Over the last few weeks, we have been discussing The Social Media Magnet pedagogy with our online text and live practicum verses teaching with hard bound textbooks or simulations that mimic paid marketing processes. One of the most important components of this live practicum is the opportunity for students to become experienced in using various marketing stacks, as vital components in the new world of MarTech. If you are unfamiliar with the term “martech,” it stands for marketing technology. What exactly is martech, you might ask?
“Every piece of technology a marketer uses to reach a potential customer is martech… Everything from an email marketing system like MailChimp to social media marketing platforms like HootSuite” says John Koetsier, mobile economist at Tune, a mobile analytics and performance marketing company, quoted by George Slefo in an AdAge article explaining the topic. As Slefo explains, “almost without exception, marketing technology companies operate on a software-as-a-service model, or SaaS.” This means that companies pay vendors a yearly service fee to use the vendor software to gather data on the company’s consumers on their behalf. There are clear leaders in this space, like Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, and Marketo that use marketing clouds to store this company data.
Unfortunately, the recent martech reality is human’s inability to process, organize, and make strategic decisions off of so much “big data.” It’s mindboggling and overwhelming, and the future will bring a reliance on artificial intelligence to make sense of all of the data. We are already seeing commercials to help humans come to grip with this future reality, including IBM’s commercials already demonstrating the use of Watson in various industries, such as wind turbines, farming, cybersecurity, education, and even the Grammy selection process. The future of martech is hiring students who have current experience with available martech now.
This is one of the main reasons we demonstrate current job positions that are using the same martech that our Social Media Magnet students are using right now in their live practicum. We provide the opportunity for students to use all sorts of freeware in their project, including WordPress, Hootsuite, Ninja Forms, MailChimp, Google Analytics, Yoast SEO, among thousands of other plug-and-play options available to them through their live WordPress website. Throughout our blog, we highlight students who have received jobs and internships specifically because they had experience with these marketing stacks through our courseware and live practicum. Be sure not to miss these student stories. We hope their experience with MarTech in our curriculum will help you solidify the sizeable advantage that you are creating for your students in the marketplace as you choose to use The Social Media Magnet in your classroom.
If you are a college professor curious about The Social Media Magnet, check our professor overview with highlights of our features and benefits. If you would be interested in considering The Social Media Magnet for your university, we have a professor preview function that would allow you to see and work with some of the content. Within the professor preview, we have a complete list of instructor’s resources available when you adopt the course. If you are interested in our theory, then read our abstract and request our white paper. Or if you just have some general questions, feel free to contact us. We would love to assist you however possible.
References:
AdAge. Marketing Technology Explained: Everything You Need to Know. https://adage.com/article/digital/marketing-technology-explained/308661/. Last accessed March 1, 2019.