Curriculum: Digital Marketing Graduate Certificate

This course explores use of digital technologies as they are used for the marketing, selling, and the distribution of goods and services. New developments unfold rapidly in this arena, hence course content changes as appropriate. The goal is to develop an understanding of the opportunities and limitations of digital tools for marketing and how these tools support marketing strategy.

This course aims to develop a conceptual framework for strategic planning and introduce a handful of analytical tools. Importantly, strategy involves wrestling with knotty problems and testing solutions in a group context. Therefore, we develop descriptive familiarity and some analytical prowess around real problems and develop vital points of reference we can utilize in future, analogous circumstances. We analyze marketing cases that pivot on substantial, contemporary issues involving branding, market selection, business definition, program development and management, among others.

This course explores the use of digital marketing – the integrated use of demand generation digital platforms and multiple social channels – to create digital conversations that enable brands to send the right message, to the right person, at the right time. A digital conversation is a sequence of communications, or "touch points," that nurture a prospect through each of the marketing funnel stages. It is the execution of the brand’s storytelling in a digital format, addressing the prospect's “moment that matter” in each funnel stage, and progressively profiling the prospect to optimize content delivery. The goal is to quickly connect with the prospect, reduce the time it takes to convert them to customers, and create long term loyalty.

Digital Marketing Analytics refers to the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data associated with digital marketing touch points such as web sites, mobile sites, email, and mobile apps to improve the customer experience and drive desired outcomes. Digital marketing analytics has become an integral part of core business strategies and maintaining a competitive edge. Digital marketing analytics can help the manager determine how to best spend marketing resources.

This course introduces design thinking as a business problem solving approach. It overviews design thinking techniques and has hands on practice applying these to classic business challenges. It fosters creativity and teamwork in the increasingly ambiguous business world in which today's business leaders must compete.

Social influence refers to the attempt of one party to gain compliance from another party. It is a universal feature of human existence and widely practiced by sellers. This course will examine principles of social influence and their applications in marketing. Based on noted psychologist Robert B. Cialdini's authoritative book "Influence: Science and Practice" students will learn the psychological secrets underlying powerful persuasion techniques used by advertisers, sales professionals, direct marketers, politicians, religious cults, and others.

To influence consumers’ decisions, marketers first need to understand how those decisions are made. Such decisions would be quite easy to understand if we assume consumers (1) are perfectly accurate information processors, and (2) always choose options that maximize their happiness. In this course, you will learn how and why both of these assumptions are rarely true. Specifically, we will look at how things like risk and uncertainty, heuristics and biases, feelings and emotions, contextual factors, and even our evolutionary history lead consumers to both systematically deviate from traditional notions of rationality, and even define new ways in which we think about rationality itself.

There is an increased need for marketing managers to measure and justify marketing spending to CEO’s, CFO’s, Management Consultants and Investors. Companies are increasingly cautious about marketing spending due to the economy and the continued fragmentation of marketing channels, and the increasing importance of word of mouth. These changes make marketing resource allocation decisions much more complex. In addition, the increasing availability of data (“Big Data”) and techniques for dealing with it (i.e., machine learning, computational mathematics) has made assessing marketing performance more feasible. This course focuses on providing you with tools and approaches to gauge the impact of marketing actions – short and long term. More specifically, it provides an overview of currently available marketing metrics, how to determine the most appropriate marketing measures (Key Performance Indices-KPI) for a specific company, and whether that data is available or needs to be created, and how to construct a marketing measurement system or dashboard to enable return on marketing investment (ROMI). Students who will benefit from this course include those interested in current or anticipated positions in the following: • Marketing at either the firm or business line level • Planning and strategic planning, • Operating positions for a business line or firm • Entrepreneurs launching new businesses

This course provides an introduction as well as hands-on experience in data visualization. It introduces students to design principles for creating meaningful displays of quantitative and qualitative data to facilitate managerial decision-making.

This course covers the fundamental concepts of applied data analysis methods. Various aspects of linear and logistic regression models are introduced, with emphasis on real data applications. Students are required to analyze data using major statistical software packages. BANA 7038 should not be taken for credit by MS-Business Analytics students.