Digital marketing is an ever-changing field. However, a solid understanding of the basic fundamentals prepares a marketer to better understand and evaluate tactics for effectively conversing with customers online.

To that end, the goal is to start and work through the following concepts through readings and assigned exercises. In addition, world-class experts from companies like Amazon, Design Within Reach, IDEO, Google, and MailChimp have generously offered up case studies in the following areas to tie real-world situations to the marketing theories presented.


This section starts with a brief history of advertising, rise of mass media, and how marketing has changed in the digital age. Next, we’ll cover the core theories of the online world like Metcalfe’s Law, Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations, Adoption Curves, Dunbar’s number, and Moore’s Law.

Goal: Understand how marketing has changed and the fundamental laws that help shape the online world.


Here we get into the fun work of truly understanding your target market beyond traditional demographic and psychographic profiles. Tools like user personas and keyword analysis will help cement the concepts of search, user experience, network effects, and the importance of optimized content.

Goal: Learn how to empathize with your ideal user’s online habits.


Once we know our ideal user’s habits we’ll set about understanding how to reach them using the web. Topics include paid search advertising, social media, defining online metrics for success, public relations, mobile, design, and building engaged online communities around a brand or cause.

Goal: Using your new research skills, form a strategy for building an effective brand online.


Once our strategy is formed, we’ll set about executing it using the many tools available to digital marketers today. We’ll look into ad platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Email, social media and mobile marketing tactics will be covered as well along with effective content and search engine optimization (SEO) tools.

Goal: Know how to put content out and effectively engage with customers on the web.


The biggest opportunity for digital marketers is to effectively measure their work. We’ll cover how traditional metrics like CPM’s transfer to the online world and look into free reporting tools like Google Analytics and HootSuite for measuring the effectiveness of online campaigns.

Goal: Understand what are online marketing metrics. In addition, how to measure and effectively report efforts across social media, search, and content creation.


Very rarely do things go as planned. Armed with real-time data, we’ll look into how things like design, content, keywords, and social networks can be tweaked to better achieve our marketing goals.

Goal: Better understand how to start back in the Research phase with solid data.