The In-Depth CXL Review – Growth Marketing Mini Degree (I Tried & loved it)

CXL Review - Growth Marketing Mini Degree

Want to enter the realm of growth marketing and implement an iterative growth strategy for your business? CXL Institute might be just the one for you.

CXL offers multiple video courses and mini-degrees that are siloed to cover specific topics in the field of internet marketing. This upskilling platform has a vast training library that will help you run growth experiments, optimize your best channels, and scale your growth program effectively.

Interested in knowing more about reliable growth programs? Check out my in-depth Demand Curve Growth Program review!

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CXL Institute claims to be the only skill-building platform with its instructors among the world’s top 1% practitioners (which I find it true). I completed their Growth Marketing mini-degree course, so here I am to share my learning experience and offer you a solid CXL review.

Before diving in, here’s a TL;DR for our busy readers:

  • If you are a marketer and want to speed through your learning on digital marketing stuff and get hired in “growth department” – CXL Growth Mini-Degree is the right choice.
  • CXL’s instructors, content outline, and depth of information is exactly the way it should be.
  • Growth marketers touch every stage of the funnel to ensure that they understand their customers well and build loyalty to retain them.
  • The courses in the CXL Growth Marketing mini-degree are a series of videos by instructors who are experts in several microdomains present in digital marketing.
  • The mini-degree is focused on user-centric marketing, developing a growth mindset, and building a growth process.
  • The content covers email marketing, Google Ads, content strategy and SEO for lead generation, YouTube ads, LinkedIn advertising, and more.
  • If you don’t have any experience with marketing, CXL is the right choice.
  • CXL’s growth marketing training program is ideal for you if are a full-stack marketer or a generalist who now wants to specialize, a UXer who works with data and wants to enhance your skills or join a growth team.
  • It’s longer than expected but everything you learn is actually useful and you can easily apply it.

Btw, I’m a growth marketer myself and I still took CXL Growth Mini-Degree to brush my skills. If you are into growth marketing, check out my podcast (it’s free to listen, no ads).

👉 Try CXL Growth Marketing Mini Degree First Lesson for Free

What is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is an approach where a marketer conducts a series of experiments to learn about and optimize campaigns to achieve certain targets within a given timeline. It’s data-driven and especially suitable for startups in their early stage.

Traditional marketers focus on the top of the funnel – awareness and acquisition. On the flip side, growth marketers touch every stage of the funnel to ensure that they understand their customers well and build loyalty to retain them. 

Traditional marketing vs. Growth marketing

Source: Medium.com

As a marketer, taking a growth marketing approach can help you gain a leading position for your organization’s marketing efforts. Consequently, you can lead your marketing team towards excellent results.

Traditional marketing involves the marketer using only one hypothesis or experiment to improve the company’s position from A to B within a certain period.

They may end up failing with the process, in which case all the invested time and resources go to waste, and the marketer may not even get another opportunity.

On the contrary, a growth marketer experiments continuously with the faith that they still have more to learn about their customers. The best bet here is to conduct A/B tests based on the experiments.

If any of your experiments fail, you can learn from your mistakes and improve future campaigns. 

CXL Review – The Growth Marketing mini-degree courses

CXL Review

The founder of CXL came to my podcast – if you want a trailer of the content, listen to him here:

 

The courses in the Growth Marketing mini-degree are a series of videos by instructors who are experts in several microdomains present in digital marketing. Transcripts are present in the videos to help you retain information. 

This mini-degree would take 12 weeks to complete. Each course in this mini-degree is different based on the stage of the user’s learning.

Let’s look at the various courses offered under the mini-degree. 

