As a professor, you have probably experienced all the challenges in working to not only teach all the theories, strategies and approaches that make up the digital marketing practice.
But in order to build proficiency in the skills needed to execute digital marketing campaigns, students must learn through simulations that allow them to practice digital marketing skills such as blogging, conversion path design, social media monitoring, email marketing, and even website analytics. Cobbling together multiple software systems to help students gain exposure inside the systems can feel like a next-to-impossible task to pull off in a single semester.
But, in the age of modernized, digital, multi-channel and account-based marketing, using market-facing marketing and sales technology while remaining in the safety of the college classroom is not simply a nice to have -- it's an experience that will have perhaps the earliest and most positive impact on a student's marketing and sales career.
But teaching digital doesn't have to be that scary. To help you teach digital marketing skills in your classroom, we've developed this comprehensive page of resources to act as your guide. When you scroll down, you will find:
A skills gap is defined as the difference between the skills required of an individual to complete tasks that allow them to add value to an organization, and the actual skills possessed by that individual.
While skills gaps can be present in all industries that have been disrupted by advances in digital technology, software and hardware, marketers and sales professionals have experienced one of the most rapidly disrupted industries of the past decade.
So what created this marketing skills gap? In short, a seismic shift in consumer habits driven by highly innovative, and high growth companies has drastically impacted the way that consumers gather information at all stages of their buying journey as they research the products and services they intend to purchase.
Consider that today, it is estimated that 77% of Americans own and use smart mobile phones (Pew Research, 2017). This widespread mobile adoption spans generations and is fueled to burn brighter by smartphone apps’ growing share of digital media usage time (comScore, 2016).
General consumers have realized that they can find, learn, and do just about anything from the device they carry around in their pocket.
Likewise, this search is also increasingly infiltrating the home across multiple devices that include traditional laptop and desktop computers, tablets, gaming consoles and even home media and entertainment centers.
For example, some estimates suggest that approximately 1.6 million people have purchased and installed Amazon's Echo -- a device that provides a digital personal assistant who can complete a variety of tasks using common voice commands. (BI Intelligence, 2016).
To meet this seismic shift in consumer behavior, software companies all over the world have developed powerful software that empowers businesses of all sizes to harness customer data in real time and quickly take action. In 2016, Google reported that voice search makes up 20 percent of queries on its mobile app and across Android devices, paving the way for the development of Google assistant. (Search Engine Land, 2016)
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"Thank you for teaching Digital Marketing and having us not only earn the HubSpot certification, but also giving us the opportunity to work with the actual system."
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