How Swiss University education is changing to cope with companies emerging needs for Digital Marketing knowledge and skills. 

What is your approach when teaching students Digital Marketing?

My approach is to balance theory and practice and at the same time cover the main types of media that are relevant for digital marketing strategies and tactics.

The course is structured into the three parts: paid media, owned media, and earned media. We discuss the main concepts behind these types of media in class, with a focus on paid media. The course also contains a practical part in collaboration with Google, where students advertise a local business from Lugano (or the Ticino area) using online marketing tools.

Digital Marketing is an ongoing and quick changing discipline. How do you manage to teach in such an evolving context in order to keep up with companies expectations towards fresh graduates?

Although technologies change very rapidly, human motivations and behaviours are very stable.

For this reason, we emphasize the Psychology and Economics behind digital marketing and do not focus too much on current tools as they may become obsolete soon. When we talk about earned media, for instance, we look at the psychological reasons behind sharing. These theories can be applied to any platforms offering sharing functionality, such as Twitter, Facebook, or now Snapchat.
Having said that, companies are certainly interested in graduates that master the latest tools. For this reason, we established the collaboration with Google. We take an in-depth look at Google AdWords, which is a leading tool that most likely will stay on the market at least for the next few years to come. As most paid advertising tools follow a similar logic, students should be able to also successfully apply other tools after this experience.

In your opinion, what is the key to success for a career in Digital Marketing?

I think there are three key factors that will drive the success of a career in Digital Marketing.

First, you need to be highly motivated to understand and work with digital technologies. Digital needs to be fun for you and you should burn for it. This involves looking behind the curtains and understanding how technology actually works. Learning a programming language, for instance, is crucial here.

Second, as with any marketing activity, it is important that you have very good people and communication skills. You will need to interact with managers, customers, and engineers, and you will often act as the interface between them.

Finally, you need to have good business and quantitative skills. At the end, it all comes down to financial figures. If you like math and playing with numbers is easy for you, you will have a significant advantage.

24 Febbraio 2016