Marketing Strategy
Understand the market, choose who to reach, and build a plan that can win customers.
12 modules
Self-paced
Certificate of Completion
Enrolled
About this course
Marketing starts before an ad is written. You need to understand the business, the market, the people you want to reach, what they have to choose between, and why your offer deserves their attention.
This course takes you through that work from beginning to end. You’ll study customer information, compare competitors, choose an audience, shape an offer, make pricing decisions, write a clear message, choose where to reach people, work with a budget, read campaign results, and build a complete marketing strategy.
Every lesson gives you a business situation, the information you need, and a decision to make.
Work from real business situations
Work with customer interviews, survey results, sales numbers, pricing, competitor information, budgets, channel costs, launch plans, and retention data.
Build a strategy from the ground up
Start with the business problem. Work through the customer, market, audience, position, offer, message, channels, budget, and customer retention.
What you’ll learn
- Turn a business goal into a clear marketing problem.
- Use customer evidence instead of relying on assumptions.
- Compare competitors and identify meaningful differences.
- Divide a broad market into useful customer groups.
- Choose which audience deserves priority.
- Position an offer against the alternatives customers already have.
- Make sensible decisions about offers, packages, and price.
- Write a clear message based on what actually matters to the customer.
- Choose marketing channels based on the job they need to do.
- Build a campaign around a real objective and budget.
- Read marketing results without being distracted by impressive-looking numbers.
- Decide what to change when a campaign underperforms.
- Find ways to keep customers rather than treating every problem as an acquisition problem.
- Build a complete marketing strategy with clear choices and measures.
Curriculum · 12 Modules
Every module includes guided lessons, practical assignments, and an independent challenge.
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1
Read the business situation: Identify what is happening, what management wants, what is known, and what remains unclear before proposing tactics.
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2
Separate the symptom from the problem: Examine the funnel from awareness to repeat purchases and isolate the core marketing problem.
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3
Set a useful objective: Transform vague aspirations into measurable, commercially grounded marketing objectives.
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4
Work within the constraints: Map all operational, legal, geographical, and budget boundaries that govern strategy.
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5
Decide what you still need to know: Evaluate and prioritize information needs, separating high-value decision drivers from irrelevant curiosities.
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6
Write the marketing brief: Synthesize the business situation, core problem, objective, audience, constraints, and success measures into a complete marketing brief.
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1
Look beyond demographics: Compare individuals within the same age bracket whose needs, behaviors, and buying decisions are completely different.
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2
Find the real need: Probe past surface statements like 'I want to get fit' to uncover the underlying functional and emotional needs.
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3
Find the barriers: Rank and quantify customer adoption barriers using combined survey and interview evidence.
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4
Compare customer groups: Create actionable, decision-changing customer segments based on distinct needs, behaviors, and trade-offs.
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5
Do not confuse one quote with a market: Weigh vivid qualitative quotes against quantitative survey and behavioral evidence to avoid overreacting to outliers.
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6
Write the customer brief: Synthesize all customer evidence into a comprehensive Customer Brief that informs positioning, offer, and messaging.
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1
Define the real market: Determine what job the customer is hiring a service for and identify the full set of meaningful alternatives.
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2
Compare the competitors: Build rigorous comparison criteria around what customers actually care about rather than generic feature checkmarks.
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3
Separate claims from proof: Distinguish between unsubstantiated marketing slogans and verified operational proof.
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4
Find where everyone looks the same: Identify category clichés, identical promises, and homogenous positioning across the competitive landscape.
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5
Find meaningful gaps: Identify underserved customer needs supported by concrete empirical evidence rather than wishful thinking.
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6
Write the market brief: Synthesize the competitive landscape, customer alternatives, and defensible positioning opportunities into Atlas's official Market Brief.
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1
Build useful customer groups: Divide a broad potential customer base into distinct, actionable segments based on behavioral differences and operational requirements.
