Digital Marketing Foundations
Signature Course No. 111 — A Signature AI Socratic Coaching Course.
A New Kind of Learning
Socratic coaching, delivered by an agentic AI coach.
Not a course you watch. An AI coach you work with.
The Lighthouse Coach begins by discovering how you think about the subject, teaches what is missing, and gives you realistic practice before asking you to prove that you can use it. You may test out of concepts you already understand, while capstones turn the learning into a practical plan, decision, conversation, or other real-world result.
The curriculum is deliberately authored; the AI delivers it through coaching. It is not an AI randomly generating lessons.
A coach that teaches by asking — not by lecturing
The Lighthouse Coach is an AI Socratic coach built on Cognosco Learning's Digital Marketing Foundations course, in the Sales, Service & Revenue category. It does not play videos at you.
It holds a conversation: it asks you a question, listens to your answer, names the misconception it hears, affirms what you got right, and asks the next question — the way a great coach works in the room. You work on one consistent set of small, checkable figures throughout: the Coach teaches and questions, you map, price, and plan, and what you produce is what gets checked.
This is the course for professionals handed marketing on top of their real job, owners of small businesses and practices who spend real money on websites, ads, and help, early-career marketers who can operate every platform and cannot yet explain how the pieces connect, sales and service professionals who work beside marketing, and anyone preparing to hire or brief a specialist or an agency.
It works in the order a beginner actually needs it: first, Module 1 — The System and the Places You Own: Audience, Promise, Funnel, Website, Content, Search, Email — work through Concepts 1–9, finishing with The System on One Page — Harbor & Vine Mapped; then, Module 2 — Channels in Practice, Money, and Measurement: Social, Paid Media, Budgets, Numbers, Testing, and the Plan — work through Concepts 10–18, finishing with The 90-Day Foundations Plan — Spend, Measure, Improve.
You finish by proving the whole course — in The System on One Page — Harbor & Vine Mapped and in The 90-Day Foundations Plan — Spend, Measure, Improve. You can type your answers, or talk out loud: the Voice Coach speaks its questions and listens to your spoken replies, hands-free. The course is self-paced and always on — roughly 30 minutes per concept, about 9 hours in full, taken in as many sittings as you like. Learners who already know the material can test out concept by concept.
Where those numbers usually go, it puts arithmetic you can check by hand and evidence your own accounts can supply. No figure is presented as typical, average, or good, and every worked figure belongs to one fictional company, labeled as such, or to an invented scenario whose figures are stated inside it.
Where benchmarks would normally go, the book substitutes your own margins, ceilings, and comparison periods. This is the foundations course — what each piece is, what job it does, how it connects to the others, and how to do it competently the first time.
Both capstones produce real artifacts — the whole system mapped on one page, and your own 90-day foundations plan, built on your own numbers, ready to run — not just ideas about marketing.
This is the one hundred and eleventh course in The Lighthouse Signature Series — the online counterpart to the one-day, in-person learning Cognosco Learning has delivered since 2002.
Course Facts
One full concept, coached end to end — free: verify your email and we’ll send you a link to start.
Already enrolled? Enter the course →
Diagnose → Learn & Practice → Prove → Capstone
Every learner moves through the same discipline a Cognosco instructor would insist on in the room.
Diagnose
The Coach starts where the course starts: with the system, not the channels. Channels are rented; the system is yours — and if the system is not built first, every channel is graded on the wrong job. Every concept opens with three questions that locate where you actually stand, and your answers shape how deeply the Coach works the concept with you. Everyone begins with Module 1 — no skipping the foundations you only think you have.
Learn & Practice
Work each concept in conversation with the Coach — spoken or written — then practice it against realistic situations until it holds up.
Prove
Every concept ends in proof: answer the check cold and demonstrate the skill. Know it already? Test out and take credit immediately.
Capstone
Finish with two capstones — The System on One Page — Harbor & Vine Mapped for Module 1 and The 90-Day Foundations Plan — Spend, Measure, Improve for Module 2 — that pull the whole course together, and earn the certificate.
What You'll Learn
Digital marketing is not a pile of channels. It is one system: a defined audience, a clear promise, a path from first encounter to repeat purchase, places you own where that path runs, channels that carry people onto the path, a budget spent on purpose, and numbers that tell you whether any of it worked.
This course builds that system piece by piece, in the order a beginner actually needs it.
You will learn what each channel is for and what it is bad at, how to write a promise a stranger can understand in seconds, how a website and a landing page turn attention into orders, how content, email, social, and search each earn their place, what paid media can and cannot do, and how to read the small set of numbers — click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend — that separate marketing from guessing.
The figures throughout are small, round, and checkable by hand, because the skill being built is judgment, not tool operation.
What you will learn
- See how the channels fit into one system, and choose the right ones for a given goal
- Define an audience, position an offer, and follow the funnel from first click to repeat purchase
- Make the places you own do their work — website, landing pages, content, email, and search presence
- Spend, measure, and improve — budgets, funnel math, testing, and a 90-day plan you can actually run
Everything in the course
- All 18 concepts of Digital Marketing Foundations, in 2 modules
- A starting-point check first — the Coach finds where you actually stand before teaching
- Learn, Practice, Prove for every concept — no passive video watching
- A test-out on every concept: prove you know it and move on
- The Voice Coach: talk with the Coach out loud — it speaks, listens, and replies
- A personal Learner Record of your work across the course
- Two capstone exercises: The System on One Page — Harbor & Vine Mapped and The 90-Day Foundations Plan — Spend, Measure, Improve
- A printable session summary whenever you pause
- The Lighthouse Coach completion certificate (Signature Series)
- Your progress is saved as you go — stop anytime, resume where you left off
Built for the person marketing landed on
Digital Marketing Foundations is for professionals handed marketing on top of their real job — the operations manager, the founder, the practice administrator — owners of small businesses and practices who spend real money on websites, ads, and help, early-career marketers fluent in the apps who cannot yet explain how the pieces connect, sales and service professionals who receive the customers marketing produces, and anyone preparing to hire or brief a specialist or an agency who needs to recognize a vague report when one lands on their desk.
This is a foundations course in marketing in the Sales, Service & Revenue category and it assumes no prior marketing role and no particular platform account: if you have used the web as a customer — searched, clicked, subscribed, bought — you have all the experience this course builds on. It teaches principles and arithmetic that survive any platform redesign.
Prefer to learn live and in person? The same material anchors Cognosco's one-day programs — browse the in-person catalog.
Start with The System on One Page
$195 — introductory price. One payment. No subscription, no password to manage.
Here is exactly what happens when you enroll:
- Pay securely with Stripe — you are taken straight into the course
- Create your learner profile and begin the Module 1 starting-point check
- Save the access key you are given — it restores your enrollment on any device
- Learn at your pace; your progress is stored in your browser on your device
For the full voice experience, use Chrome and allow the microphone when asked. Typing your answers works everywhere, all the time. Questions before you enroll? Email hello@cognoscolearning.com.
More Signature Courses are coming
Digital Marketing Foundations is Signature Course No. 111. Leave your email and we'll send you news of future Signature Courses and Lighthouse updates as they are announced — nothing else.