This lesson marks the first step in your journey in mastering Aligned Marketing. 

What you’ll learn over the next few lessons is going to challenge just about everything you think you know about marketing. You’ll walk away armed with everything you need to make a serious impact, and build a sustainable business in the process, no matter what medium you use—fast! So buckle up, this is going to be fun!

The first thing you must understand is the purpose of marketing: 

Marketing only serves one purpose—to take your client or customer on a journey into becoming the person they want to become.

The person they want to become is their desire to achieve the results you offer. So by taking them on a journey toward becoming that person, you quickly create the bond necessary for them to trust you enough to become your customer. This is how you create gravity.

Your marketing should be a series of stepping stones that guide your audience TOWARD you, and eventually they realize the most natural next step is to SIGN UP with you.

Most people look at marketing as benefits, features and price points. Sure, there are some aspects of that, but the essence of marketing lies MUCH deeper. Understand this, and you’ll have no choice but to succeed.

You can think of marketing like the transference of currency. Currency is simply a unit of value, and is exchanged through various environments, for different purposes.

Marketing is the same, the currency being BELIEF: 

• When someone reads a piece of content of yours, and it resonates, you deposit a small amount of belief currency into their “account”. This happens in two ways: you begin to establish authority, which is their belief in you; and at the same time, you help them believe more in themselves.
• When someone believes in you, a deep relationship is formed. It might simply be that you personally reached out to this person, and because you took the time to do so, they thought, “Wow, this person cares.” That’s belief!
• The more belief you’ve built up in your prospect’s “belief account,” the more they are naturally and subconsciously drawn to seek you out.
• And when a customer finally signs up with you or purchases your product, the belief they have in your ability to help is what causes them to pull out their card and pay.

The currency you are trading in ALL aspects of your business is belief. And the only real obstacle that is holding your customer back from the life they want is belief. 

Therefore, it is your primary duty to activate the right belief in your audience so that they decide you are the one that can help best. And do this in a way that is natural, authentic and empathetic. 

Side Note: The fact is—and this is critical for you to fully internalize for yourself—your ideal customer NEEDS your help in achieving the life they are struggling to achieve. This struggle that they are stuck in is rooted in their false beliefs, and they are quietly suffering because of it. Their entire life, happiness, inner peace and confidence are suffering, and YOU have the power to make it better. The most noble thing you can do for them is put yourself out there in full confidence and help them realize their own potential. Do this, and you’ll change their life forever, while earning a long-lasting bond with them—and the money that follows!

Now, let’s talk about how belief is formed.

---

Belief

“The longer I work in this business, the more I realize how everything comes down to one thing—belief. Belief creates the customer. Belief creates the results.”
—Russel Brunson

Every communication, every piece of content, every piece of marketing you leverage in your business serves to take your audience (or customer) on a micro-journey of belief.

When your aligned customer finds your content and begins reading or watching it, they are suffering from a problem for which you are a potential solution. They’re reading your content because it resonates with the problem they are experiencing. 

This is the first pillar of marketing: meeting your audience where they are at. 

The fact that they are suffering means they NEED a shift in belief in order to achieve their desire. Either they don’t believe they have what they need to achieve their desire, they don’t believe they can do it alone, they believe something or someone is preventing them from moving forward, and so on. 

Think about your past journey in overcoming the obstacle you have crafted your Aligned Offer around. Remember the epiphanies you had, and the beliefs that shifted because of them, which may have gone something like this:

• First you may not have believed you could achieve your desire.
  
• Then you found someone telling you otherwise, so you slowly started to believe you could.
  
• So you researched and studied, building belief bit by bit.
  
• Eventually your belief built enough for you to take action.
  
• After a bit of trial and error, you achieved your desire.
  
• You realized, “If only I had known this, I could’ve saved all that time and trouble!”

Your very own past story is a journey of belief! And your responsibility is to meet your audience where they are at, and take them on that journey, just like you did for yourself, only you’re offering something invaluable—a massive SHORTCUT!

So let’s now further develop our understanding of marketing:

Marketing only serves one purpose—to take your client or customer on a journey of epiphanies and shifts in belief into becoming the person they want to become.

This is the second pillar of marketing: moving your audience from where they were at, toward where they want to be, by shifting their false or limiting beliefs. 

If you look back to your past self, those same shifts in beliefs you had are very likely the exact shifts in beliefs your audience needs. If you successfully reverse-engineer this to guide them through these shifts, you effortlessly earn a customer.

Let’s recap the Two Pillars of Marketing:

1. Pillar #1: Meet your audience where they are at. 
2. Pillar #2: Move them from where they were at, toward where they want to be, by shifting their false or limiting beliefs.