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2
Judge the opportunity: Evaluate the commercial opportunity of each customer group by comparing market size, revenue potential, competition, and likelihood to buy.
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3
Judge the fit: Assess how well each customer segment aligns with Cedar's specific architectural layout, acoustics, location, and operational ethos.
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4
Consider how hard they are to reach: Calculate customer acquisition costs (CAC) and channel accessibility across candidate segments before committing marketing spend.
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5
Choose the priority: Make an explicit, evidence-backed decision establishing Cedar's primary target, secondary target, and designated non-target audiences.
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6
Write the audience decision: Author Cedar Workspaces' official Target Audience Decision Document to guide interior design, marketing messaging, and sales operations.
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1
Understand the choice: Map the runner's purchase decision frame and the specific trade-offs they navigate when buying a daily trainer.
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2
Find differences that matter: Audit product specifications to classify differences into real, irrelevant, unproven, and customer-valued categories.
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3
Prove the claim: Construct an airtight Claim vs Evidence framework that provides undeniable proof for every marketing assertion.
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4
Accept the trade-off: Evaluate three candidate positioning strategies and analyze the deliberate sacrifices each requires.
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5
Write the position: Author Morrow Running's internal strategic positioning statement defining audience, frame of reference, point of difference, and reason to believe.
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6
Test the position: Stress-test the approved positioning against four realistic customer purchase scenarios to identify where it holds and where it breaks.
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1
Define what is actually being sold: Deconstruct the unbundled hourly service into complete customer value components beyond raw clock time.
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2
Connect price to value: Evaluate four candidate pricing models to determine which structure aligns customer willingness to pay with business stability.
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3
Build packages that make sense: Design a cohesive, multi-tiered offer architecture that provides clear options for different student intensity levels.
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4
Use discounts carefully: Analyze proposed promotional discounts using deterministic arithmetic to demonstrate how price cuts erode gross margin.
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5
Reduce the risk of saying yes: Design ethical, structural risk-reversal mechanisms that lower customer purchase anxiety without resorting to manipulative gimmicks.
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6
Recommend the offer: Synthesize the complete offer architecture, pricing tiers, margin proofs, and risk-reduction terms into Brightwell's official Offer Recommendation.
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1
Start with what the customer cares about: Uncover the real homeowner anxieties, financial concerns, and practical outcomes that drive preventative maintenance decisions.
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2
Turn a feature into a reason to care: Translate technical maintenance procedures into clear, compelling customer benefits without making unsupported promises.
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3
Support the message: Construct verifiable proof points to substantiate every promise in the Home Guard messaging.
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4
Answer the objection: Address legitimate homeowner hesitations directly and truthfully rather than dodging them.
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5
Decide what comes first: Structure the core message into an intuitive hierarchy from primary promise down to proof, qualifications, and action.
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6
Write the campaign brief: Author Greyson's official Campaign Messaging Brief to govern all digital ads, web pages, direct mailers, and technician conversation guides.
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1
Start with audience behavior: Analyze the real search and discovery paths homeowners take when seeking a recurring residential cleaning service.
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2
Understand what each channel is good for: Categorize candidate marketing channels by their specific functional roles: demand capture, demand creation, or retention.
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3
Compare cost and reach: Calculate customer acquisition costs (CAC), inquiry conversion rates, and payback periods across candidate channels using deterministic arithmetic.
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4
Match the channel to the objective: Align channel capabilities with the primary launch goal: securing 60 recurring bi-weekly residential clients in 90 days.
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5
Build the mix: Construct a disciplined 3-to-4 channel mix that concentrates capital on proven performers while explicitly excluding weak channels.
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6
Write the channel plan: Author Hearth Cleaning's comprehensive Channel Strategy and Go-to-Market Plan ready for executive sign-off and operational rollout.
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1
Define what the campaign must accomplish: Establish clear, measurable, and commercially grounded primary and secondary campaign objectives before planning activities.
