Communication & Digital Marketing (MC)

Integrated marketing is a communication strategy that provides a seamless experience for consumers to interact with a company or brand across traditional and nontraditional marketing platforms. Students will learn how to create integrated marketing communication plans that unite strategies such as advertising, sales promotion, public relations, direct marketing, and social media. This course will also enhance students’ knowledge of the marketing mix and appropriate segmentation and positioning strategies. (Must be taken in the first semester.)

This class explores the interactivity and narrative of digital media through the creation of audio and video projects. As the media landscape continues to evolve with the advent of new technology, it is imperative that those working with media messages thoroughly understand the digital world in terms of creating digital content that resonates with different types of audiences using different media platforms. Digital Storytelling takes the traditional craft and attributes of telling stories and merges them with new techniques to create diverse digital media. This course is designed to provide students with a new skillset in digital storytelling ideas, production, and analysis.

Businesses are inundated with data that could be used to develop insights into their customers, suppliers, and internal processes. The field of business analytics involves using data to guide decision making with the goals of improving productivity, increasing profits, and creating competitive advantage. The course provides an introduction to the applications and issues associated with systematically using data to drive business decisions across industries and in all fields including marketing, finance, operations, network security, fraud protection, and strategy. Topics include collecting and integrating data (systems knowledge), using the data to find optimal solutions (decision analysis), make predictions and find patterns (analytic tool application knowledge), and the ability to ask the right questions and think critically about the results (management knowledge).

Digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, e-mail, and mobile apps. Students will learn best practices in formulating and analyzing digital-based marketing campaigns, as well as the integration of digital and traditional marketing channels. Students will evaluate and select digital platforms that collaborate with company goals, brand personality, and the selected target market.

This course explores the creative approaches of recent and historic innovations in business and industry. Through a case study approach, this course cultivates intentional and systematic competencies in students in order to develop leaders capable of solving problems in business settings. Students will draw insights from the most innovative and successful corporations to explore their approaches as well as examine the role of failure in innovations throughout history using foundational, creative-thinking concepts.

The course covers the development and use of an integrated brand strategy in social media outlets to effectively communicate branding messages across digital outlets. Students will evaluate tools for evaluating strategic uses of social media, developing a social media strategy and marketing campaign, and creating effective messaging for specific target audiences. Students will also learn how marketers utilize digital media as a public relations tool to change brand perception, re-brand, and respond to negative publicity.

This course critically analyzes the legal and ethical framework defining media freedoms and constraints in the United States, including First Amendment rights. Students will obtain a working knowledge of law and ethics in a media-related context, such as constitutional protection for organizations and practitioners, as well as discuss and analyze a range of legal and ethical issues within the scope of media from both historical and contemporary perspectives.

Understanding users is critical in the communication and digital marketing plan. Students will learn how to create prototypes to diagnose design issues by users, teammates, and other stakeholders such as clients in human-centered usability. Students will develop prototype proposals and a report evaluating the prototypes and the system. Students will also formulate recommendations for the redesign of the system and prototype to enhance user-centeredness.

Moving beyond social media listening, this course enhances students’ knowledge of using social media data to provide insights into brand perceptions and effectiveness of digital marketing efforts. The course covers techniques for retrieving, visualizing, and analyzing social media data to form conclusions and recommendations. Various metrics, including engagement, reach impressions, conversion, and ROI, will be covered. A focus will also be placed on research design.

This capstone courses provides students the opportunity to create and implement a marketing and digital communication campaign for a local, national, or international business. Integrating digital storytelling, principles of integrated marketing, user-centered design, creativity, and digital analytics, students will develop and implement a digital marketing strategy.

Utilizing various methods of contextual research and industry standard design tools, students will work toward identifying these intangibles to visually communicate a unique, trademarkable brand identity across populations. Through short lectures, design tutorials, and hands-on projects, students will learn how to conduct relevant and useful research to create a unique identifiable mark that communicates emotion, context, and essence to the user. In the end, students will recognize the importance of research in the branding design process and have gained the confidence and knowledge to run their own research projects in the future.

This course provides students with the opportunity to embark upon a faculty-supervised special project that enhances their knowledge in a communication and digital marketing topic. The course offers the student a great deal of flexibility with respect to topics to pursue.

Prerequisite(s): Permission of department and instructor.