Digital Marketing 360Cornell

Certificate Program

Using paid media, such as buying ad space on well-known websites, may be the fastest way to promote a product or service on digital platforms. In addition to display ads, paid media includes initiatives like search engine marketing, email marketing, video marketing, social media ads, and mobile ads. 

This course provides a tour of opportunities and strategies associated with these various paid media channels, and guides you in drafting a paid media marketing plan that addresses your own marketing objectives.  

Marketing within your own digital properties—such as your organization's website, blog or social media pages—is an effective way to build deeper relationships with existing customers and attract the attention of new ones. 

This course covers the unique opportunities of “owned media” and how those differ from “paid media”. You will learn more about content marketing, search engine optimization, social media “fan pages”, mobile apps, and virtual reality apps and assess the relevancy of owned media initiatives for your own marketing objectives. By the end of this course, you will have a plan outlining a strategy for your own potential use of these channels.

You are required to have completed the following courses or have equivalent experience before taking this course:

• Understanding the Digital Marketing Landscape and the Customer Funnel
• Assessing Opportunities in Paid Digital Media

Properly utilizing digital marketing allows you to promote your products and services while building customer relationships through “paid media” and “owned media” initiatives. So how do you put them together to create a comprehensive, effective marketing plan?  

This course will help you evaluate and combine your ideas to create a single, encompassing marketing plan.  This plan will include the priorities, resourcing and performance metrics appropriate for your organization. Once complete, you will be able to immediately put this plan in place to drive results. 

In order to be successful with your social media marketing, you must first understand how and why to structure a social media strategy to guide campaign execution.

In this course, you will explore social media marketing platforms, publishers, tools, agencies, and the foundational elements of running a successful social media campaign. You will also examine what social media marketing is and how it is part of a brand-driven integrated marketing communications strategy. As the course progresses, you will evaluate the main social platforms used for digital marketing and practice aligning these platforms with your marketing goals and campaign strategy. You will also examine how marketers incorporate effective social media content generated by the brand, influencers, or users. Lastly, you will assess the role of social media agencies to help you decide if and when to outsource your campaigns.

Effective marketing communications inform and inspire consumers. It's messaging that creates product awareness and knowledge, and encourages positive brand attitudes and action. Traditional marketing, especially advertising, uses a “tell and sell” promotional approach that's unidirectional in presentation – from brand to buyer – and designed to persuade; it's hard marketing. Effective social media marketing is different. It's bidirectional conversation – from brand to buyer and buyer to brand – about the brand experience and designed to engage. This is soft marketing, the kind that target audiences seek as opposed to avoid. The key to social media marketing is connecting the customer with the brand through content that's informative, interesting, or entertaining; ideally, a combination of all three.

In this course, you will conduct a brand audit to identify the brand's pillars, tone, imagery, and personality. You will use these to create a clear brand voice for social media. You will then develop a content marketing social media strategy centered around a big idea and produce creative content that meets the business objectives of the organization as well as the needs and wants of the customer. Lastly, you will identify opportunities for user-generated content (UGC) that motivates the brand community and create a detailed content-posting cadence designed to meet the specific marketing goals.

Influencers are social media's celebrity spokespersons. Their followers provide a core audience of avid social media users, while the influencers themselves, through the endorsement of and engagement with brands, provide authenticity and trustworthiness. Teaming up and collaborating with the right influencers can help a company reach and expand target audiences, improve brand engagement, and inspire conversions. However, not all influencers are right for all brands; knowing when and how to use social influencers is an important element of social media strategy.

In this course, you will analyze the types and roles of social media influencers and identify specific influencers that will help drive your marketing efforts. You will apply the consumer purchasing funnel to devise strategies aimed at connecting the right influencer at the right time with the right customers. Additionally, you will evaluate the ethical and regulatory aspects of working with influencers, and examine how to measure influencer campaign success across the funnel. Lastly, you will craft an influencer program to achieve social media campaign objectives by integrating influencers into the content marketing strategy.

