Our goal for Part III of the Core Training is to help you identify where to go next based on your specific interests and needs.
Before we do that, however, there are resources we recommend for everyone to understand how we think about the fundamental principles we teach in the Modern Marketing System.
This is an opportunity to mention — again — that there is no daylight between what we teach and what we do.
Everything you’ll learn in The System is based on decades of our own experience working individually and collaboratively.
André’s perspective is informed primarily from his experience building and nurturing a business and a following starting with nothing.
Shawn’s perspective is based on twenty-one years running a digital services agency working with hundreds of clients in some of the most demanding markets in the world.
Between April 2020 and January 2023 we worked together, distilling and refining our individual wisdom into time-tested principles and frameworks that others can use to avoid the mistakes we’ve made and benefit from what we’ve learned along the way.
And, in 2024, Shawn overhauled and updated MMS to version 2.0.
Scenarios.
If you’re a business owner — or you are responsible for the marketing activities of a single business — use the scenarios below to determine your initial learning path.
If you’re a service provider, decide if you’re interested in building your own business or if you’re looking for guidance for a client’s business when considering the various scenarios.
Scenario #1: no offer, no audience.
This one is easy. Start with The Durable Business and come back here when you’re making job-replacing income.
TDB is self-contained and intended to get someone from $0 to $100,000+ in revenue.
Scenario #2: existing audience, no offer.
Start with the Audience & Offer Masterclass to better understand what you really want to do and how to match that to the needs of an audience.
Then, be honest with yourself about whether or not the audience you have is the audience you want.
For example, if you have a cold list from sporadic ideas you’ve tried over several years, it’s probably easier to start over (see Scenario #1 above).
If, however, your current audience is a good match for where you want to go next, use the Audience & Offer Masterclass to start identifying opportunities to create an offer for that audience.
Don’t get hung up on the word offer. Keep it simple, especially at first. A $95 seven-day course sent by email can be an offer that will tell you a lot about the interest of your current audience.
It’s easy to slow everything down by thinking too big and making things too complicated. Avoid that whenever possible.
The primary choice you need to make is whether or not to create an offer and then sell it, or co-create an offer with your audience. (In general, we recommend co-creating whenever possible.)
Our ‘Bullets to Cannonballs‘ discussion will be helpful here.
If your audience is an email list, the Art of Email is your next stop.
We recommend that you go through the AoE Workshop simultaneously — we expand upon each of the modules in the Art of Email in that workshop.
Scenario #3: existing offer, no audience.
There’s some important nuances to understand in this scenario.
In broad strokes, there are two likely variations of this scenario. The first is that you have a proven offline offer that you want to sell online.
For example, you’re a consultant who gets clients through referrals and local word of mouth and you want to sell that same offer to a larger audience online.
Or you’ve done the work to create an offer (for example, a digital course) but haven’t sold that offer yet.
The place to start is the Audience & Offer Masterclass — particularly Part II to create a clear value proposition for your intended audience.
Clarity about the value your offer creates for your ideal audience is critically important.
We can’t overstate this.
Next is Sphere of Influence (SOI).
Even if you’re not planning to use a Multi-Page Pre-Sell, SOI will help you understand the chain of beliefs your audience needs to move closer to you (as prospects and eventually customers).
If you want to attract an audience using Google or Facebook’s advertising platforms, start with The Traffic Engine.
Scenario #4: existing offer(s) and existing audience(s).
If you haven’t seen Where to Start? A 10,000′ Roadmap for The System.
If you interact with your audience primarily by email, the Art of Email and the recordings from the Art of Email Workshop should be next.
Before you create your first AoE-inspired email campaign, we also recommend Lesson 1: Thematic Arcs (Themes), Lesson 2: Overview, Strategy, Themes, and Lesson 8 (Bonus Chapter): The Secret Sauce from the Momentum Builder Workshop.
Sphere of Influence will help you think (very) differently about how you attract and interact with your audience.
SOI can be implemented literally (with a Multi-Page Pre-Sell), or you can think about SOI from the perspective of principles and apply those principles to your campaigns more broadly.
The MPPS is one expression of SOI. The real genius of Sphere of Influence (Shawn’s words because André would never say that about his own work) is that it’s a profoundly different (and better) way to market with an audience vs. at them.
It’s also a Swiss Army knife that can be adapted to nearly every imaginable marketing situation.
The Traffic Engine will help you build paid traffic campaigns for your business for audience building (lead generation and customer acquisition).
Scenario #5: you want the 80/20 view of the Modern Marketing System as quickly as possible so you can take action and get some results.
The Momentum Builder Workshop condenses the principles, strategies, and tactics we teach in all of our courses into a time-bound six-week implementation sprint.
If you’d like to dive in and get a sense of what we’re all about as quickly as possible, and you learn best by doing, MBW is the place to start.
If you’re willing to do the work, it’s not hyperbole to say that you could build a six-figure business (or grow a business to six figures) with what you’ll learn in the Momentum Builder Workshop.
These are the most common scenarios we’ve heard from our students over the years. However, we know there are other possibilities we haven’t articulated here.
NEXT: Your Business is a System