Digital Marketing Strategy: Navigating Emerging Media and AI

Overview

The Digital Revolution has led to a titanic shift in the landscape of marketing communications, while also creating new opportunities for businesses to reach and engage consumers through smart, social, and mobile media technologies. In this course, you will learn about the impacts of digital technologies on marketing communication strategies and practices.

By understanding the underlying processes of marketing communication and the core features of new media technologies, you can strategically select the appropriate channels to deliver the right marketing message to the right audience at the right moment. You will be able to:

- Examine marketing as a process of highly strategic communication - Understand the impacts of digital media and information technologies on communication and marketing - Develop a conceptual understanding of several digital marketing strategies - Consider the rise of exciting new technologies, such as AI, Internet of Things, and Mix Reality, as new tools for digital marketing This course is part of Gies College of Business’ suite of online programs, including the iMBA and iMSM.

Learn more about admission into the program and explore how your Coursera work can be leveraged if accepted into a degree program at https:

//degrees.giesbusiness.illinois.edu/idegrees/.

Syllabus

• Course Overview and Module 1: Understanding Attention as the Foundation of Marketing
In the orientation, you will become familiar with the course, your instructor, your classmates, and our learning environment. The orientation also helps you obtain the technical skills required for the course. In the first module, we will examine marketing as a process of communication, in which businesses and marketers attempt to deliver the right message to the right person at the right moment, and listen and respond to consumers’ feedback.
• Paths of Engagement: From Messages to Context and Content
This module aims to provide students with a structured understanding of the digital marketing mix, emphasizing the distinction between touchpoints (where consumers interact with marketing messages) and communication channels (the methods used to deliver those messages). It also helps students understand the strategic evolution of strategic marketing communication from message-based persuasion (traditional advertising) to context- and intent-based persuasion, where tech enables personalized experiences.
• The Fuel of Growth: Data, Automation, and Real-Time Engagement
This module explores the data, technologies, and automation strategies that power modern digital marketing. We will examine how data is collected, analyzed, and leveraged in marketing; explore attribution modeling, automation, and algorithm-driven decision making; and unpack how emerging technologies shape targeting, engagement, and media buying.
• The Road Ahead: Marketing in the Age of Intelligent Experiences
In this module we will explore the future of marketing and AI. Researchers like Alan Turing and John McCarthy laid the groundwork for AI as a formal field, evolving from rigid rule-based systems into machine learning models capable of learning from vast amounts of data. This shift, fueled by internet data and advances in computing hardware such as GPUs, led to powerful applications in natural language processing, recommendation systems, and generative AI.

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Taught by

Mike Yao

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Subjects

Business