Training Tomorrow’s Digital Marketers Today
Since the dawn of the marketing age, marketers have dreamt of reaching exactly the right person at exactly the right time with exactly the right message about exactly the right product.
Today, technology is making this dream a reality.
Advanced tools and strategies, in the hands of skilled digital marketers, are being leveraged to power increasingly sophisticated and intelligent campaigns that deliver powerful messages to receptive audiences. These campaigns in turn drive highly desirable growth for businesses across countless different fields.
The need for this kind of modern digital marketing has grown so rapidly and so intensely, that demand is far outpacing talent, and that means … opportunity!
But there is a problem.
Despite this overwhelming demand for talent, there are virtually no learning programs out there that equip aspiring digital marketers with the 360-degree understanding you really need to succeed in these kinds of roles. It’s simply no longer enough to specialize in SEO, email, or social media, and you can’t get away with being a single-tool ninja; you need to know how and when to use all the available tools — and more than that, you need to have your fundamentals in place, so that when technologies change and new tools replace old ones, you’ll always be at the cutting edge, ready to take advantage of every advantage!
I was fortunate. I got a job at Yahoo! that enabled me to get real-world digital marketing experience right away, at a time when the technology was advancing rapidly in very exciting ways. I watched the landscape change in front of my eyes — old ways of doing things started to come up short against newer experiments, even as many of the new experiments failed from being little more than thinly-disguised modifications of legacy models. I watched, learned, and contributed as the split between old and new began to blur, as new technologies began to mature, and as the fundamental relationships between content and content distribution began to change dramatically. I was able to witness, learn from, and leverage the rising power of data, of cloud computing, of automation.
Most importantly, I was able to learn by doing. I didn’t have to read about what was happening, I was able to make things happen myself!
Now that I’m in the position of teaching digital marketing to others, I am making absolutely sure students get the same kind of direct, hand-on, real-world experience. I am also committed to seeing that students are able to learn from the most innovative, most forwarding-thinking, most influential experts out there.
In my 10 years of teaching digital marketing at the university level, I have been extremely fortunate to work with the very best in the business, and when it came time to build the Digital Marketing Nanodegree program here at Udacity, I had no doubt as to who we needed as partners if we were to truly make this a world-class opportunity for our students. I am so proud and excited that our partners now include Google, Facebook, Mailchimp, Moz, Hootsuite, and Hubspot, because having industry-leading innovators like these as partners makes guaranteeing a state-of-the-art curriculum with the latest info on platform developments so much easier.
Ultimately, I believe that this program will put every student on the fast track to a successful career as a digital marketer. Our graduates will gain both the skills and the experience hiring managers and recruiters are looking for, and we know this with certainty because of our hiring partner relationships — we work closely with them to understand their needs, and we make sure our students emerge uniquely prepared to fulfill their key roles.
With the launch of this program, tomorrow’s digital marketers finally have the chance to learn what they need to learn, today.
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Enroll in our Digital Marketing Nanodegree program today!