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2
Connect the pieces: Audit an unaligned draft campaign plan to diagnose mismatches between audience, offer, message, channels, and objectives.
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3
Allocate the budget: Allocate June Street's exact $48,000 launch budget across production, paid media, local activations, and contingency buffer with deterministic arithmetic precision.
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4
Build the schedule: Construct a 10-week workback schedule from launch day, establishing critical path dependencies and milestones.
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5
Assign the work: Create an authoritative execution accountability table defining owners, deliverables, deadlines, and dependencies for all campaign tasks.
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6
Produce the campaign plan: Synthesize objectives, target audience, offer, messaging, channels, budget, schedule, owners, and risk management into June Street's official Campaign Plan.
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1
Choose the right measures: Identify which marketing metrics genuinely reflect business success versus vanity metrics that mislead decision-makers.
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2
Calculate the results: Calculate conversion rates, cost per inquiry, initial CAC, cancellation rates, and true retained CAC across all four channels with deterministic mathematical precision.
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3
Compare the channels: Analyze multi-channel trade-offs across volume, customer quality, acquisition cost, and scalability.
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4
Read a test carefully: Analyze an A/B message test to determine whether reported differences are genuine or within the margin of random noise.
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5
Know what tracking cannot prove: Expose the severe blind spots of last-touch attribution, multi-touch channel overlap, and dark social sharing.
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6
Write the performance memo: Synthesize the campaign analysis into Riverlane's official Executive Performance Memo, delivering verified metrics, honest diagnostics, and channel reallocation recommendations.
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1
Study the first experience: Examine the subscriber's first 30 days to uncover operational frictions that set new customers up for early departure.
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2
Find the retention signals: Analyze behavioral telemetry to contrast customer actions that predict long-term retention versus actions that predict churn.
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3
Understand why customers leave: Examine exit surveys, customer support tickets, and cancellation timing to diagnose the true root causes of customer churn.
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4
Decide who should be won back: Segment lapsed subscribers to distinguish high-potential win-back targets from customers who should not be pursued.
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5
Earn referrals: Design an organic customer referral engine anchored in customer delight milestones rather than aggressive transactional bribery.
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6
Choose the growth priority: Model the enterprise financial impact of retention improvement versus acquisition spending to guide executive resource allocation.
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1
Diagnose the opportunity: Determine whether the Portland expansion opportunity is primarily a market, customer, offer, awareness, or logistics problem.
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2
Choose the audience: Select the primary and secondary customer segments to anchor the Portland launch while explicitly de-prioritizing bad-fit groups.
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3
Set the position and offer: Establish the market positioning and design the core recurring meal subscription offer, pricing tiers, and risk-reversal guarantees.
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4
Build the message and channel plan: Construct the campaign messaging hierarchy and design a focused go-to-market channel portfolio allocating the $35,000 launch budget.
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5
Build the budget and measurement plan: Construct an exhaustive financial budget and design a multi-stage measurement framework with explicit decision thresholds for continue, change, or stop.
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6
Write the strategy: Synthesize all twelve strategic components into Oak & River's official, board-ready Master Marketing Strategy Document.
Certificate of Completion
Earn an official Practisi credential
Upon completing all 12 modules and the Final Challenge with a passing score of at least 80%, you receive an official Certificate of Completion.
- Permanent public credential verification link
- Cryptographically secure verification record
- Directly shareable on LinkedIn and professional portfolios
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Frequently asked questions
Who is this course for?
Marketing Strategy is for anyone who wants to learn how marketing decisions are actually made: business owners, career switchers, and marketing practitioners.
Do I need prior marketing experience?
No. The course begins with fundamentals and builds toward comprehensive market analysis, channel selection, and campaign strategy.
Can I learn at my own pace?
Yes. Every lesson is self-paced. Your progress, attempts, and submitted strategies remain saved in your account.
How do I earn the Certificate of Completion?
Complete all 12 modules and their Final Challenges with a course score of at least 80%.