Course Preview : Digital Marketing at Columbia Business School

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Ready to Learn More? Apply to Enroll in: Digital Marketing

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Now, from there, we'll take a survey of the world of digital advertising, look at the mix of different channels that are available to marketers and some of the principles that allow us to get the most out of it, the ways that advertising itself is changing quite dramatically from the traditional pre-digital era.

Next, as we start thinking about strategies to really create value and connect more deeply with our customers, we'll start from a point of view of understanding the core five behaviors of customers in the digital world and using those five behaviors, the desire to access, to engage, to customize, to connect, and to collaborate, as a basis for understanding and exploring a wide range of strategies available to marketers in the digital world.

Now that we've got the strategies in place and an understanding of our customers, we're going to look at social media and social networks, both some of the things that can go wrong by understanding some lessons from brand failures in social media as well as the best practices that allow us to take the best advantage of and make the most use of the different networks that are really dominating the market today. From there, we want to understand how to actually put this all together and plan for it and get the most use out of it for our organization. That's partly about measurement. We'll examine how we make our digital marketing really matter to our organization with proper metrics and modeling. We'll also look at a strategic planning process so that you can plan an appropriate digital marketing strategy for your business, whatever your objectives, your goals, your market, and your customers are.

Lastly, we're going to look at the organizational shifts and some of the challenges around organizations as they move towards a more digital approach to marketing and a bit of a peek at the future with Six Faces of the Near Future of Marketing, where the industry is going next. As we do this, we're following an arc, if you will, from starting with a theoretical understanding of digital marketing and customer networks and moving from theory to behaviors, really understanding what is driving our customers today and using from behavior to strategy. How do we make sure our strategies are really grounded in those behaviors of our customers? From there, we move on to tactics, metrics, and finally strategic planning.

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Ready to Learn More? Apply to Enroll in: Digital Marketing

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The whole process, the methodology of this program, will be multiple things coming together at once. Each week, we'll have these interactive videos, which provide the lecture content. But we'll also have both individual assignments and group assignments. You'll be working with others in small groups to apply these ideas that we're looking at each week. We'll have discussions within the mobile app about pertinent topics and your own experience. We'll use a couple of in-depth simulations, where you could play with the impact of different tactics and different digital marketing spends, what they would do for your business on a specific business challenge, and play with what these tools look like.

The goal is to really enhance your peer learning as much as what you're learning from me and from the cases and examples we're seeing. It's a class that is meant to combine both strategies, really thinking about strategic thinking for your organization, as well as application, really making sure it's very applicable to whatever challenges you are facing in your own organization right now, next week. We're going to have a mix of case studies that are broader as well as a variety of them looking at many different industries. Whatever background you're coming from, whatever your company is, we can understand how these different trends and forces are impacting you.

Lastly, the whole course is designed to be, in its philosophy, very customer-centric. As marketers, everything we do and everything that is driving our change in marketing as a field should be based on what is changing for our customers. That's how we really try to focus and center this entire class.

Lastly, I'll just say this program is... It's really, I hope, the beginning of your journey as a digital marketer. It's not the end. We're going to look at and explore and share and discuss a lot of things. Hopefully, it's going to give you the tools and skills, and vocabulary to think differently about the challenges you face today and the unknown challenges and opportunities that you'll face tomorrow in the world of digital marketing.