Topics in Digital Marketing

Introduction

Rapid developments in digital technology and available data have transformed how companies and other organizations communicate with their audiences. Digital marketing activities are nowadays established in the daily routines of marketers in addition to traditional marketing techniques to achieve a wider reach and closer connection to the audiences of interest. Companies interact with audiences in new ways, develop new products and services, and expand into new markets leveraging digital technologies and vast amounts of data. Consumers now regularly interact with each other and with brands on social media and through mobile devices sharing information about products and brands. This has changed how they approach and interact with products, services, and brands and the way they search for information. In addition, younger generations of consumers are hard to reach through traditional marketing channels. At the same time marketers are struggling to coordinate their digital marketing activities, to build a unified (digital) marketing strategy, and to evaluate the effectiveness of their digital marketing activities.

This course addresses some of the challenges that marketers face today, by providing an overview of digital marketing activities, the assessment of their effectiveness and how to strategically align them to increase reach, facilitate actions, and enable engagement on digital platforms. In addition, it covers selected aspects of how digital technology and the availability of big data impact the digital customer journey as well as reflection on potential problems and ethical considerations of digital marketing practices (e.g., consumer privacy and data integrity).

Course content

Digital marketing is a fast-developing field in marketing. This course will cover some selected topics in digital marketing but is not intended to give a comprehensive overview of the field. The topics will centre around the following five aspects. The specific aspects are exemplary and subject to change.

1. Digital customer journey
   
   • Digital information search behaviour and digital decision aids
   • Current trends that are shaping/changing digital customer behaviour
2. Overview of digital advertising activities
   
   • Forms of digital advertising: display ads, video ads, mobile ads, search engine advertising, programmatic advertising, native advertising etc.
   • Factors that influence the success of different forms of digital advertising
3. Measuring the effectiveness of digital advertising
   
   • Metrics to evaluate digital advertising
   • Attribution, AB field testing, selection bias, etc.
4. Social media marketing and social listening
   
   • Analysing social media conversations
   • Participating in social media conversations
   • Social media engagement and outcomes
   • Influencer marketing
5. Ethical reflections around digital marketing
   
   • Data privacy vs. targeting/personalization, etc.

In addition, we may take deep dives into more specialized and state-of-the art fields of digital marketing research.