Digital Marketing Communications (DMC)

This course exposes learners to a wide range of tools needed to produce highly creative and current messaging and branding for companies in order to be heard, create followership, and succeed in today's market. Modern media channels are now accessible to virtually all businesses at a low or no cost. In one hand it's democratizing the space, but it contributes to a crowded and noisy advertising/marketing space. In this busy environment, marketers have to fight hard to capture the attention of the consumer. Telling stories, being remarkable, transparent, and producing highly creative ideas and messaging for a company or individual can truly differentiate and achieve its intended goals.

This course focuses on digital marketing strategy targeted through search-based marketing tactics and conversion site development. Learners build marketing strategies that centre on a web platform such as a website, blog or wiki that optimize conversion through both paid and organic search engine marketing (SEM) and SEO (search engine optimization).

This course equips learners with the skills required to design and implement a complete integrated promotional campaign for an organization. Learners examine the marketing communication, promotional goals, and strategy of an enterprise, with an emphasis on the integration of digital and traditional channels. The course is practically oriented, and learners examine traditional mass advertising, online communication, promotion, public relations, personal selling and other communication areas. The course illustrates the relationships between the various forms of communications and how an organization uses them individually and collectively to resolve business problems. Businesses today are searching for integrated solutions, hence the need for coordinated planning of all forms of marketing communications.

This course provides learners with a fundamental understanding of how different social media channels are being used by consumers and marketers. Learners demonstrate social media strategically by employing social media planning principles, analysis, social media content planning, writing, and implementation to deliver on marketing communications objectives. Testing and post-campaign analysis is also touched on.

This course prepares learners to enter the workplace as a digital marketer – through work integrated learning, work placement, and future employment. Learners explore their core strengths and values to refine their career vision and goals. Learners generate professional career-search materials and reinforce their presentation skills necessary to promote a career portfolio for examination by prospective employers. Online personal brand development and professional networking is emphasized with specific attention given to leadership, teamwork, conflict resolution, and innovation within the workplace.

This course introduces learners to the campaign evaluation process. Learning how to measure the effectiveness of a campaign enables improvements to be applied on the go or for the next campaign. During this course learners measure and test the effectiveness of the campaigns and projects developed in other courses. The focus is on web analytics but includes traditional measurements as well.

This course provides learners with the experience of a marketing/advertising agency processes. Students apply skills learned throughout the program to develop a comprehensive IMC plan/campaign for real clients. Building from the RFP stage, to client briefings, strategy planning, and development of executables, the course culminates in a final presentation to the client. Campaigns developed during this course are at a calibre that clients may implement in the future using their own resources.