CXL Institute Growth Marketing Minidegree | Week 9 | REVIEW

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  Welcome back one more week to this blog where I take you to my journey through the CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree.



This week I covered Facebook Ads, Content Strategy and I am midway through the Retention module. So let’s dive straight into the learnings, starting with Facebook Ads.


Facebook Ads


The Facebook Ads platform has tremendous opportunity when you know how to use it correctly. It’s important when you get started that you don't get overwhelmed with all the metrics that are available within the account. At the end of the day, we want this to be a business-level impact for you. So, your ROI, your profit, your profit margin, and also the volume of sales that you're able to do are the most important. After that comes basically the cost per conversion, the conversion volume, the return on ad spend. And then below that are all the other micro-metrics like, click-through rate, quality score, impressions share, and things like that. This course basically goes over the bigger picture things that you want to do from start to finish and how you also optimize your Facebook Ads performance to achieve the goals that you set.


This course was broken down by start to finish where I went through different lessons, how to create your account, how to set it up, how to build it, how to run it, then how to optimize it. The goal is not traffic, the goal is to make money at the end of the day.


 


Content Strategy & SEO for Lead Generation

I want to start by clearing up a common misconception about content marketing and content strategy. You see a lot of the stuff you read out there makes it sound like create good stuff, produce a valuable piece of content, attract visitors from the three main sources of traffic from search, from social, from email .And some visitors will subscribe and make them even more effective ,and some will follow making social more effective, and you'll attract links making search more effective .Create that fly wheel and that visitors who read these blog posts will actually move onto your service pages and really need what you offer. Let me go from there to the about page and build some trust and find out what you believe, and what you are all about and then go to the content page and convert and become a leader. This is actually an extremely unlikely scenario. It's just not what a lot of the articles out there make you believe, right. It’s not what a lot of people suggest. What that content that you create actually does is gives the universe something to link to.


A strategy is a plan to reach a goal. A goal you have to plan, that's strategy, right? Content strategy is a plan to use content to reach a goal, and reach a business goal, right? That’s how I define content strategy. Now before I go too far into this definition of content strategy, I want to acknowledge one of the truths about content strategy out there is that, which is there's a lot more to it than just marketing. Sure, some content is marketing content but a lot of other content in the universe is just internal content. It’s your HR documents, your employee handbook. There are huge, huge bodies of work out there that are not related to marketing, and I do understand that this is still part of content strategy. Okay, so let's start at the top and go through empathy. The science of connecting with the audience. Data driven empathy which is going to befall about the audience themselves and the topics and what they care about.



Now there's more to search than rankings .Of course it has to begin with the key phrase and the visitor's intent, and are people actually searching for that phrase. Ranking for a key phrase that no one's searching ford doesn't help you. You have to know what your audience is actually typing into Google. And of course, do you have a chance of even ranking for it? Then the next question, do you have a relevant page for that topic? Do you rank? And ranking, by the way, isn't SEO by itself either. Because if you can rank all day long and  no one clicks on it, you get no traffic. So really what we're trying to get is the, you know, the click from that rank. There's a separate set of tactics to trigger the click and increase the click through rate. And then finally, you know, did the visitor have confidence? Did they like the site? Did they take an action? So search is really, when done well, it's not really a standalone thing. It's kind of supporting a lot of other things and it's related to many, many other things. But I have a strong bias toward It because I know from experience that search is a very durable source of traffic. Think about it this way. Every page on your website has the chance to catch traffic from search just like a sale catches wind. And you can keep adding more and more sales to this boat anytime you want. Email and social media on the other hand are much more labor intensive channels and you have to keep working at them. You got to put your back into it and row that boat. And you get blisters on your hands from tweeting and sending emails. It’s just harder work, right? You have to keep doing it.If you stop doing email marketing, you stop getting traffic from email marketing. PPC or paid in general, you got put more resources in there' cause it doesn't keep happening unless you keep putting resources toward it, right,as we said last time. Advertising might be fast, but it's temporary.


So this is it for week 9. Stay tuned as I wrap up the minidegree and share learnings on the upcoming courses with you all. Stay safe and healthy!



Author
Gatesweb Alessandro Eren

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