CXL - Must marketing and product be enemies?

TODAY'S HOST

Ognjen Boskovic, Growth Lead at CXL

The way marketers often pitch their contribution to growth is really primitive.

At its essence, it looks like this:

Product won't sell itself / objective product differentiation is dead / true innovation is gone
You need marketing / you need subjective differentiation / you need positioning and category creation

This IS true for a big chunk of the market, the chunk of copycats and mediocre product vendors.

For the remaining piece of the market, the minority that actually cares about the customer and has ambitions bigger than 'xy company is doing z, lets do z with out own twist', this is not true.

The product can sell itself when you understand how users want to use it, when you incorporate growth loops into it based on that, and when you lead with value and not transaction.

True innovation does exist. Going from 1 to n is way more common than going from 0 to 1, but we still see the Looms, Miros and Figmas of the world dominating the market because they value innovation and serving the end user. And because they build growth loops.

As marketers, we're fine with saying 'brand helps your ABM and outreach efforts', so why arent we ok with saying 'product helps your marketing and everything else'...

When it's such an obvious truth?

Marketing and product are not enemies.

Product is technology/innovation. Marketing is distribution.

Pair the two and you get = growth.

Connect with Ognjen on LinkedIn.

YOUR WEEKLY DOSE OF MARKETING UPDATES

1. Google Tag Manager for Beginners Course

Good marketers aren’t afraid of data.

That’s why one of the essential skills of any digital marketer or analyst should be Google Tag Manager.

It’s the control center for all your measurements, and it helps you deploy all kinds of tracking scripts without relying on your Dev team.

We’ve given a full refresh to our Google Tag Manager course to bring you even more value, with the help of Chris Mercer, from MeasurementMarketing.io.

After taking our updated course, with almost 9 hours of practical, fluff-free video material, you will:

Be competent in one of the most useful tools out there for a digital marketer.
Confidently know that your tracking isn’t broken.
Master the integration between GTM and Google Analytics 4.
Use Google Tag Manager to deploy third party tracking scripts.
Set up tracking without having to rely on a developer.
Get more insights from your data with advanced tracking.
Build a system you can use immediately to make sure your tags stay organized.

Check out the course.

2. Get Featured in Growth Notes

Your last real competitive advantage is constant innovation through experimentation at speed.

Submit your experimentation case studies and we will share them with our audience...

Newsletter (+120,000 readers)
Social media (+20,000 followers)

Case studies like the one you're about to submit help us educate more marketers on how to achieve speed through experimentation and win.

We will feature the best case studies across all of our channels and pay credits to you.

Submit your case study here.

3. Building the Greatest Swipe File

Join us in building the greatest swipe file there is. We will feature the best ads across our different channels with credits to you:

Newsletter (+120,000 readers)
Social media (+20,000 followers)

You can submit ads you've created but also the ones others did. We'll pay credits to you anyway for contributing to the marketing community.

PS. You can also submit content pieces beyond ads, like landing pages, organic social content, etc.

Submit your ads here.

4. CXL Community

There's no shortage of SEO advice on how to rank higher for high-volume keywords. Yet, even today, gaining high-quality backlinks continues to be one of the most effective components of a successful SEO strategy.

Still, outranking your competition through link building may require a big effort in time, with the campaign ideation, seeking out professionals for guest posts, doing outreach and following up, and in expenses, with paid backlinks.

The only way to justify that effort is to track and report the impact of your link building strategy properly. This playbook will help you exactly with that.

Get your playbook on how to track and measure your link building results.

5. Product Bundling: Guide, Strategies and Examples to Get It Right

It’s the early 1980s. You’re in charge of a fledgling ESPN, and you have two choices:

Add more college basketball—you’re highest-rated programming—to the schedule.
Stick with the skiing and billiards you’ve aired for years (because you couldn’t afford anything else).

Which creates the more profitable programming bundle?

ESPN stuck with the esoteric sports. And because of that choice, the ESPN family of channels now consumes a double-digit percentage of your cable bill.

6. CXL Talent Program

We help you hire experienced, CXL certified marketers outside US in less than 100 days. Salaries starting at $40k.

Learn more about CXL Talent Program here.

7. Deep B2B ICP Research

“[There is an assumption that] more is better… they don’t think about any precision with regards to who they’re selling to and why. They think sales have to be feature, benefit or product-led. There’s very little customer understanding or deep customer understanding.” — Moeed Amin, Founder, and CEO at Proverbial Door and expert on the neuroscience of trust and decision-making.

We don't think a lot about whom we're selling to and why.

There's one reason for this — zero deep customer understanding.

To understand to whom you're selling to and why, you need to research your customers in a way that actually converts and let you grow.

In this blog post, Speero will help you develop deep customer understanding for B2B, so you can finally understand their motivations, FUDs, and frustrations. Not their age or income.

Read full article.