CXL Institute: Growth Marketing Mini Degree Review #4️⃣
Growth Channels, ROI, SEO & PPC, Content Marketing.
In last week’s article review of the CXL Growth Marketing mini degree, we have talked about the necessity to adopt user-centric marketing and what type of frameworks we can use to, on one hand, understand how to deliver the best user experience for your customers, and on the other hand, how to prioritize those key tasks to ultimately optimize your CRO.
If you have missed the previous article, check it out 👉 here.
Let’s take up from where we left off in the previous article, once you have identified relevant growth teams, developed your growth model, and identified one or more steps of the funnel to optimize, you will then need to identify those channels that can be optimized to drive growth for your company.
Yes, there are many channels from which we can start, but here the idea is to pursuit quality, not quantity, therefore one, among many others, an important lesson from this module’s coach Sophia Eng is that you need to assess which are the best channels for your company’s size, resources, and objectives.
How To Choose Which Channels To Focus On?
In the process of optimizing a company's social channels, the scope is universal and, it deals with the understanding of where are your customers and what they are doing. The general advice is to keep this focus on one to three main channels that are the most important for your customers, whether your business is at an early stage or is already a matured large company.
- Study all the channels that your audience uses, in which channel your audience is the most active? In which channels they exhibit the most engagement?
Go out and test if needed, for example with a Facebook Ad test from which you can get great insights on demographics and social information about your target customer, plus it is a relatively cheap and fast way to understand on which channels to invest most of your marketing efforts to drive growth. - Identify any discrepancy between the channels you are focusing on at the moment and those channels your audience uses the most, to check if your efforts are displayed in the right position. This is important to avoid any mistake when choosing which channel to focus your future investments and efforts to scale growth.
- Measure ROI & ability to scale for each channel. Usually, those channels that present high ROI and high ability to scale are those channels that will likely help you to drive growth across your business. Conversely, channels that have high ROI but low ability to scale you will have fewer opportunities to drive grow your business.
📌 Look out for any under-performing channel: You should not advertise on a popular channel just because it works for your competitors or because statistics say that that specific channel has higher ROI rates.
📝 Take time to assess channels' opportunity to scale — this is because a channel can take time to succeed.
✌🏻 The right attitude is to keep testing for channels in order to assess which ones work the most in terms of growth-driven opportunities for your company. There is no one rule fit for all as they say because every business is different, hence, for instance, those channels that work for a retail business will not work the same way for a manufacturing business.
Main Digital Channels For Growth
Five main digital channels can burst growth for your business:
- SEM, Search Engine Marketing
PPC, pay-per-click is also another term for it. When dealing with SEM you will use platforms such as Google Ads and Bing Ads. Paid search requires constant optimization where you need to look frequently at the keyword traffic, search relevant trends, and monitor the fluctuation in PPC cost.
There are two popular types of PPC campaigns:
- Awareness Campaign: this is implemented whenever you need to promote your company’s digital presence to your audience, and PPC offers a great way to increase traffic online.
- Lead Generation Campaign: this is a campaign to let your users know that your business has solutions to their problems, and through PPC you can drive them directly to a landing page that lays out the solution they are looking for.
We have different PPC channels to invest in such as Google Ads (60% of market share), Bing Ads (less competitive) but also Google Display and Facebook Marketing and Re-Marketing option.
2. SEO, Search Engine Optimization
SEO is the process of improving your website’s ranking on the search engine results page to get more people on your site, or said differently, to increase social appearance in organic search results. One of the perks of SEO is that compared to SEM, the audience here is more intent focused and the click-through rates are way higher when your website ranks on the first page of Google, especially for the first search results position.
A critical component of SEO optimization is keyword research and content gap analysis, this is done to create a roadmap for both the design and the execution of building your website and developing content to include in it.
The keyword research is basically finding out which keywords are related to your product/service, take a look at your content, your search volumes, and especially higher search volumes to prioritize keywords for your product that can work the best for your customers. Many tools assist you in keyword research, such as Google Keyword Planner, Moz Keyword Explorer, Ahrefs, BrightEdge, all these tools assist you in search terms and volume data.