So, with that understood, how do we guide someone along their journey of beliefs?

---

Storytelling

By telling stories of your journey, you connect with your audience, helping them begin to experience the transformation they are looking for. One by one, they knock down false beliefs, and begin to see results and changes in their way of thinking. 

Your past AND present stories are the portal through which your audience will become your customer, and therefore achieve the transformation or results they are looking for. Through stories, you will activate their deep-seated values, make them feel like they’re not alone, remind them of who they desire to be, and guide them through the internal shifts in belief required for it to become reality.

Another bonus of storytelling is that by telling the details of your past and present, by sharing WHO you are and WHAT you stand for (and don’t stand for), you attract those who align with your values, and repel those who don’t. Telling real, raw and authentic stories is like having a bouncer at the front door of your business—they take care of who is let in!

Check out this quote by Seth Godin:

“The business that succeeds realizes that offering a remarkable service/product with a great story is more important and more profitable than doing what everyone else is doing.”

And another by Russell Brunson:

“What I’ve found is that if you just sell something, it’s not as strong, and doesn’t create the emotion you need to really cause action. If you want people to adopt a new concept and want to get their buy-in, you have to lead them to the answer, but you can’t GIVE it to them. They have to come up with the idea themselves. You plant the idea in their minds with a story, and if THEY come up with the answer, they will have sold themselves. The buying decision becomes theirs, not yours. When that happens, you don’t have to sell them anything.”

Cool, huh? When this happens, you don’t have to sell anything—they come to you already decided that your opportunity is their most relevant and safest choice. And this happens because you’ve created GRAVITY by already taking them on a journey. And now, they simply want to complete that journey!

What Russell is saying here, is that by telling stories you guide your audience into realizing the same epiphanies, and therefore belief shifts, that you had—the ones that allowed you to overcome your obstacles.

Here’s why this works: have you ever picked up the phone to a telemarketer, and just after they open their mouth you realize what you have done, then tense up and focus all your energy on getting off the phone?

This is the pitfall of “selling.” When you try to sell someone on something by convincing them it’s what they need, you end up being the high-pressure salesperson you DON’T want to be, and they likely go running for the hills. Running your business this way sucks, and causes you to struggle in a tug-of-war between you and your prospects.

The way to never sell again is by GUIDING your audience on the journey you ALREADY traversed, so they too can have the same epiphanies you had, and come up with the decision themselves that this is the right solution for them.

And you do this through storytelling. Have you ever been at the cinema, and found yourself so immersed in the movie that you forgot you were sitting in the dark watching a projection on a screen? You had slipped away from reality and actually experienced what the character on-screen was experiencing—it was a visceral, emotional experience. This is the power of storytelling—instead of pushing your audience toward your offer, you have them experience it.

So as long as you remember that EVERY point of communication is a micro-journey, you’ll create content that inspires, moves and creates a GRAVITY that pulls the right customers to you, already having decided that they HAVE to work with you.

---

The Customer Journey

Now that we’ve discussed that your audience must be taken on a journey of belief shifts in order to become your customer, let’s break this down into a clear formula.

 Let’s look at the journey your customer desires to take, from start to finish:

1. Starting Point: The pain they are currently experiencing
2. Solution: The method that will solve this pain
3. Destination: The desire they have (what they want to accomplish)

So we have Point A, their present pain, Point B, the method, and Point C, their desire—the Customer Journey.

In looking at your business through the lens of the Customer Journey, you are able to see how each part functions within the whole. Suddenly, every aspect of your business has a clear purpose, and that purpose is designed around the only thing that generates growth and profit—the customer’s transformation.

Key point: In every customer relationship, where someone is paying you to help them achieve particular results that they do not presently have, what they are really paying you for is a SHORTCUT from Point A to Point B.

Now that you understand the purpose of the Customer Journey, let’s map it out. The Customer Journey consists of two segments:

1. Your Aligned Marketing
2. Your Signature System

Your marketing is the first segment of the journey, where they begin down the path toward their desired results. This first part of the journey is focused mostly on belief shifts. It’s a critical part of the journey, because without these initial belief shifts, they will not arrive at their destination.

Your Signature System is the second segment of the journey, where they partner with you to get the real work done. This second segment builds on top of the first. This is the power of the Customer Journey—by using it as a framework for your marketing, you are able to be purposeful in every communication you make. And because of this, you’ll never get stuck with your marketing again!

In the next lesson you will begin creating your Aligned Story, which will be the centerpiece for the marketing segment of your Customer Journey.