting & matching your reader’s motivation?
Conveying & clarifying the value that’s being offered?
Proving a claim?
Addressing anxiety?

Conversion-Focused Formatting & Layout

In this lesson, you will be learning about:

Making your sales page copy as easy to scan & read as possible in a digital context.
Leveraging key design principles to control the order, pacing, and emphasis of your copy in your readers’ heads.
Creating actual-size, clickable prototypes of your page copy that you can share with your clients/team.

Design factors that dramatically influence copy’s effectiveness:

The position of each piece of copy on the page. Design factors that can dramatically
The size of each piece of copy on the page. influence your copy’s effectiveness
What order you put your pieces of copy in.
The amount of space/clutter around your copy.
The typography of your copy.
Directional cues toward (or away from) your copy.
Color contrast vs. background, imagery, buttons