GROWTH MARKETING MINIDEGREE / CXL — REVIEW 10

In the last blog post, we talked about the e-mail marketing concepts and it’s capabilities in detail. In this blog post, we will talk about different topics with 10th part of CXL Growth Marketing Minidegree.

You can go to the CXL website from here.

This week I will try to share the introduction & gist of every topic I have learned this week.

These topics are:

• Messaging strategy in Public relations by Ray Young
• Google ads by Jonathan Dane
• Content Strategy & SEO for Lead Generation by Andy Crestodina

Messaging Strategy in Public Relations

Maximum people know the wrong meaning of PR. The real sense is, It works with earned media where they pitch stories to producers & reporters to get them to write a story about the company, the client, or interview the CEO or an exciting story on the company’s product. PR is not the paid advertising thing.

The PR person firstly figures out the target audience & the right messages for the right audience. There are two kinds of PR -

• Defensive PR- In this negative PR, when something wrong happens. You have to deal with the negative press.
• Positive PR- This is about raising the visibility of the company & communicate with your targeting audiences.

It is not possible to track conversion results because of PR. So, to know the outcome, we can observe the effect while we started our initiative & when we closed it.

To define the target audiences, PR companies need qualitative & quantitative research. They often collaborate with research companies. The PR companies ask few questions to get clarity on their client’s target audience -

• Who is the Right Audience?
• Who Comes in?
• Who would you talk to?
• Who are the people already using your product/service?

Now, Before pitching to any traditional media. Do the extensive research about -

• Who Am I Pitching?
• What they have been writing on?
• What they have been covering?

Also, Check their stories & build a relationship with them on social media. Finally, make your Pitch relevant & timely. You have to stand out in your Pitch to get a pick from 1500 other Pitches. Keep it short & simple.

For blogging pitches, you have to be very specific with the topic & niche you want to Pitch in. Personalization & creating relations is necessary for Pitching. Mostly, you have to pay the blogger.

Google Ads

The course starts with clearing basic understanding of meaningful metrics. As stated by the instructor, we can not change all the metrics at the same time. We can do this gradually with the process.

Then the next most important thing in google ads is goal-setting to get a clear view of the process that we will be going to perform. Also, Google has the best research tools in account to plan keywords. Some external resource tools can also help in collect more data for our ads like spyfu & Semrush.

• Iceberg effect — This problem occurs when we do too many layers of targeting in one ad set. So, after a certain amount of time, these think starts to jump together. And we can not see their performance. Try to focus on the simplicity & granularity of your ad set to know what works & whatnot.

We can convert any traffic we want but, we need to match up the intent & the temperature. For display & youtube ads, we have to create our offer & Call to action beforehand to generate more variety around the offer.

• Smoke testing — This is testing where we create something exciting from the surface but in the end, we never finished it. We do this to gauge & know what our customers care about & are going to convert? Because of this, we can also update & modify our offer to increase conversions.

After all this research, we will start creating our campaigns & start running them. After collecting data from our active ads, we begin observing data to optimize our ads.

Content Strategy & SEO for Lead Generation

The course starts with the Content strategy & debunks the various myths.

The main target is to get our Qualified visitors to the service page to convert.

The website will act as a bridge between the search engine to our thankyou page & to achieve that, We should have high ranking service page. These all can be done when we have link-worthy good quality content to attract visitors.

The marketing content could be of these types -

• Blogs / Articles
• Social Media Content
• Press Releases
• Videos & Podcasts
• Whitepapers

To get the relevant audience our strategy should be simple, that is, to help them as much as possible.

• Our Content is Where [Audience X] gets [Information y] that offers [benefit z].

Having a mission statement is necessary because it makes a great call to action & also gives clarity to the Audiences.

Now, the next question comes is the sources of topics, as it is essential to create content that is relevant for our audience & can help them. And to get the approaches, we can do Keyword research, Q&A Websites & listen to your audiences. There are many keyword research tools to find the proper set of keywords.

Do you know! Most of the content gets no links and few shares. & if we want to create sharable content, then it should be well researched, opinion-forming & evidenced content. There are three ways to produce research -

• Observation: Pick a data set. Gather data.
• Aggregation: Combine data from existing sources
• Survey: Mass Outreach & analysis

There are many formats of content that we can use & these are-

• Text — Articles, Guides, ebooks
• Images — Infographics, Diagrams, Memes
• Video — How to, Explainers, animations
• Collaborative — Interviews, roundups

Images are better than texts, & videos are better than images. Finally, the articles that we want to publish should be Searched optimized & should have high infographics with diagram.

See you next week with a new blog post containing details from the CXL growth marketing mini degree program.

Thanks,

Mert Kolay