Design Thinking for a Digital World

Our foundation for succeeding in digital requires us to design experiences through our users’ eyes. Students will learn how to interview users across various age groups and identify their online habits and preferences in-depth to design the right digital experiences. We’ll prototype these using wireframes and user journey mapping.

Brand Strategy

Your brand is not your product, your logo, your website, or your name. Brand strategy is a plan that encompasses specific, long-term goals that can be achieved with the evolution of a successful brand — the combined components of your company’s character that make it identifiable. Learn about some of the most popular brands in the world and identify what makes them unique and successful. Each student will discover and create their own brand, leveraging a Brand Archetype methodology.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. We will explore the wide world of content types, vehicles and publishing paths leveraged in a content marketing strategy.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covers long-tail keyword research methods, on-page SEO for a focus keyword phrase, the art of inbound link building, and identifying influential sites based on Domain Authority to support online PR efforts. You’ll do this for your own WordPress site using the Yoast SEO plugin for on-page SEO. We’ll also setup Search Console so you can track your own websites performance through the eyes of Google.

Social Media

Next, we’ll build out a social media strategy and campaign against a target market’s preferred outlets and measure engagement. You’ll see why social is a critical part but not the only tool in the modern marketer’s arsenal. More importantly, you’ll see why this is truly a pay to play channel and should be approached with skepticism for what natural growth can honestly look like.

Online Advertising or Pay-per-click (PPC)

Develop basic fluency in online paid platforms like Google Ads and Facebook/Instagram Ads to map out target markets, customer acquisition costs, and retargeting campaigns. Here’s where we’ll crack open a spreadsheet, evaluate our margins, and compare cost-per-click to basic metrics like customer lifetime value (CLV) and Average Order Price (AOV) to see if paid ads make sense for customer acquisition over the long term.

Web Analytics

The unifying framework behind all this will be basic web analytics using the Google Analytics platform. This is an opportunity to work with real data to validate hypotheses in real-time. Google Analytics is overwhelming for new users, so we’ll play with this tool early and often throughout the course.

Data Visualization

Move beyond just crunching numbers to data-visualization for crafting custom dashboards that help our key stakeholders see the important numbers and the changes over time. We’ll rely on Google Data Studio to sync various datasets across Google Analytics, MailChimp, Social, et. We will work on providing context around the data as well as making it actionable.

Emphasis on Real-World Applications

To supplement the concepts, various leading online marketers, designers, and content strategists from industry will address special topics such as email marketing, user experience design, search engine optimization (SEO), programmatic advertising, marketing automation, content marketing and planning, geo and mobile marketing.

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