The recipe to Digital Marketing Success: UpGrad and T Shaped Marketing
We all know how rapidly the Digital Marketing industry is growing — without showing any signs of tapering in the future. To give some perspective, by the time you finish reading this article, two people across India will be placed with a Digital Marketing job! Within Digital Marketing itself, there are various job roles that exist and can either be in the brand management segment, or content, or SEO; or even in the performance marketing segment. There are also secondary functions like graphic design or data analysis that play an important role in digital marketing.
There are tons of questions that people have when they want to upskill themselves from say, traditional marketing to Digital Marketing. Many of these revolve around salaries, skill sets, domain knowledge, techniques, strategies and what not. Further, there are more fundamental questions like should I join an agency, a brand or work as a freelancer? Or which Digital Marketing segment is right for me?
The T Shaped Digital Marketer
The answer to these existential questions are not simple. While, many such decisions would depend upon individual personalities and skills — some gurus have coined the term a “T Shaped Marketer” which probably can come closest to being an appropriate answer. Being a T Shaped marketer is highly-desirable these days.It means that you need to have in-depth knowledge in one function of marketing (for example, paid marketing), and also have an overall understanding of how other marketing functions work, so as to grow towards an all-encompassing role, not limited to a silo, and a more fuitful career. Truth be told, most industries are hungry for T Shaped marketers across organizations; irrespective of company size or nature..
The Secret Sauce behind T Shaped Marketers
At UpGrad, we’ve broken down every kind of marketing function, and isolated every type of KPI or quality that is required to become a cross channel digital marketer. All these boil down to three primary elements:
- Data Driven Business Cases
- Live Project with a Real Business
- Application Driven Digital Strategies
Once we identified these core elements, we made sure that in our entire program of 17 modules spread across five months of intense teaching, these three core elements are maintained throughout.
So let’s think out of the box, and argue, why these three elements are required for you to become a Digital Marketer, and you can be the best judge within the next two minutes.
Secret Sauce Element #1
All Channels, Tools and Strategies are Useless if You Can’t Solve a Business Problem
Whether it’s a brand you’re working for, or an agency, or even as a freelancer; you need to understand how for different business situations, different channels & strategies combine to deliver optimum results. So how did we achieve this for our Digital Marketing Program?
We Identified business challenges across industries, company sizes and their maturity and picked out 15 businesses which faced marketing challenges across one or many digital marketing functions. What did HDFC Life do when their Google Search Channel was proving too expensive? How did layered targeting on Display Channels solve this? How did persona based creatives help in habit generation for Grofers? Or how did a Microsite transform Thomas Cook’s revenue streams?
All the case studies are present at the end of every one of our 17 modules. But you can just read a 1 pager about 100 such case studies on lighthouse insights blog. The difference is, we actually went to each of these brands, understood their challenges & how they solved them; and created a custom, detailed case study. These have data tables of campaign performances, and we’ve kept the format at an Ivy League standard, meaning, you don’t just get the problem & solution to mug up. You are given the premise with data tables and business situation videos which recreate the atmosphere of the challenges the brand was actually facing. You then need to apply the learnings from the module to actually solve the business case. Post submitting your answers, you are graded based on our rubric grading systems and finally exposed to the way the brand applied strategies to succeed in the respective digital marketing channel.
Secret Sauce Element #2
Digital Gyan is one thing, Applying it for a Real Life Business is what Industries seek
After speaking to hundreds of seasoned digital marketers in the industry, we realized that even with a hardcore digital offering, students can only become job ready if they are launching and optimising marketing campaigns for a real business. So we partnered with GentClub, an upcoming e-commerce apparel recommendation engine that calculates the right outfits that you can buy online based on your requirements. Owing to the digital first nature of the business, it fits perfectly into every avenue of paid and organic marketing, from google adwords, SEO, display marketing, social media marketing, remarketing to content, inbound marketing and much more.
The way UpGrad’s Live Project works it that after solving the module lectures and assessments, and solving a real business case, your skills are then put to the test. Let’s say you take the example of remarketing, and after you have solved the case study by Dominoes, you are then put into the shoes of the marketing manager of GentClub. You will then need to plan remarketing campaigns for GentClub basis their target audience. Once campaigns are launched, there is an optimisation drive, where you are given the chance to improve the campaign’s elements like creatives, targeting, bids, budget and more, based on the real data of the campaigns. For the same you need to focus on the channel level data, and optimise based on your learnings. If your suggestions are chosen as the final ones to be applied on the marketing campaign, then you get better grades.
Secret Sauce Element #3
At the heart lies strategy, it’s all about building the Marketing Thought Process
By now you must have a clear idea about the philosophy behind UpGrad’s Digital Marketing Program. For a deep dive into what we’re teaching in the program, you can check out the program curriculum. Even if you are new to marketing, or already a marketing professional in the branding segment, or a domain expert, or someone entirely new to marketing; you need a different approach to understanding channels, buyer personas and digital marketing metrics, than what would have been before the digital era dawned.
In the beginning you need a website. Be it any brand, you would be building a presence, getting quality traffic across different digital channels like Google & Facebook, working on your organic strategy with SEO driven content, working on repeat user acquisition and finally setting up analytics dashboards to optimise your marketing efforts. At the heart of all these strategies lies the customer purchase funnel and it’s important that while strategies are created on Digital, the target groups and their journeys across the purchase funnel of attract, nurture, convert & delight are always in focus. In the end, you should be in a position to tie all of these digital marketing channels to create a cross-channel digital media plan that solves the brand’s multi-objective goals.
You need clear application driven questions that test your idea about the business goals’ premise, the data elements and communication elements across all digital marketing disciplines. Our rubric driven assessment layer vouches to do exactly that with more than 200 questions, with a mix bag of data tables and comprehensions.
Extra Seasoning #4
The Digital Tool Artillery
Working your way across executing channel strategies is only possible if you have complete clarity on how to use tools across digital channels over a spectrum of elements like goals, targeting options, ad formats, bid and budget flexibilities and the array of optimisation capabilities that different tools & interfaces allow.
We’ve created a resources section within our program that ties to every channel, and showcases exactly how each interface & tool can be used to launch campaigns and derive insights for a given business goal. Some really amazing tools like Unmetric for social listening or Hootsuite for social scheduling have really proved useful for our students.
Does this suit your palate?
Well, to become a pro at Digital Marketing, you would at least have to spread 2–3 years of campaign management effort, across different marketing elements. This is probably the best way to scale up the digital ladder. However, if you want a fast forward and compressed thought process training of working in multiple brands, in a five month time span, then you should reconsider your options.
Certificates, Placement Assistance, Career Mentoring, Skill Profiling, Industry interaction, Mentoring all comes as a part of the core offering in UpGrad’s Digital Marketing Program.
Interested in a Career Counselling session with an UpGrad Career Counselor? You can schedule a call right away.
Got ideas on how you can make our Digital Marketing Program more awesome? Comment below, we’re all ears. Stay tuned for more.
