This month we again invite Jeanine Morber from Stevenson University in Maryland as a guest blogger, this time to talk about an integrated project in her Internet Marketing class. This project is similar to one I have used and that I talked about last month at the Academy of Marketing Science. I will include more information on that activity next month. ---Dr. Debra Zahay
Jeanine says the following.
"I was a corporate digital marketing strategist and
trainer for almost ten years, I taught countless sessions on web design best
practices, Google AdWords, Google Analytics, search engine optimization (SEO), email
marketing, social media marketing, and online advertising. When I became a
marketing lecturer for Stevenson University in Maryland, I had the opportunity
to teach all of these together in a three credit E-Marketing course to a class
of twenty-five budding digital marketing strategists.
At first, I planned to teach each topic as a separate
unit but quickly abandoned that idea when I realized how disjointed it would
seem to students, whose only experiences with these concepts, were from a
consumer’s perspective and not from a marketer’s perspective.
I decided to create a semester-long project that would
incorporate each of the components of E-Marketing in a way that would be
meaningful to them, but also resemble a real-world online digital marketing
campaign. I also wanted students to use as many online tools as possible to
manage and monitor their work, and also analyze their results. I compiled a
list of tools that had either free versions or trial versions and set out
creating an outline of the entire project and all of its components. (The complete list of tool used can be found
at the end of this post.)
The main component of the project was a niche topic
blog created using Google’s Blogger. Although students can create wonderful
blogs on sites such as WordPress, Tumblr, Wix, or Weebly, in order to
incorporate Google Analytics into those sites, they would have had to pay a
fee. My goal was to create a project using many of the same tools as
professionals but using free versions only. By using Blogger, students could
incorporate Google Analytics for traffic monitoring and analysis and Google
Search Console to check the status of Google indexing and troubleshoot any
indexing issues.
Once I realized I would be using Blogger, I made the
first step of the project creating a Gmail email address to be used for the
course. Using Gmail solved many
problems; 1) Google requires a Gmail email address to use many of its tools and
2) The Gmail email address could also be used for students to sign up for other
free or free trial tools without leaving them with an inbox full of sales
emails on their “real” email accounts and 3) Not having students use their
university email address to sign up for so many tools will be blessing to your
IT department, trust me!
 |
| Sample Student Blog |
Once I knew they would be creating a niche blog in
groups of two or three, I broke the project down into three main stages:
Acquisition, Conversion, and Retention.
Acquisition: Getting visitor traffic to the blog. I had
the students research their potential audience and competitors, and create a
Buyer Persona using Xtensio which has
a great persona template. I then had the students create a few blog posts
before I taught them the basics of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This way
they could go back and optimize their previous posts. I had them use the
Hubspot Website Grader (https://website.grader.com/) before
and after they implemented SEO techniques to analyze the effectiveness of their
SEO skills.
 |
| Hubspot Website Grader identifies areas of improvement |
For content, in addition to writing, I had them use
various graphics and video tools, such as Canva, Animoto, and Soapbox. They
also used social media to send traffic to their blog – mostly Twitter,
Instagram, and Facebook - and used Hootsuite, Sprout Social, TweetDeck,
and SumAll to monitor and manage all social media platforms.
For all blog links used in social media, students uses Bit.Ly Link Shortner which gives a great report on how, where, and when
links are clicked.
Conversion:
Getting site visitors to take a desired action. In the real world, conversions
are most often sales but for the purpose of this course, we considered
conversions subscribing to the blog, commenting on a post, participate in a
poll, or sharing a post to social media. I also had them create goals in Google Analytics based on number of website
pages viewed and time on site. They would monitor their Google Analytics goals
weekly to determine how well (or not so well) they were doing on conversions.
 |
| Google Analytics Tracking |
Retention: Turning new site visitors into repeat
visitors. We used email marketing with both Mail Chimp and Constant
Contact. Students created a sign up box for their email list on their blog and
students subscribed to each other’s lists using the Gmail address they created
for the class. They experimented with different email marketing designs and
used A/B testing to determine the most effective verbiage and design. They were
fascinated that they could not only see how many people opened their email, but
actually who opened what and when, and which links they clicked.
Also for
retention, they created their own mobile apps using Appy Pie. Appy Pie has a
fairly easy to use mobile app maker with a free version. Students were able to create
their apps, and post links to their blog for readers to download them and
install them on their phones. I downloaded all of them and installed them on my
phone without an issue.
 |
| Mobile App Maker |
For assessments, the students wrote two progress reports using
a template I provided them, and did a final presentation. The final
presentation included strategies and tactics they used throughout the semester
and the results of their project as far as visitor count, page views, link
clicks, downloads, etc… They also had to include their (now expert) opinion on
what they would do differently if they had the opportunity to do the project
again.
The feedback from the students regarding this project
was overwhelmingly positive. Most commented on the value of first-hand
experience implementing strategies and using many of the same tools used by
digital marketing agencies. After adding the tools they used to their resumes,
students commented that potential employers were impressed with their extensive
list of skills and experience with the numerous applications and tools.
Some final tips:
·
Schedule the class in a computer lab
·
Be sure to require a minimum of two students per group – doing this
project alone is too much work
·
Require one blog post per week per student
·
If possible, share the blogs with internal school publications to help
students get traction for their blogs
And finally, enjoy the semester – your definitely students
will!"
Thanks Jeannine. This sounds like a wonderful project and I will be sharing some other ideas for this type of project in the next post!
