Growth Channels | Week 6 | Review

Identifying and Boosting Growth Channels

This is blog post #6 as part of the series of blog posts in which I will sum up my learning experience with CXL Institute attending their Growth Marketing Minidegree.

Last week I talked about the User Mental Model.
Today I will continue with Growth Channels that can Amplify your business Growth summing up my learning experience and review the following key takeaways:

Main Growth Channels  

Where and how you connect with your customer is extremely important. So what're the main channels you can use to help your business grow? well, let's start with SEO; where you can rank in top search engine results ORGANICALLY but you have to make sure that you're on page 1 of search engine results pages, either that or your website is dead!
With Paid Search AKA SEM or PPC; you get to rank your website on the top of search engine results with Paid Search Ads on platforms like Google or Bing, but it requires constant optimization to look at keyword traffic, search trends, and change on PPC cost. However, with a lot of attention, it can drive success. While SEO and SEM are powerful as you can reach your customers based on their intent, Social Media and Displayed ads are powerful too as you can reach your customer through sharing customers' interests. Also, there's Content Marketing; which is the core common channel of all these main channels, so when we say content marketing we mean blogs, forums, video marketing and more.

How to Pick What's Right for My Business?

These all channels above have shown great growth potential for many different businesses but you can’t focus on all of them at once, because you can't leverage all of them with top peak performance, regardless of whether you're a startup or a large scale company. Okay, then what to do? simply identify where your customer is and just follow, understand where your customer is? on which platform? and what they are doing on it? then pick from 1 to 3 channels to leverage. always remember not to spread yourself too thin. Also, avoid channels that are most competitive.
After picking the channel, how to make sure if it's worth it or not? how to measure success? you can measure your success based on the Pre-defined metric you were focusing on, so it gets for example a high ROI with a high ability to scale, this is a good choice and if it gets you high ROI but low ability to scale, that's not good. Always remember to look at the data and don’t keep strategy just because everyone else is doing it, great to get insights from your competitors but what works with them might not work with you and vice versa. 
As important it is to identify the falling channels, it is also important to identify where to double down, Channels must be given the opportunity to scale before deciding whether it's a success or not. for example, a channel like SEO might take from 6 to 12 months before you see actual results that by data proved to have an ROI on your business.
Always remember that a Data-Driven decision is a key element of a Growth Marketer and it's always important to keep testing.

Let's dive below into each growth channel and highlight the best practices on each.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is hugely popular but tends to carry the reputation of being all fluff, or just for vanity metrics, which is simply NOT true. you can track every single action on social media and link it to a specific metric that impacts your business, using tools like google analytics, for example,  You can track the response of different social campaigns and see which are more successful at moving users to and throughout your site as well as tracking specific conversions. And this is important to have within your website the UTM tracking as well as the pixels.  with social media not only you can generate leads but also you get to build and create and engage deeper relationships with your existing clients/Customers. 

Social media marketing should be treated as any other channel in that you can still track from the first touchpoint to LTV and take a look at exactly what your users are doing throughout the journey.
What's most fun about social media for me, is the ability to do testing on a wide scale and learn what works best, understand why and what's not. but what to test? you can test publishing times, content, CTA and offers. So always be testing to figure out the best ROI you can get with the lowest cost.

SEO

Now knowing that SEO is one of the top driving factors for traffic and growth it's best to optimize. For Google to crawl your site there's a couple of things that Google looks at: 

• Domain Authority, which is how your site compares against the other sites in your industry
• Page Authority, which is how well your site is set up for success for crawling
• Content Schedule, so how frequently do you post and frequently do you update and add pages to your website
• The popularity of your website, it's a combination of site traffic, click-through rate, time on site, looking at bounce rate and all of these contribute to a higher frequency of crawling for your site.

There's a fetch function that you can do within Google webmaster tools, you can also create Google sitemaps within your website, and within Google Analytics you can also give them an edge as well.

Don't forget about your customer when doing SEO, while a certain might be tempting to use as you may think it will rank you #1 on google search the truth is actually that keyword, that one keyword that you're finding has a high search volume may not necessarily be the keyword that's going to get your users to convert in your funnel.

Good traffic you'll find is often can be found in longer tail keywords that have lower search volume with more focused content which is engaging and educational. which will help you become the influencer for your customers and they're more likely to get the knowledge from you and you become the authority for that. Targeting the right keyword is more important than targeting the high search volume keyword.

SEO is changing every day and you have to keep up and be always updated, the average amount of Google algorithm updates per day is about 4 to 6. Google and Bing are constantly making updates for the best optimizations, for the best experience for their users, and therefore it kind of forces our hands business in all across different industries to take a look at what the best experience is for our users, whether it's, in all aspects from SEO keyword optimization and on-page optimization. 

I will be continuing with SEM, Content Marketing and New Emerging channels in next's week blog post.