With only six more weeks to go, I wanted to take the time to reflect on what I’ve learned thus far with CLX in their Growth Marketing minidegree.
CXL
It has been roughly six weeks since I started the minidegree program with CXL Institute focusing on growth marketing. For anyone who is unaware, CXL is an online organization that makes knowledge accessible for anyone willing to put in the effort to learn.
CXL brings you advanced level marketing training: get deep skills in growth, customer acquisition, analytics, and conversion optimization.
CXL was founded by Peep Laja, an entrepreneur and a conversion optimization expert. An All-Access subscription to CXL comes with access to their minidegree programs, which are designed to advance your marketing skills with training programs taught by leading marketing practitioners.
As I write this, I cannot remember how I found CXL but I signed up for their newsletter in August of 2020, during the pandemic. It may have been through one of my many other newsletters I’m signed up for, through some random recommendation on Facebook, or by chance off of some marketing site. I honestly cannot remember.
In either case, I’m extremely happy that I did. Since signing up for their newsletter, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading all of Peep’s insights into various subjects across marketing. In the beginning, I treated the newsletter as such. Just a newsletter with insights from Peep and various articles to learn more.
As time went on, I started learning more and more about what CXL had to offer outside of their emails. Eventually, I applied for and received a chance to win a one-year, All-Access subscription to CXL Institute. This subscription was worth $1,299!
As a (very) small start-up, this price was entirely out of my budget. I just did not have the cash on hand to pay for this subscription. Due to this, I’m extremely ecstatic to have been given the chance to learn with CXL!
Why I Chose Growth Marketing
I’m currently in the video game industry and have been for over ten years now. Throughout that time, I’ve worked in various disciplines, having started in quality assurance then eventually moving into game design, production, product management, and currently, marketing.
As with anyone working in the field, hobbies are a norm. One of mine happened to be game development. I’ve been creating random video games for years but in 2019, I decided to start an LLC to work on video games for mobile devices. This was my first step towards creating a fully functioning and profitable video game development company.
Having worked on the development side for years now, it came easy. Anything that I’ve learned on design, user experience, or product goals were put to use. What I started seeing was that I lacked several crucial marketing skills. As such, growth marketing was the obvious choice when I was choosing which minidegree to pursue. After having completed several lessons already, I can say it was a great decision. I’ve already put several lessons to use and continue to dig further into those lessons that I have yet to implement.
Knowledge So Far
The first courses with the Growth Marketing Minidegree were focused on why growth marketing was different from digital marketing. I won’t go through the whole spiel again as anyone who’s interested can take a look at my first article here. However, as a quick recap, growth marketing focuses on the entire funnel while traditional marketing focuses on the top of the funnel.
As I went further through the lessons, taught by different teachers of course, I started learning more about user-centric marketing and channel optimization strategies. These were extremely interesting to me as it exposed me to a side of development that I had never had the chance to work in before now.
I’ve dabbled in various ad networks and run several ad campaigns on Facebook for several different businesses in my personal portfolio. So, a lot of the information I gained from the courses thus far, outside of general “what is growth marketing” moments, were extremely useful to me. In fact, I’ve probably taken longer than necessary to go through a few lessons because I kept pausing in order to review what I’d done on my website, app store pages, or social media pages. Personally, I’ve been enjoying the lessons so far.
Longing for More
I do have to admit, though, that I found some of the lessons in the beginning to be a bit basic. I realize, that’s how most courses start and it isn’t until you’ve moved further into the curriculum that things start to pick up. Still, I would have preferred to have the courses structured in a way that would quickly move into detailed, hands-on lessons without spending so much time going over the basics of marketing.
The structure of the lessons are taught by different experts in their respective fields, so with each lesson there is a general “intro” to the lesson before the instructor dives into their lesson. Still, I found a few lessons to be too general. It almost felt like they were reviewing what they were going to talk about without actually talking about it. This definitely left me wanting to know more, though. So if the purpose of the lessons were to get me excited about a subject and researching more, then it was definitely a success.
With other lessons, the instructor talks about strategies but do not go into enough detail on those strategies. I definitely would have appreciated real-life examples, or even mock situations, that would help me better visualize how a strategy could be implemented. I am really hoping that the upcoming lessons will continue to either build upon these lessons or go deep into their own lessons.
Tip of the Iceberg
That said, I still have a lot more of the minidegree to go through! There is so much content that I am not deterred by these general lessons in the beginning. Within just the few lessons I have taken, I have found enough beneficial information that I cannot completely say it has been a waste of time. Far from it. In fact, I know that the time invested into this minidegree will completely pay off when the time comes!