Course 1: Growth marketing foundations

This course would take 2 hours to complete. You’ll obtain detailed knowledge on:

  • Growth mindset
  • Building a growth process
  • User-centric marketing
  • Identifying and amplifying growth channels

Course 2: Running growth experiments

With a 12.5 hours completion time, this course deals with:

  • Research and testing
  • Conversion research
  • A/B testing mastery
  • Statistics fundamentals for A/B testing

Course 3: Data and analytics

This course is 28.5 hours long and covers the following areas:

  • Google Analytics for beginners
  • Intermediate Google Analytics
  • Google Tag Manager for beginners
  • Attribution
  • Excel and Sheets for marketers

Course 4: Conversion

This 15 hour-long course covers:

  • Landing page optimization
  • Product messaging

Course 5: Channel-specific growth skills

This is a 28 hour-long course and covers a wide range of topics:

  • Email marketing
  • Facebook Ads
  • Messaging strategy in public relations
  • Google Ads
  • YouTube ads
  • Retention
  • Content strategy and SEO for lead generation
  • SEO driven editorial calendar
  • Maximizing audiences for your PPC campaign
  • LinkedIn advertising
  • Technical SEO
  • Account-based marketing
  • Data-driven influencer marketing

Course 6: Growth program management

This 2-hour course deals with:

  • GrowthMaster training workshop
  • Optimizing your growth process

Course 7: Management

Finally, this 11 hour-long course on management covers:

  • Optimizing your marketing tech stack
  • Marketing strategy
  • Project management for marketers.

CXL Review – Highlights of the mini-degree

Develop a growth mindset and build a growth process

 

The growth mindset stresses the importance of humility in growth marketing. Rather than being sure of what your customers want, you say that you’re unsure and run experiments to evaluate whether your customers care about your message.

Here, you don’t spend all your money on a single campaign or marketing platform. Instead, you carry out multiple individual campaigns as experiments as fast as you can from now till the deadline. 

Each time an experiment succeeds, you scientifically build a foundation of knowledge about consumer behavior. Even if an experiment fails, it’s okay because the successful ones keep adding value.

Plus, you know what improvements to make and what mistakes to avoid. A growth process follows the 3-step Lean Startup methodology:

  • Designing a hypothesis
  • Using the fastest and the most efficient way to test a hypothesis
  • Designing an experiment to validate or invalidate.

User-centric marketing

The mini-degree will help you realize the importance of user-centric marketing in today’s world and guide you through the process. It involves user research and adopting a user-centric design. You get to know more about your customers, which helps you persuade them to purchase your product.

This segment focuses on:

  • How to adopt a user-centric approach
  • What you need to know about your customers
  • What Customer Journey Mapping is and how it will help you.

Email marketing

This segment starts from the basics to the best-in-class. Your objective should be to start receiving 20 times the return from email marketing. You’ll learn:

  • How to build email lists quickly
  • What type of content to send
  • How you can implement data-driven email marketing
  • Email list growth
  • How to create campaigns

Google Ads

This would help you master Google Ads and make paid customer acquisition highly profitable. This segment digs deeper into:

  • The intricacies of Google Ads through Search, Display, Shopping, and Video
  • Different types of Ad campaigns
  • Attribution (The Holdy Grail of Ads)
  • How you can best use the Google Ads platform to meet your business objectives

Content strategy and SEO for lead generation

This segment helps you understand the key components required to create the best content marketing strategy. You’ll be able to plan accordingly and implement and measure a successful B2B content marketing strategy.

It mainly focuses on:

  • SEO
  • Lead generation
  • Measurement.

SEO driven editorial calendar

This segment enables you to maximize traffic by using an SEO-driven editorial calendar. You’ll learn to improve your keyword research and use the proper content types to create the calendar.

It focuses on:

  • Content calendar
  • SEO
  • Campaigns.

Maximize audience for your PPC campaign

It’ll help you obtain higher returns from your PPC ad expenditure. You’ll learn what process to use to enhance your PPC returns by maximizing your audience across channels and in the search network.

This segment will dig deeper into:

  • Google Ads
  • Retargeting
  • Audiences
  • Remarketing.

YouTube ads

Here, you’ll learn how you can create and scale profitable YouTube ad campaigns. It’ll focus on:

  • Targeting the right audience
  • Creating good quality content
  • Carrying out campaigns that will work
  • Converting YouTube into a reliable source of traffic.

LinkedIn advertising

Completing this segment will let you obtain high ROI from your LinkedIn ads by targeting, building, and measuring them. You’ll learn more about audience targeting and funnel optimization.

Retention

Retention is arguably the most important growth channel and should be your top priority. This segment will allow you to identify and define the retention points for your audience, reduce or flatten churn, and eventually enhance retention over the long run.

