Honest CXL growth marketing minidegree review. Part 9/12
Hello there. If you land on this article looking for opinions about CXL, there is something you should know before. First of all, welcome. I was in the same situation as you are, and I know how hard it is to find genuine reviews in this magic world. I will be 100% honest with you.
Please read the following disclaimer to better understand the reason behind my review on CXL.
Just to be 100% honest with you, I am going to use some GIFs from The Office show just to make the reading less boring. 101% honestly, it is more for me than for you. Not very passionate about writing and GIFs help me not giving up.
This article reviews just the CXL growth marketing minidegree (not all the CXL courses). The review is written by an actual user, me (Diego). BUT… it is not entirely bias-free. My experience with CXL is due to them granting me a scholarship (yes 100% courses). We know that in this capitalistic world nothing is for free and there is always a bilateral exchanging. Santa Claus does not exist, and it is not a drama only for children. Instead of money, the CXL scholarship program asks you to write 12 posts sharing your learning outputs and impressions with the mini degree. So yes, this review is biased but just for the fact that I am grateful to CXL. As a broken AF graduate (like me) trying to start a marketing career, it is very stressful to gain useful knowledge for free. Giving back to the community by delivering free education to people unable to afford expensive courses is per se a great reason to buy CXL products.
You can find more about the CXL growth markeing minidegree here:
And more about the CXL sholarship here:
A little bit of contextualization. CXL growth marketing minidegree is a 111h long course (111h 42min to be fair) composed of 9 modules. In this article, I am going to review the fifth module: Channel-specific growth skills. This module is the longest within the minidegree so I am going to cover it in multiples articles. Just to give you an idea: this model includes thirteen potential channels you can leverage to grow your business includining PPC, SEO, influncer and email. For the complete review of the Channel-specific growth skills modul or other modeuls have a look at the link at the bottom.
I would like to take a more unusual approach to reviewing by talking about people instead of contents. Growth marking video courses are approximately the same all over the industry. What really matters is how growth marketing has been taught, depending on teachers, not contents. So, today I am going to talk about two guys teaching two very different, yet essential, channels for your brand digital communication.
Dan Shure talking about SEO Driven Editorial Calendar
Dan’s course, like himself, is very practical and straightforward. While CXL has plenty of courses about content marketing, copywriting and SEO strategies, Dan’s is particularly focused on the idea generation for SEO-oriented content. The great takeaway from Dan is that online presence should of course accommodate the interesting and engaging of prospects but also should reflect the company’s potential in ranking in the search engine pages. In brief, while most companies can write content satisfying our user’s needs, few can generate content able to satisfies the search engines. That is why this course is concentrated on the brainstorming, valuation, and prioritization of content ideas with the purpose of ranking high when people search for our business-related keywords. Dan’s expertise in this field is well summarized in the process explained in his course.
Starting from seed topics and content competitors, Dan’s process can estimate the potential of a multitude of content ideas. Additional to that. Dan’s process is also focused on utilizing the available tools to boost our brainstorming process to find more relevant ideas. The potentialities of content ideas are used as the basis for the prioritization of topic ideas inside a content editorial calendar. The scope of the content calendar is to leverage keywords volume and ranking potential, content saturation and competition, internal ability, and knowledge of the topic to optimize our content production process. However, The course does not stop on the calendar but it goes also into the practical aspect of the content creation like the choice of the content type, the medium, content structure and elements, and layout setting, all to increase the chance of high ranking. To sum up, Dan’s approach is very much strategical and process-oriented. In my opinion, to grow your SEO program you can easily start from this course but you should integrate it with other CXL courses like product messaging, content marketing, and technical SEO.
Siim Säinas talking about Data-driven Influencer Marketing
While SEO’s main goal is to make our communication being found when users are searching for us, influencer marketing is more on the branding side of our marketing strategies. Siim defines influencer marketing as the way to tell your brand story by collaborating with individuals with a voice in social networks. As this channel has the peculiar characteristic of involving external actors in our communication, it is of utter importance to treat the influencers not as a channel but like people. While operating with Facebook or Google ads we interface with a platform with an algorithm, in influencer marketing we work with people with their style, vision, objectives, and creativity. Therefore, part of the campaign planning regards the scouting of the right influencers and the management of the relationship with them both professional and personal. As Siim points out several times the great mistake that companies do when launching influencer marketing campaigns is to not give creative freedom to the creators and instead act as commanders. The great advance of collaborating with people, instead of algorithms, is that they have a different point of view of us and for sure they know how to engage with their audience better than us.
This course is full of tips and advice on how to leverage the influencers’ creativity to better deliver a brand story through social media. Moreover, This course is data-oriented. Siim’s approach to influencer marketing is very much different from other experts in this field. While professionals operating in the branding tend to forget or ignore data, Siim will teach you how to track, measure and analyze metrics to compares and values the performances of each influencers works.
Another takeaway from Siim is the amplification of the influencers’ content via the deployment of an omnichannel approach. It is fundamental to brack the noise to engage with all our own, paid, and earned channels. Very interesting is the lecture from Siim regarding the use of Facebook ads to boost the content produced by the influencer.
And that is pretty much my comments on the forth module of CXL growth marketing minidegree. If you want to know more, please read the previous reviews of the CXL growth marketing minidegree:
Or simply go check the CXL Institute, they offer a 7-day free trial so you can have a first-hand experience of the validity of their courses and teachers: