Flexible MBA Specialization in Digital Marketing
Add a specialization in digital marketing.
The marketing environment has rapidly changed in recent years with the exponential growth in digital marketing techniques. The digital economy has entered a new era of unprecedented challenges and opportunities for marketers to engage with consumers in real time, requiring marketers to equip themselves with new skills and practices.
The Digital Marketing specialization is designed to meet the demands of professionals in the changing field of marketing. The curriculum provides you with a strong foundation in marketing knowledge as well as skills in analytics. Most courses have a strong hands-on component with in-class examples and group projects. You are equipped with cutting-edge marketing techniques to identify, understand, and cultivate relationships with customers in the digital environment. Graduate with a deep reservoir of market insights to successfully build your business and marketing operations.
While balancing a full-time job with his studies at the Carey Business School, Flexible MBA student Josh Howard says he isn't just earning a degree. He says his learning – both online and in the classroom –directly impacts his marketing career at Under Armour.
Digital marketing curriculum highlights
Required
BU.420.710 Consumer Behavior (2 Credits)
This course provides you with a solid foundation in consumer decision making based on theoretical and empirical findings from the fields of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Topics include consumers’ knowledge and involvement, attention, comprehension, learning, attitude, and purchase intention. Emphasis on cognitive learning, social influence and persuasion, and behavioral science provides an overview of the various methods used to drive behavioral change and social impact when marketing products, services, and social issues. Also explored is the practical impact of consumer behavior analysis on marketing mix strategies, market segmentation/positioning, brand loyalty, persuasion process, and promotion.
Electives
BU.450.760 Customer Analytics (2 Credits)
This course introduces you to the modern practice of customer analytics. Learn to leverage scientific approaches in the analysis of big data. Leading analytical techniques and data structures are illustrated in the context of their most prominent applications, including predicting customer responses to marketing campaigns and managing customer churn. The class has a strong hands-on component, enabled by several in-class examples and group assignments (using Microsoft Excel and the statistical language “R”). You are not expected to become expert programmers or statisticians. But you will acquire basic skills and knowledge to orchestrate an effective analytics strategy, given your firm’s goals.
BU.420.720 Customer Relationship Management (2 Credits)
You will investigate the critical role and impact that customer relationship management (CRM) plays in marketing and business decision making. Topics include CRM history and evolution, database marketing, big data, customer lifetime value, predictive modeling, analytics, key performance indicators (KPIs), multichannel customer management, and CRM platform systems. Course content begins with the definition and overview of CRM, and then proceeds to detail the evolutionary trend from database management to the current use of big data and analytics in the multichannel environment. You will learn how to leverage data to quantify marketing results, forecast marketing goals, and realize marketing objectives. The course in divided into three sections: customer centricity and data evolution, leveraging and quantifying data, and CRM management.
BU.460.700 Integrated Digital Marketing (2 Credits)
Integrated Digital Marketing is designed to give you an understanding of the digital marketing environment and how it functions. Exploring the complexities and nuances of the digital world, you will gain the foundational skill sets that translate into business value. The course will cover a wide spectrum of topics, including the history of the Internet, new and emerging digital trends, website design and development best practices, digital marketing campaign design, digital analytics, channel decision making, e-marketing research, digital positioning and branding, social network management, and digital messaging/creative best practices. Lectures, readings, case discussions, and project assignments will offer perspectives on both digital agency management and the end-user experience. Timely case studies, relevant text materials, digital marketing tools, and group projects are used to augment the lectures and gain hands-on experience in the digital space.
BU.410.601 Marketing Research (2 Credits)
This course is an introduction to fundamental concepts, processes, and techniques in marketing research. The goal is to enable students to apply these tools to solve business problems and to differentiate good research from bad. The topics in this course cover the entire process from defining research problems and selecting appropriate research designs and research methods to conducting data analysis to making strategic recommendations. The course will also build on the foundations of statistics and introduce more advanced statistical tools relevant to marketing decision making.
BU.450.765 Social Media Analytics (2 Credits)
The rapid growth of social media has given consumers a powerful tool to create knowledge and propagate opinions. At the same time, social media has created an unprecedented opportunity for companies to engage in real-time interactions with consumers. In addition, the size and richness of social media data has provided companies an unusually deep reservoir of consumer insight to transform their business and marketing operations. This course will enable you to grasp the analytics tools to leverage social media data. The course will introduce tools such as engagement analytics, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, social network analysis, identification of influencers, and evaluation of social media strategy.
BU.450.750 Strategic Market Intelligence (2 Credits)
This course is focused on understanding advanced issues in marketing strategy and processes that determine marketing competitiveness in dynamic consumer and organizational markets. Learn to anticipate your competitors’ next marketing moves and incorporate them when setting your own marketing strategies. You will learn to apply game-theoretic tools in various marketing contexts to understand the strategic implications of your competitors’ as well as your own marketing decisions. And learn the strategies to make effective decisions when lacking important information and facing an uncertain market environment.