3rd week at the CXL Institute

Always keep learning — Oscar Ivan Hernandez — Digital Marketing

My third week in the Growth Marketing program at CXL Institute.

This week I had to slow down in my studies with the CXL institute because the demand for work in my company increased in a significant way. First, the COVID-19 brought more uncertainty for the decision-makers and that made at first that it will be necessary to increase the pace of implementation of campaigns, as well as the amount of work that was done in each “sprint”.

As the days went by, everyone in the company (working in an IT company), realized that our company was one of the lucky ones in keeping its operations in remote, from home, without errors in the processes or infrastructure, so the continuity was maintained. Of course, we saw a decrease in the purchase of our services, since our main market is the United States of America, a country that is currently experiencing a hard situation because of the virus and therefore companies have suffered this setback during the month of April.

After this hard week, here we are again to resume my degree in Growth Marketing with the third publication of my learning process. This week, I focus on learning from Sophia Eng, Digital Marketing expert and current leader of Invision App, one of my favorite tools for UI optimization in the market.

At this point, I have to say that I watched all of Sophia’s classes 3 times and read each of the articles she recommended in the classes, to reinforce the topics. In short, the course specializes in the different approaches to SEO, PPC, Email Marketing and Content Marketing. Without a doubt, Sophia’s focus is on long term, scalable strategies with high ROI, as are channels such as SEO and Email. Content Marketing is more of an approach to complementing SEO and building a brand or company identity at the communication level.

On the other hand, we also work on SEM issues, focusing on several points:

• Find out where your audience is
• What kind of content does your audience consume and based on that, what need do they have
• Web optimization needed = higher relevance in the data (quality score is key)

In summary, Sophia explains that there are three types of strategies in each of the digital marketing channels. These three channels are:

• Brand awareness
• Engagements
• Acquisition

Brand awareness seeks, as its name suggests, to generate a brand presence that has the widest possible reach within the target audience, as well as a clear definition of the brand.

Engagement is the next stage to “brand awareness” and seeks in principle to increase the interaction that our target audience has with our digital channels. At this point, it is key that the different interactions with our audience take into account different elements that allow p2p interaction between the brand and the audience or target group. It is in this sense that we seek to create an audience that is loyal to the content that the brand works with and the messages that it seeks to bring to the market, creating a strong bond between potential customers or active partners with the brand.

Acquisition is the last stage of the flow and talks about the moment of deciding within our target audience. At this point, the need to have strategies that do not lose the focus of the audience is key, making it help the audience to guide in the path towards conversion.

The title of the class is “Identify and amplifying growth channels”, and it covers several topics that I would like to explain my learning and conclusions:

First, before I define which channels I will work on in my strategy to achieve the company’s goals, I have to ask myself:

• Where is my audience?
• What are the needs or pains that my audience has and how can I help them with my product or service?
• What value will I create in my audience with the purchase of my product or service?

A starting point to answer these questions is through benchmarking of industry benchmarks, which will allow me to understand their competitive orientation. How do they talk, to whom do they talk, where do they seek to position their company, what volume of traffic do they receive and from where, etc… SEO is an excellent channel for this market analysis since it allows you to see the market through tools such as “keyword research” or “backlinks”.

Once this information is available, it opens the way to the positioning of our page in meta-search engines. For this, it is necessary to do a “keyword research”, establish which are the words that have more potential to work on positioning and relevance of my service, as well as the level of competition that this keyword has in the market.

A key tip given by Backlink.io is to see what and how many elements outside the organic searches exist within my SERP by keyword. In this way, not only does it evaluate the complexity of positioning my service organically in this “keyword”, but it also gives me information about which “search features” I can use to position my brand over the current competition, improving the positioning of my company over the competition and gaining organic traffic.

This SEO hack is key if we take into account that Google currently brings out more elements embedded in SERPs that push organic results down the pages, making the volume of search and traffic decrease over time.

According to Backlinks.io these “search features” serve in turn as generators of “backlinks”, since they allow to share this information in other pages external to ours. The moment this content is added to other pages, a request is made to our page and therefore the positioning in Google is improved.

Sophia explains the relevance that exists today between on-page and off-page SEO optimization. Without a doubt, Google’s latest algorithm “Penguin”, has a higher priority on the relevance that my website has, compared to others. And how much of my content is consulted by others?

For this last reason, the Off-page SEO is a strategy that cannot be needed in any page, independently if it is or not of niche, since it counts with greater benefits versus the optimization within the page. Now, this strategy requires more work and time as it is not immediate and it is necessary to achieve a network around our brand.

I want to confess that by watching the class videos and external readings about the importance of off-page optimization, I have made the decision to stop my studies for today and take action to improve this point in my company.

For this, I will start with an On-page optimization for the pages that have a higher relevance and then I will make an automated strategy with email marketing to progressively create a network around the content we develop, to have more organic traction, hopefully in the coming months.

I will resume my studies in a couple of days once I complete my SEO On and Off-page practice, finishing the program with the paid channels and later with the UX and User Research class. See you next time.