The content gap analysis is essentially taking a look at the opportunity you have when running a comparison between your business and its competitors, a good method is to jot down what components you miss and planning to achieve, following up by creating a roadmap that illustrates which tasks to prioritize to “fill the gap”. This content gap analysis is also useful when designing a content marketing strategy for your company.
Some of the KPI´s available for SEO are:
1. Session & Visits: how much traffic is coming from a dimension/source
2. Goal completions: depending on your goal, for example, it could be related to an event, such as click on your video or the user took a desired action such as downloading the free case study offered on your website (for instance you will look at the total number of conversions)
3. Revenue: what traffic source is generating revenue?
4. Goal conversion rate: how many users from the total amount of traffic actually resulted in converted users?
5. Bounce rate: this is a rate that describes the overall permanence of a user on your website, hence the higher it is, the lower engagement your website provides to users, and Google will definitely interpret that bounce rate in this way when crawling. To tackle this rate you can run user research or prototype testing that helps you optimize your website to drive more engagement and increase the overall conversion rate.
You can also work on SEO through the identification of specific stages to improve:
1. Awareness stage focus: Build an audience for your product and service
2. Engagement focus: How to drive engagement with your product and service via SEO optimization
3. Conversion focus: Hence, how to drive sales and leads from SEO.
3. Social and Display Ads
Display ads are the banner ads you see on websites, usually in the middle page or on the right-side, whilst social ads are the ads you see on social platforms such Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, YouTube, etc.
Social channels open access to demographic data but also to main interests and customers’ behavior data. Buffer and HootSuite are tools that help you manage your social media posts, while Twitter and Facebook are generally used for B2C companies, LinkedIn works very well for the B2B industry. Instagram is also considered as a potentially explosive channel for growth if you are in an e-commerce business.
🆕 Native ads are also a great way to raise brand awareness. Native ads are defined as those ads that appear as part of the design and flow of the web page they are located on. Conversely to hard-selling ads, native ads tend to have an editorial look and feel, with a softer selling approach.
4. E-mail Marketing
Although it is considered by many marketers a relatively “old” channel for growth, e-mail marketing still performs and converts really well today.
It is an effective channel when reaching new prospects and also throughout the funnel it is effective for a business to retain its customers and engage with them with customized offers, newsletters, and so forth.
Tools such as Mailchimp, HubSpot E-mail Marketing, Get Response, and Aweber are only some of the tools that help your team to ace ROI for the e-mail marketing channel by automation, for example by creating a drip marketing email campaign, whereas you create a set of marketing emails that will be sent out automatically on a schedule, once satisfied a set of given parameters.
We will talk more about this powerful tool to drive sales up in the next upcoming articles.
5. Content Marketing
Content Marketing is acting like the glue that sticks together SEO, PPC, and PR efforts. By investing in content marketing practices, you invest in the relationship you have with your customer.
Above the content marketing matrix by Smart Insights provide a comprehensive visual including all types of content we can create for our business, and it also categorizes them from least to most emotional/ rational and taking into consideration the funnel stages, from awareness to purchase.
There are great distribution channels for content writing such as LinkedIn, Medium, Slideshare, but you can choose to open a “Blog” section on your website where to directly inform your customers.
Like it or hate it, content marketing is essential if you want to grow your business and the higher quality content you are able to provide, the better it will affect your overall CRO strategy.
🔥 Want to know more about growth marketing? 🚀
👉 Stay tuned in the next article we will talk about how to properly run growth experiments, starting from research testing, going through the researchXL process and conversion research hosted by our passionate CXL-Institute CFO Peep Laja.
💫 Four weeks in this mini-degree course and we just began naming what is growth hacking and what type of mindset to adopt to thrive in this field.
🙋🏼♀️ Are you thirsty, hungry, curious about this topic like me? 🙋🏼♂️
Then I highly recommend applying for this CXL course, or simply check among their courses which one can be the best for you!
You won’t regret it! 🙌🏻 😉
