Traditional Marketing vs Growth Marketing — CXL Review

Have you ever asked yourself the question to know what is growth marketing and what growth marketers actually do? If you browse the internet nowadays, you will find a tone of content around the same topic and with different appellations. Some people would call it growth marketing and others call it growth hacking.

Being in the marketing field for good years now (especially online marketing), I was also triggered the same way from the first time I got to learn about the existence of Growth Marketing but never knew what it was all bout and how was it different from traditional/brand marketing. I conducted some research to learn more about it and believe me, the findings were more than just Wow!! I quickly realized all the important skills that I was missing, despite all my qualifications in Digital Marketing I realized that there is another discipline that go deeper into different marketing approaches and focus the overall marketing strategy around growth. I couldn’t hold it anylonger — all my go-getting mindset popped up and set a goal to go for it and hustle my way up until I become a Certified Growth Marketing Specialist from a renowned institution.

“If you have a great ambition, take as big a step as possible in the direction of fulfilling it. The step may only be a tiny one, but trust that it may be the largest one possible for now.” – Mildred Mcafee

Here I am today, proudly following the famous CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree

CXL Institute/Growth Marketing

I will be happy to take you through with me during my 12 weeks learning period as I will be sharing here everything that I have learned on a weekly basis. Many different questions/challenges that digital marketers always face are discussed in this course; so keep your curiosity here, and let’s learn together. But in case you would like to give this course a try by yourself or any other mini degrees or a short course; I totally recommend you try the 7-day 1$ trial by CXL and explore their long list of specialties depending on your area of interest.

As per now, let’s dive into what we learned this week as this brings us back to our question What is the difference between traditional marketing and growth marketing.

This week was more of introductory, but still with a non-negligible set of information and skills.

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth Marketing is the process of designing and conducting experiments to optimize and improve the results of a target area. If you have a certain metric you want to increase, growth marketing is a method you can utilize to achieve that.

John McBride explained that traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel, these are Awareness and Acquisition while Growth Marketing takes place at every step of the funnel. Growth Marketing is compared to the Lean Methodology of Eric Ries and it’s because in growth we run different experiments to learn what is working and what is not working, then we adjust our strategies or keep doing what is working well. But in traditional marketing, usually, you set one big campaign and finger cross that things work as planned. If it fails then you don’t only waste all that money but also chances are high that you didn’t learn much from it.

Then what is experimentation in Growth?

I don’t want to stress it out because am sure you know already that you always have to work with a goal. So, in Growth marketing, after setting your goals, you run different experiments to reach your goals.

Let me explain from the example of an email campaign — your goal is to increase revenue through email marketing. You set up an email campaign to test if people can be converted from email. If it’s positive then you can look at the creative side of the email as well as the copywriting of the email. You can run different experiments to test which design people like more or which style of writing convert more or maybe which email opener has a more open rate. I mean there are plenty of different experiments that you can run for this campaign and at the end, you will know if you can keep sending out emails to your prospect because it’s another sales channel or maybe that channel doesn’t work for you for a specific group of people in your target audience. You can tailor your message depending on specific types of people based on their persona.

John mentioned something that I liked a lot, he said, if you are running experiment and it’s working or maybe not working it still fine because you’re still going to learn from it. Half of the money you use for Advertisement will be wasted (experience from many companies), but the most important thing is to identify where that money was wasted from and that’s when you start winning.

What is the difference between Growth Hacking and Growth Marketing?

It’s all the same! As I mentioned above, Growth Marketing comes from the idea of the Lean Start-Up methodology by Eric Ries. Lean methodology have 4 pillars that guide the continuous improvement cycle for value creation. These are Identification, Planning, Execution, and Review.

Planview.com

In lean methodology, there is a concept of Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which implies setting a version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort. The same as in Growth Marketing, You set a minimum viable experiment/hacks, you learn from them and pivot if necessary.

How to become a successful Growth Marketer?

For someone to become a successful Growth Marketer, they need to develop the skills below:

• Channel level expertise: You need to know how to use different growth channels because you will have to use them in your implementation. These are channels like (SEM, SEO, Email, Social, Ads).
• Analytical capabilities: you need to develop your analytical skills and learn the tools necessary to read and exploit data.
• Strategic thinking, Project management, and Leadership: You will obviously be working in a team and on different projects. So knowing how to deal with clients, your team, and manage the project, in general, is very useful as a growth hacker.

John advised that to grow your career in growth marketing you need to identify and focus on skills that you are good at. Also, have a look at someone around you who is in the field, talk to them, and learn from what they did to get there.

In lesson 2, John McBride took us through the Growth Process. He explained the following as a process for growth implementation:

1. Identify your growth model: the growth model depend on the growth objective that you have. The objectives for growth can be grouped into 2 categories, either User growth or Revenue growth. The most common framework for growth model to use is Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics for Startups.

startitup.co

2. Identify your customer journey or customer mapping: here you identify the different channels that your customers use most and that’s where you are luckily to meet them and convert them. (SEM, SEO, Email, Social, Ads).

Experimentation process:

• Goal
• Hypothesis
• Work on copies
• Automate what works

Tips:

• Use sticky notes to do customer mapping.
• You don’t start a growth team until you have product-market-fit and if you are trying to accelerate an already existing and working business — you should have enough data to understand what is working and what is not working for your customers.
• Explore data and set your goals based on that.
• Set OKRs goals that align with your company’s overall objectives
• Year-long goals are for company level, quarterly goals are for team and department level and also for startups.
• Ideally have a team of 4–5 people
• The best way to brainstorm is by conducting the conversation around the goal.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s was a lot of information that I can’t repeat all here. I hope I tried my best. See you next weekend for another review. xoxo :)

If you have something you would like to discuss with me concerning any of these topics or if you would just want us to stay in touch, then please Click Here to connect with me on Linkedin.