Understanding what past, present, and potential customers are saying, hearing, and seeing about your brand is an important part of brand management and social media presence. Monitoring brand mentions and conversations on social platforms can seem like a daunting, even impossible task. Fortunately, there are tools and solutions providers who can facilitate social listening and reputation management. What's important, then, is your understanding of why and how to manage social discourse about the brand to maintain and enhance your brand's credibility and overall reputation.

In this course, you will build a strategic, proactive social listening system that amplifies the efforts of social media marketing and creates close relationships between the brand and members of the brand community. You will also develop a systematic organizational approach to community management that is consistent with the brand and leverages best practices for different social media platforms.

What makes a social media marketing campaign successful? Is it growth in followers? More engagement on social channels? Greater positive sentiment about the brand? What about increases in sales leads or in sales revenue? Social media success might be reflected in all, some, or just one of these outcomes. Ultimately, however, success is a function of how well the campaign performed in meeting its marketing objectives. Measuring this performance used to be elusive for social media, but as the practice has evolved, so has the means to determine what worked and what did not.

In this course, you will identify the right metrics for measuring and benchmarking social media success across the marketing funnel. From measures of impressions to engagement, to conversion, and to advocacy, you'll examine how brands and agencies link campaign objectives — activity — and outcomes to assess, test, and optimize campaign results. Additionally, you'll explore how existing and emerging performance-reporting tools and dashboards help social media managers control dynamic campaigns to best ensure social media success.

The increasing availability and granularity of customer data in the modern age has forced a shift in focus toward customers as the most critical unit of analysis in business strategy. While this makes sense, as customers are the true source of revenue for any business, it requires that a number of additional factors are quantified, managed, and leveraged effectively for that strategic shift to be successful.

In this course, you will explore customer lifetime value (CLV) as an objective metric with which customers can be managed more effectively, evaluating the ways in which it can be quantified and improved. You will go from learning what a customer is and performing the calculations necessary to quantify their value from an organization's perspective to determining how the various levers contributing to that value can be managed for a real-world business in the course project. Along the way, you will review some of the challenges and limitations of this approach, finding ways to facilitate the management and allocation of resources such that business success can be achieved.

Evolution of the consumer market is an ongoing and inevitable process, driven to new heights in recent decades by the strategic shift in focus toward customers as the most critical unit of analysis. To spur innovation and growth in this increasingly tumultuous environment, a test-and-learn culture must be fostered to understand customers and harness the power of new ideas.

In this course, you will explore testing as a means of adapting to that evolution, analyzing and leveraging data to inform business and marketing decisions. You will go from learning what testing is and how it can be applied at a basic level to designing and conducting tests in RStudio to understand how to target customers. Along the way, you will evaluate the efficacy of a variety of approaches, finding ways to enhance your analytics and communicate results to better inform business decisions.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Leveraging Customers for Growth

Improvements in marketing practices in recent decades have had a significant impact on productivity, driven by the increasing efficiency and relevance of customer data collection. Leveraging that data effectively, however, requires that marketing efforts are directed only toward those who are likely to respond, rather than casting as wide a net as possible. Yet to target the right customers, you have to know who they are, which requires that customer data is leveraged such that relevant behaviors can be identified, differentiated, and understood at a granular level. Only then can the value they provide be classified and segmented, allowing for productive management of customers based on those characteristics.

In this course, you will explore RFM (recency, frequency, and monetary value) analysis as a means to classify customer purchase behavior characteristics indicative of a likely response to marketing efforts. You will go from identifying the implicit purpose and value of RFM metrics and workflow to developing and assessing the performance of response models with respect to profitability. Along the way, you will evaluate the pros and cons of RFM analysis in the real world.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Leveraging Customers for Growth
• A/B Testing and Analytics

The success of any targeting strategy is dependent on the validity of the models used to select customers, which requires that value distinctions are optimized within the constraints of a marketing budget. While there are a variety of methods available to identify and assess likely drivers of customer response, their ability to differentiate and approximate relative influence on purchase behavior can be limited in scope.

