Instructive Pedagogy

Digital Marketing and Social Media has changed the marketing environment in ways that traditional marketers could have never imagined just a short time ago. It has rapidly provided a mechanism to communicate on a one-to-one level, allowing marketers to tailor specific messages and content towards a fine-tuned segment of customers, whether they are business-to consumer (B2C), business-to-business (B2B), or even business-to-government (B2G) customers.

Multiple philosophies on best practices in this digital landscape have provided various methodologies for targeting these customers. During this time of change, these practices have led to the refinement of digital services, including behavioral advertising, search engine optimization, pay per click, content marketing, social media marketing, and organic inbound marketing, among specialized others. In fact, most digital agencies today are quite niche, providing only a couple of services to a couple of distinct target segments. Hence, when one considers the writing of any digital textbook, breadth and timeliness are important dilemmas to consider, as we can’t consider and teach all of the techniques across the entire landscape of digital marketing in a single semester.

Therefore, we wanted to treat The Digital Engine as a type of survey course in which we must build the fundamental blocks of digital marketing. With our course, you will learn the fundamental basics of website design, curating and creating content, social media acquisition, email retention, and the auditing of digital analytics to create a growing and successful organic messaging campaign. However, the problem with teaching in this area is that it is reliant upon third-party applications that constantly change their platforms and processes. This requires the text to be nimble by focusing on strategy and not tactics. In other words, the focus of The Digital Engine is NOT to teach all the tactical operations of digital marketing, but teach sustainable strategies. Teaching only tactics would be impossible due to the rapidly changing nature of the digital marketing toolset. Google and Facebook change their algorithms seemingly almost daily. Additionally, new platforms like Snapchat and TikTok spring up quickly due to innovative platform design. If we tried to teach these tactics in a textbook format, then by the time the textbook would be published, the content would be out of date. Consequently, this is why we have chosen to develop the text in a digital platform. It allows us to change descriptions of tactics and strategies at a much faster rate and with more precision when it is absolutely critical that adjustments must be made. But for the most part, this course tries to stay out of the weeds of tactics for specific platform functionality, and provide students with the creative thinking ability to figure out the tactical operation of any given platform. Again, let me stress, that we will NOT be covering every social media platform and their individual nuances. However, we will discuss the history of some of the most important and largest social media platforms to demonstrate how to strategically think through their use in your own campaign. You will be responsible for the specific tactical implementation of any and all platforms that you choose to use during your campaign practicum.

In this course, we stress the strategic principles of inbound marketing, also known as “pull” marketing. Our intent is to use the foundational knowledge of marketing from the last 80+ years to build the principles that will teach you how to approach digital marketing with sound strategy by using a new theoretical model on inbound marketing. With the Digital Engine Theory as the conceptual orientation, we will teach you these strategic principles. While there will be some tactical discussion in the classroom, your learning is primarily built around a live practicum that will allow you to dive into the tactical application of the strategic principles you are learning. It is at this level that you will achieve the hands-on experience of the current tactics, which will change from semester-to-semester, allowing you to build the tactical toolkits, while simultaneously, and perhaps more importantly, allowing you to build your critical thinking skills around the strategic principles that have and will continue to govern the process of digital marketing.

Finally, since students are most often on a restrictive personal budget and because current statistics indicate the increasing usefulness of pull marketing campaigns, we will teach our digital strategies from an inbound, organic perspective. Towards the end of the text we will discuss the usefulness of paid media such as Google AdWords and Facebook ad campaigns, but we will teach these as a supplement to the inbound strategies now being deployed by more than 80% of small and medium-sized businesses around the world (HubSpot, State of Inbound Report 2019). The economic return and ability to analytically track the invested return on these organic campaigns, as well as the demonetized value of these learning opportunities for you, makes this the optimal pedagogy to teach inbound principles as a knowledge foundation.

In fact, we argue that not only is this true for you as students, but also any company or business campaign. This choice of orientation is in no way critical of digital agencies or their ability to assist companies in their paid digital marketing efforts, but our contention is that if companies had the human capital and resources to deploy these strategic principles internally, then digital agencies assistance with paid digital marketing efforts would be unwarranted. However, as is the case with many small and growing firms, an emphasis has been put more on the immediacy of assistance through agency help, rather than building a digital department from within the company. And while agencies will continue to assist many companies in the future, our hope is that by training more and more of you, through our efforts with this pedagogy, you will become equipped to immediately step in and help companies increase their own brand awareness and ROI by focusing on both inbound messages and goals. Likewise, these skills will also create a stronger relationship with the paid digital spend, or with a future agency, when the company is possibly ready to expand its budgets.

With this endeavor, our desire is to train a market of students capable of directing and managing the overall brand, from story development to social media deployment to analytical audit. We appreciate that you are joining us in the journey through both the online text and our live practicum assignments. The assignments will assist you in setting up your own LIVE online campaign, specific to whatever you want to digitally market. It could be a lifestyle blog on your dog, a non-profit or entrepreneurial venture, or whatever you find appealing and is within the purview of the university’s code of conduct and ethics. Most importantly, we believe the practicum topic really should be your individual choice and something that you LOVE! A semester long project on the same subject really should be targeted at your passion, and something you want to market for an extended time; otherwise, your project (and grade) will suffer due to burn out. Eight weeks may not seem like a long time, but if you are not passionate about your topic, previous classes have demonstrated that it will seem like an eternity.

The live practicum will allow you to apply the strategic principles while learning the tactical application of digital marketing simultaneously, reinforcing the true learning of this digital medium. We have run this methodology for many years now and it has consistently rated as one of the top classes of the semester. Qualitative and quantitative feedback from previous students have reinforced us to press into this pedagogy to bring it in a delivery system that is easy and intuitive. We greatly look forward to sharing it with you.

Next, let’s discuss the structure of this web platform and how to navigate it.