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 curriculum and courseware, breadth and timeliness are important dilemmas to consider. It’s impossible to teach all of these methodologies in a single course.
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 that generates promising leads. 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 tool set. 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to teach these tactics in a textbook format, then by the time the textbook would be published, the content would be out of date.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 our online curriculum, 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 around social media platforms and their use, 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 tool kits, 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.
If you are a middle or high school teacher, college instructor, or a working adult looking to understand digital marketing, or perhaps you just want to launch your own website, then inquire with us at The Digital Engine to find out how we can assist you accomplishing your goals through our interactive curriculum, complete with web design, social media, and email marketing instruction. If you are interested in considering The Digital Engine, we have a demo course that will allow you to see and work with some of the content. Or if you just have some general questions, feel free to contact us. We would love to assist in your search for a dynamic and creative class.
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