You’ll gain deeper knowledge on:

  • Customer experience
  • Churn
  • Customer journey
  • Measurement

CXL Review – About the overall Growth Marketing mini-degree

Here are some of my overall observations on the whole mini-degree.

  1. The growth marketing mini-degree felt like pieces of a puzzle coming together after I finished it. It has all the courses, like conversion, growth program management, etc., as pieces of a puzzle. 
  2. Every course in this mini-degree has the most relevant topics covered in the most concise and comprehensive way. The wide range of extensive and inter-related courses also ensures you get a vast knowledge to start with for growth marketing.
  3. The courses are very practical and effective, and you can implement the process and tools you learned in your work right from the moment you’re done with the course.
  4. Some courses have an exam at the end, and it is a must to pass those to proceed to the next course. These exams are good opportunities to review what you’ve learned without any time barrier.
  5. The teachers are top practitioners you might already know if you belong to the same industry. They teach you the right skills following a hands-on curriculum. They made the classes engaging and fun to do. I still remember laughing a lot at one of the jokes the instructor cracked while teaching conversion rate optimization.
  6. The industry-expert teachers teach from their own experiences, successes, and mistakes. You get to know not only what to do but also what not to do.
  7. The self-paced content is a curation of videos, which you can complete at a speed that works just fine for you and your schedule.
  8. The teachers provide blank templates that you can work on with your data.
  9. Even though CXL says the mini-degree is for novices, too, I believe it can be a bit troublesome to catch on if you don’t have any prior experience in marketing or growth marketing.
  10. The All-Access Pass is not that cheap, and its price might be a hesitant factor for you. However, you can apply for a scholarship to get some financial aid.
  11. You also get access to an active Facebook group where you can get help for any queries quickly.

CXL ReviewHow would you know that CXL is the one for you?

CXL may or may not be the one for you. But knowing who CXL is for can help you figure out if you should opt for the growth marketing mini-degree. You can consider enrolling in it if:

  1. You are a student or a recent graduate eager to gain practical, industry-centric knowledge and skills to join a growth team and excel.
  2. You are a digital marketing professional who wants to improve your skills and knowledge in growth marketing.
  3. You are an entrepreneur or a small business owner who wants to learn to grow a business effectively with marketing. But only consider the course if you can give it enough time.
  4. You are a full-stack marketer or a generalist who now wants to specialize in growth marketing.
  5. You are genuinely interested in understanding what’s behind successful A/B tests and CRO.
  6. You are a UXer who works with data and wants to enhance your growth marketing skills.

If you see yourself in any of these scenarios, you can try enrolling in the growth marketing mini-degree and expect a decent return on investment.

How can you become successful in growth marketing?

One of the course instructors, John McBride, said that the following components would help you be a successful growth marketer:

  • T-shaped marketer, where you possess a strong channel-specific skill, such as SEO
  • Data analysis or analytical skills, like in Excel or SQL
  • Leadership, critical thinking, and project management.

You should gain a single channel-specific skill as well as an overview of other channels. 

Before you go on an interview for a growth marketing position, you need to understand the organization’s objectives, past and existing marketing campaigns and have some idea about how they can improve.

Suppose they have a product. Check out its functions and see how well it performs. Plus, review the product’s onboarding flow and come up with areas where it can improve.

Final Thoughts

CXL Institute has described growth marketing as a systematic process.

If you want to carry out your marketing activities systematically and cover all stages of the funnel, growth marketing will help you obtain better results than someone who only works on an ad hoc basis.

However, it doesn’t mean you need to specialize in all areas. It’s just that when you know at least something about multiple areas, you’ll find it easier to select your area of expertise and establish a growth marketing strategy accordingly.

Evaluate your options properly to judge whether this course is right for you. Make sure you have the patience and time to complete this course within a span of 12 weeks, especially if you are new in this field.

If you want to apply for a scholarship, try to spare some more time to ensure that you get it. 

Disclaimer: Please note, I may receive affiliate compensation for some of the links below at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan. However, these are the best tools I have tested for launching and running a website & a podcast. You can read my affiliate disclosure in my privacy policy & affiliate disclosure.

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