In this course, you will explore logistic regression as a means to enhance the predictive specificity and granularity of response likelihood, estimating and iterating on logistic models to maximize expected profitability. You will go from identifying and leveraging categorical response data common to real-world business interactions to evaluating the probabilistic relevance of associated predictor variables to optimize customer selection for targeting. Along the way, you will compare the relative efficacy of a variety of approaches in their ability to improve return on investment, recognizing the potential implications of those differences with regard to marketing success.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Leveraging Customers for Growth
• A/B Testing and Analytics
• Customer Behavior Segmentation Analysis

While the centricity of business strategy may ebb and flow with time, the rapid escalation of data availability in recent decades has driven a shift in focus toward customers that is likely permanent. Success in the current environment is increasingly dependent on the strategic and contextual relevance of customer management strategies, both of which depend on a highly granular characterization and utilization of customer value.

In this course, you will explore customer centricity from a holistic perspective, reviewing and aligning various strategies to consolidate your approach to customer management. You will go from identifying and contextualizing value derivation as it pertains to customer portfolios to developing and applying a comprehensive framework to efficiently diagnose, predict, and resolve potential obstacles to customer lifetime value for a real-world business in the course project. Along the way, you will review tactics for the acquisition, retention, and development of customers, aligning their deployment with value considerations and predictions to achieve overarching business goals and drive profitable growth.

The following courses are required to be completed before taking this course:

• Leveraging Customers for Growth
• A/B Testing and Analytics
• Customer Behavior Segmentation Analysis
• Predicting Customer Response

To improve sales and market share, knowing what consumers want isn't enough. You also need to know what they believe your product or service, and your competitors', provides. In this course, you'll create and use perceptual maps to identify which dimensions consumers use to differentiate among products, and how they perceive your products relative to competitors'. These maps are valuable for identifying opportunities to introduce and position new products, repositioning existing products, and identifying your true competitors.

Symposium sessions feature three days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Leadership Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium in which we’ll discuss the ways that leaders across industries have continued engaging their teams over the past two years while pivoting in strategic ways. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to relevant topics for leaders. Throughout this Symposium, you will examine different areas of leadership, including innovation, strategy, and engagement. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from various industries.

Upcoming Symposium: February 11, 12 and 13, 2025 from 11am – 1pm ET

• Tuesday, February 11, 2025 11am – 1pm ET
• Wednesday, February 12, 2025 11am – 1pm ET
• Thursday, February 13, 2025 11am – 1pm ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

Symposium sessions feature two days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The Marketing Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll share experiences from across the industry, inspiring real-time conversations about best practices, innovation, and the future of marketing work. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to some of the most pressing topics and trends in the marketing field. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across the industry.

Upcoming Symposium: March 11th – 12th, 2025: 

• Tuesday, March 11, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET
• Wednesday, March 12, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.

Symposium sessions feature three days of live, highly interactive virtual Zoom sessions that will explore today’s most pressing topics. The AI Symposium offers you a unique opportunity to engage in real-time conversations with peers and experts from the Cornell community and beyond. Using the context of your own experiences, you will take part in reflections and small-group discussions to build on the skills and knowledge you have gained from your courses.

Join us for the next Symposium, in which we’ll share experiences from across the industry, inspiring real-time conversations about best practices, innovation, and the future of AI. You will support your coursework by applying your knowledge and experiences to some of the most pressing topics and trends in the field. By participating in relevant and engaging discussions, you will discover a variety of perspectives and build connections with your fellow participants from across a variety of industries.

Upcoming Symposium: March 18, 19 and 20, 2025 11AM – 1PM ET

• Tuesday, March 18, 2025 11:00 AM ET – 1:00 PM ET
• Wednesday, March 19, 2025 11:00 AM ET – 1:00 PM ET
• Thursday, March 20, 2025 11:00 AM ET – 1:00 PM ET

All sessions are held on Zoom.

Future dates are subject to change. You may participate in as many sessions as you wish. Attending Symposium sessions is not required to successfully complete any certificate program. Once enrolled in your courses, you will receive information about upcoming events. Accessibility accommodations will be available upon request.