Review: CXL Growth Marketing MiniDegree (Week 2)

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 first part where I have reviewed courses 1 and 2.

This week I will be reviewing 2 courses.

Course 3: User-centric marketing by Paul Boag

Paul Boag has worked in digital for 25 years, and has written six books, and launched the first-ever podcast on web design. He is a customer experience consultant, who helps organizations overcome departmental silos, internal politics, and a plethora of customer touchpoints to create an outstanding experience. He does this by providing training, audits, and strategy. He helps savvy marketers, product owners, and UX advocates demonstrate that a useable, accessible, and people-first experience is the best path to business success.

His course on User-Centric marketing is subdivided into 15 lessons and a test.

1. Why we need a user-centric approach to marketing

In this lesson, you will learn:

• How digital has changed a consumer's relationship with businesses and the impact of that on the sales and marketing funnel.
• Why our current approach of running marketing campaigns is inefficient in the light of the capabilities that digital tools offer us.
• Why a more user-centric approach to marketing has the potential to improve conversion and create happier customers who will recommend you to others.

2. How do we start to adopt a user-centric approach

In this lesson, you will learn:

• Why we need to know more about our users than their tastes and background.
• The importance of understanding the user tasks and questions.
• Why mapping customer journey is so fundamental to success.

This lesson personally helped me understand how mapping the customer journey can help you break down and focus on individual areas for improvement.

3. How to better understand your audience without spending a cent

In this lesson, you will learn:

• How to gain insights on the hidden knowledge your colleagues hold about your audience.
• How to extract insights from freely available data sources.
• How to leverage the huge amount of data users share about themselves every day.

This is something that you would know if you are a marketer. I honestly did not find this very useful. But, this is something that fresher’s in marketing should follow.

4. Building a picture of your audience using surveys

In this lesson, you will learn:

• What you should be looking to discover when running a survey.
• How to avoid the common mistakes of running surveys.
• How to avoid surveys undermining the user experience and conversion rate.

5. Discover the power of top task analysis

In this lesson, you will learn about:

• What top task analysis is and why it matters.
• How to run top task analysis.
• What to do with the results of your top task analysis.

This is more like an introduction to top task analysis. If you really want to dwell in detail, please read this blog on What Really Matters: Focusing on Top Tasks by Gerry McGovern.

6. Why and how you should be meeting your audience in person

This lesson explains:

• Why meeting people is so important.
• How often you should be spending time with your audience.
• Different methodologies for meeting with users.

This is more sustainable for a B2C business, in my personal opinion.

7. Customer journey mapping: What is it and why it can help?

This lesson explains:

• What role a customer journey map performs.
• How it is better than a traditional persona.
• What a customer journey map typically contains.

8. How to run a customer journey mapping workshop

This lesson explains:

• Who to invite to your workshop.
• How to establish the scope of your customer journey map.
• How to identify all of the components to go on your map.
• Things to consider when turning your map into a visual.

9. How to get the most from your user research

This lesson explains:

• How your user research can shape your campaigns.
• How you can avoid users getting forgotten in the midst of a project.

10. Involve the user in your campaign design

This lesson explains:

• How involving the user in the design process helps.
• Exercises that help understand what tone resonates with users.
• Ways to engage the user without undermining the role of your copywriters and designers.

11. How to test your campaign’s design with users

This lesson explains:

• How to test whether your mockup is setting the right tone.
• How to check whether people are taking away the right message.
• How to know whether people will click what you need them to click.

12. Reflect your customer’s mindset with Card Sorting

This lesson explains:

• What card sorting involves and why it is valuable.
• Two different approaches to card sorting.
• How to run a card sorting exercise.
• How to interpret the results.

Like top task analysis, this lesson only covers the overview. Please refer to this blog, to learn more.

13. Ensure website success with a prototype you can test

This lesson explains:

• How to build a prototype cheaply and quickly.
• How to test your prototype with real users.
• How to integrate testing at all stages of your website build.

14. Testing your websites at scale with unfacilitated usability testing

This lesson explains:

• What exactly unfacilitated, remote testing is and why it is worth considering.
• How to run this kind of usability testing.
• What tools are available to make it considerably cheaper and easier than traditional usability testing.

15. How to refine your campaigns post-launch

This lesson explains:

• Why refining a campaign post-launch is so essential.
• How to use monitoring tools to optimize your conversion rate post-launch.
• How you can use A/B testing even on low-traffic websites.

Couse 4: Identifying and amplifying growth channels by Sophia Eng

Sophia Eng is the VP of Growth Marketing at Trade the Fifth. She has an entrepreneurial background and built businesses from start-up to generating 6 and 7 figure sales annually.

This course has 15 lessons and gives a refresher on the marketing channels, SEO myths, introduction to SEO, PPC, Social Media, and content marketing.

That’s all for this week, folks! Watch out this space to read the review of upcoming courses.