
In this lecture you take one channel you want to test and plan the first four weeks: the week of writing down who you talk to and what you promise, the week of deciding what counts as a result before any money moves, the week of running the smallest honest version of the channel, and the week of reading what came back and deciding to keep it, change the message or close it.
This course is built from six disciplines: marketing leadership, brand management, practical channel work, communications, revenue operations and AI at work.
The map of the course
A dictionary for reading lectures recorded for other audiences as work with your own customers
Three questions to ask after every lecture
A short self-diagnostic that shows which sections to watch first
Download the Channel Test Plan and fill in one line after each lecture.
Where to start when you inherit a position you did not build
A fourteen-day audit of team, channels and effectiveness
Ten questions to ask leadership before committing to anything
The action plan for the first month
Assembling a competitive analysis quickly
Methods for estimating a competitor's unit economics
Where insights come from, and how they turn into decisions
Building the strengths and weaknesses table properly
Building a strategy that survives a leadership review
The frameworks: 4P, STP, Ansoff, the customer journey
Linking business goals to marketing indicators
The annual strategy template, and its one-page version
Building a budget and defending it
Acquisition cost, lifetime value and return on investment
Reallocating budget between channels mid-year
The report for the chief executive and the finance director
Developing the value proposition
Brand architecture and portfolio management
Preparing a full brand plan
The template with indicators, initiatives and budget
The funnel from lead to revenue
The channels, and what each is actually for
Attribution, optimisation and the metrics behind them
What a working dashboard has to contain
Building a department that matches the strategy
The roles: brand, performance, analytics, communications, product marketing
Indicators and reporting for the team
Working with sales, product and the chief executive
Where AI genuinely works: content, targeting, analysis
The services worth trying
Building a roadmap for adopting them
Real integration cases
Who owns which brand decision
The six layers, and why the order matters
The AI stack: a map of tools by task
Brand equity and its economics
What an audit covers, internal and external
Running the whole thing in an afternoon with AI
Checking how the language models describe your brand
Health metrics: awareness, consideration, net promoter, share of search
Mission, vision, values and purpose, formulated rather than assumed
Brand architecture: single brand, house of brands, hybrid
The positioning formula, and generating fifty options to stress-test
One position turned into six messages, plus naming and availability
Logo, colour, typography and graphics produced in a week
Tone of voice, brand vocabulary, and the do and do-not list
Training AI to write in your voice rather than its own
The brand book, dynamic identity, and the legal side of generated assets
Campaign anatomy: big idea, creative, channels, activation
Generating thirty concepts in an hour
The production stack, and copywriting with AI as co-author
Channel mix across organic, paid, media, partnerships and influencers
The metrics framework: awareness, consideration, preference, loyalty
Building a health dashboard, and social listening on autopilot
Monitoring how AI systems mention you
The crisis playbook for the first 24 hours, and a 90-day plan
Managing the marketing presence as a system rather than a set of pages
Launching a dedicated site or landing page
Adding game mechanics to raise participation
Building a community around the brand, and designing a page on a site builder
Internal platforms and chat channels
Referral programmes, and how to design one that pays back
The database that holds the pipeline
Chatbots as a first-contact channel
Email as a channel, not a broadcast
Content marketing
Video marketing
Search optimisation, and writing text and choosing images that get clicked
Google Ads from the first campaign
Google Analytics, and reading it without deceiving yourself
Remarketing and its formats
Launching a first campaign end to end
Paid advertising on social platforms, and what differs between them
Facebook and Instagram
LinkedIn and Twitter
YouTube, and setting up company pages across all of them
Building the analytics for a campaign programme
Cost per acquisition, and the time it takes to convert
Which sources actually produced results, and which quality came with them
Building a report you can use to reallocate budget
How communications moved from publishing news to managing trust
What the different communications roles own
What leadership actually expects from this function
The competencies that matter now, and assessing your own level
What a communications strategy is, and what it is not
Linking it to growth, trust, investment and hiring
Reputation as an asset with a value on it
Shaping key narratives, and the positioning and messaging framework
Media, social platforms, owned media and opinion leaders
Internal against external communication
Deciding what to do in-house and what to buy in
The process, and the communications calendar
Why a leader's personal brand is a company asset
The architecture of that brand
Thought leadership, public speaking, interviews, social platforms
Managing risk and setting the boundaries, with real failures
The types of communications crisis
Preventing the preventable ones
The response team, and the principles of crisis communication
Working with media, platforms and staff, and the standard mistakes
Why reach stopped meaning anything
Output, outcome and impact as three different things
Reputation indices and trust measures
Linking it to results, and defending the budget
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Most marketing courses teach you one of two things: a strategy you cannot execute, or a set of tactics that nobody can connect to revenue.
What usually goes wrong
You are running six channels. Three of them you inherited and have never questioned. You can report impressions, clicks and followers, and when the finance director asks what a customer costs to acquire and what they are worth over their life, the honest answer requires assumptions you would rather not say out loud. Meanwhile the strategy document written in January describes a market position that nobody in the company can state in one sentence. Neither half is wrong on its own. The gap between them is where the budget disappears.
What this course covers
Thirty-eight lessons across both layers. The management layer first: auditing an inherited position in fourteen days, competitive analysis including how to estimate a rival's unit economics, strategy through 4P, STP, Ansoff and the customer journey, budget with acquisition cost, lifetime value and return on spend, positioning and brand architecture, the digital funnel and attribution, structuring the function, and where AI actually helps. Then brand as a working system: auditing how you are described today including by the language models, the positioning formula, a messaging matrix, tone of voice and visual identity, campaign anatomy from big idea through creative to activation, influencer work, and dashboards with social listening. Then the hands-on layer: email and content, video, search optimisation, paid search with analytics, remarketing, paid social across five platforms each with its own logic, and the report that tells you where to move budget. Then earned and owned media: linking communications to business goals, reputation as an asset, key narratives, opinion leaders, the communications calendar, spokesperson risk, the first 24 hours of a crisis, and measuring by outcome rather than reach. Then the money: the revenue funnel from lead to payment, where it leaks, unit economics, the system of record, automation, and a 90-day rollout. Finally content production with AI, including building an assistant on your own material.
A note on one block
Six of the lessons — the practical channel work — were recorded with talent attraction as the campaign objective rather than customer acquisition, and the measurement lesson counts results in hiring terms. The channels themselves do not change: paid search, analytics and remarketing behave the same regardless of who you are bringing to the page, and this is the only place in the material where paid social is taken apart platform by platform rather than treated as one thing.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 38 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the fourteen-day audit, the competitor matrix, the annual strategy template and its one-page version, the messaging matrix, the campaign brief, the channel mix, the funnel model, unit economics
Both layers in one course: the strategy and the account you actually log into
Where to start
Write down what one customer costs you to acquire and what they are worth over their lifetime. If either number needs a guess, that is where this course begins. Enrol now and start today.