Marketing Fundamentals: Customer, Value and Channels

This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.

Most people start marketing with the channels. That is why most beginners spend a budget telling strangers about an offer indistinguishable from everyone else's.

Learning it backwards

You opened an advertising account, wrote some posts, boosted them, and the numbers were disappointing in a way nobody could explain. So you tried a different channel, which was disappointing differently. Nobody ever asked what your customer is actually trying to get done, so the message addresses a problem you assumed rather than one they have. Your value proposition, if written down, would sit unchanged on a competitor's homepage. And when someone asks what a customer costs you and what they are worth over their lifetime, the honest answer is that you have never worked it out.

What this course covers

Forty lessons in the order the work should happen. The frame first: a fourteen-day audit of team, channels and effectiveness, ten questions for the chief executive, competitive analysis and estimating a rival's unit economics, a strategy senior management will sign, 4P, STP, the Ansoff matrix, budgeting with acquisition cost and lifetime value, the brand plan, the digital funnel with attribution, how a marketing team is structured, and where AI earns its place. Then the customer and the offer: finding product-market fit and recognising when you are losing it, the portfolio decision to invest, maintain or retire, researching what people actually want through Jobs to be Done and design thinking, journey mapping, validating a hypothesis before you build, the North Star metric and pirate metrics, monetisation models compared, growth loops, unit economics, and scaling. Then the proposition itself: why nine out of ten have no effect, the empty phrases everyone writes, auditing what you already say without spending anything, the gap between the inside and the outside version, the structure of a strong one, different versions for different audiences, packaging it, and measuring whether it works. Then the channels: site and community, referral programmes, chatbots, email, content, video, search optimisation, copy that gets clicked, paid search, web analytics, remarketing, paid social across six platforms, and measuring every channel by cost, speed and quality. Then the funnel: auditing it, finding where people disappear, FAB, AIDA and SPIN, copy that converts, writing to people who were not looking, strategies when nobody has heard of you, and handling criticism in public. Finally engagement mechanics: what gamification actually does, low-budget options, mechanics in attraction, in the first experience, in recognition, in culture and in learning.

Four blocks aimed at a different audience

The channel, funnel, value proposition and gamification blocks were recorded for people attracting candidates rather than customers. The mechanics are identical — paid search, analytics, remarketing, acquisition cost, funnel analysis, copywriting and game layers do not change with who you are talking to. The proposition block deserves a specific note: it works through an employer's promise, which is the clearest possible case study, because there the empty phrases are impossible to miss. "A friendly team" and "a competitive salary" are exactly the same failure as "high quality" and "an individual approach", and the disease is easier to see in somebody else's copy than in your own.

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 40 lessons

• Active instructor support in the Q&A section

• A Udemy Certificate of Completion

• Working material: the fourteen-day audit, the competitor table, the annual strategy one-pager, the budget and report templates, the brand plan, Jobs to be Done, journey mapping, the North Star metric, unit economics, the value proposition structure, the funnel audit and the gamification mechanics

• The order reversed on purpose: strategy and customer before channels

Where to start

Write your value proposition in one sentence, then paste it onto a competitor's website in your head. If it still reads correctly, that is the first thing this course fixes. Enrol now and start today.