Instructor: Ben Kirshner, Former CEO and Founder of Tinuiti. Tinuiti is the Largest Independent Performance Marketing Agency in North America. With over 1000 employees, 500 customers and over 3B in Media under Management.

Instructor: Jake Cook, CEO and co-founder of Tadpull. Tadpull works at the intersection of data science and digital marketing with various global clients such as Jackson Hole Resort, Caterpillar, and Vivint, along with portfolio companies of private equity firms. In addition, Jake has over 16 years of experience creating and teaching digital marketing, data science, and design thinking across undergraduate and graduate courses.

Course Overview

Digital marketing has transformed the 21st century and has upended the playbooks of every major corporation. This elective course will teach you how to unleash your digital marketing prowess over seven weeks of hands-on exercises and data analysis straight from the trenches. You will be taught by the best of the best experts from the leading performance marketing firms in North America, who collectively manage over $10B of media spend annually.

This is a half-course based on lectures and custom-built hands-on exercises for HBS students to help build foundational knowledge of the modern tools of digital marketing and analytics. The course was tailored for aspiring entrepreneurs and marketers curious about emerging methods and tactics to build effective brands in the modern age. Students will apply the learnings from each class with world-class experts while assembling their own toolsets and frameworks for executing best-in-class digital campaigns.

In addition, the course will offer optional experimental labs on cutting-edge topics for students interested in going deep in areas like generative AI via ChatGPT4 with SEO and paid media, 0 and 1st-party customer data and privacy considerations, and multivariate testing methods for pricing new products online.

Finally, students will have access to guest speakers and instructors for the below topics in a private Slack environment for asynchronous learning opportunities to augment pre-read assignments and Q&A follow-up from class exercises for completing assignments.

Educational Objectives

The Digital Marketing Workshop will teach you how to effectively assess and deploy digital marketing strategies and accompanying tools to be effective at designing high-performing online campaigns and measuring their success in near real-time. Specifically, the course will cover Search Engine Optimization(SEO), Search Engine Management (SEM), Influencer Marketing, Selling on Amazon and Retail Platforms, Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO), Email and SMS Marketing, Programmatic Display and Connected TV Ads, Media Planning, Web Analytics, and Data Visualizations along with basic Data Science fundamentals for identifying and predicting opportunities in the online marketing mix.

Course Content and Organization:

Module 1: Digital Marketing Overview

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Prepare for the upcoming seven weeks of hands-on exercises

2. Familiarize yourself with the final presentation expectations

3. Understand the Digital Marketing and Analytics landscape

Module 2: Search Engine Optimization - Part I

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Understand how SEO works

2. See how SEO fits into the overall Digital Marketing channel mix

3. Perform a basic audit of a site of a B2B or B2C site

Module 3: Search Engine Optimization - Part II

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Analyze keyword portfolio for value

2. Identify emerging content opportunities and rankability against competitors

3. Guide brand content strategies

Module 4: Search Engine Marketing

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Understand how PPC works and when to use it based on business models

2. Tie keyword portfolio strategy into budgeting forecasts

3. Map SEM to the customer journey

Module 5: Digital Analytics - Basics

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Understand how digital campaigns are measured

2. Analyze digital cross-channel performance from a live e-commerce dataset

3. Grasp challenges of modern attribution in a post-iOS world

Module 6: Display/Programmatic/CTV Advertising

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. How ad tech tools work and where it fits in the digital marketing mix

2. Display and attribution considerations

3. Effective CTV strategies in the age of streaming

Module 7: Amazon & Retail Marketing

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. How to sell on Amazon & strategic tradeoffs for data

2. Similarities & differences with SEM

3. Mix modeling of Amazon/DTC/Wholesale for inventory

Module 8: Conversion Rate Optimization

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Shocking ROI math of conversion rate optimization lift

2. How to rank opportunities across creative and engineering

3. Frameworks for managing digital property improvements

Module 9: Digital Analytics - Intermediate

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Understand 0, 1st, 3rd party customer datasets

2. Communicating cross-channel campaign performance to non-digital stakeholders

3. Grasp basic fundamentals of machine learning for predictive analytics in digital marketing campaigns

Module 10: Email and SMS Marketing

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Why email and SMS are owned channels in the digital mix

2. How to build, segment, and maintain lists

3. Scaling with automation based on the customer journey

Module 11: Influencer Marketing

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Early mover advantage on emerging platforms like TikTok with influencers

2. Identifying influencer's ROI based on reach and engagement

3. Key considerations for attribution for measuring campaigns

Module 12: Paid Social Media Marketing

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. How paid social media works in comparison to SEM

2. Power of testing creative and user-generated content

3. Considerations with generative AI

Module 13: Media Planning

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. How media strategies are developed and deployed in market

2. Mix media modeling fundamentals

3. Introduction to incrementality

Module 14: Retention and Personalization

Upon successful completion of this week, you should be able to:

1. Customer heterogeneity and what to look for and fix

2. Predicting which customers are most valuable and in what digital channel

3. The tradeoff for privacy and personalization with 0/1st/3rd party datasets

Final Presentations

After completing this week, you should be able to present the ideal digital marketing mix for a DTC e-commerce website along with scenarios on future returns for the brand.

Grading:

Grades will be earned through the following activities:

• 60% Class Participation and In-Class Exercises

• 10% 2 quizzes

• 10% weekly polls

• 20% Final Exam

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