Learning Digital Marketing Fundamentals Through Comprehensive Marketing Strategies

(This blog post is part of my coursework at Full Sail University, where I am currently attending for a Digital Marketing M.S. degree)

When I started Digital Marketing Fundamentals, I initially fell victim to thinking I knew more about marketing than I actually did. Sitting here here reflecting on the past few weeks, I'm amazed at how much I've learned and how it's reshaping my approach to the entire Digital Marketing program. One of the first big revelations was just how crucial it is to have a deep understanding of the organization and its products before you even think about marketing strategies. It sounds obvious now, but I didn't realize the true scope or depth that SEO and metric analysis went to.

This course also opened my eyes to how a well-crafted narrative about a company's journey can resonate with customers and set the stage for all your marketing efforts. One of the biggest things that jumped out at me was the some of the analytical tools we learned about. SWOT and PESTEL are no longer just fancy acronyms I've heard thrown around in meetings. They're invaluable resources for understanding a company's position in the market. The SWOT analysis helps you see the full picture – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. PESTEL is the ultimate method to see the bigger picture of all the external factors that can impact a business. Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal – it covers almost every factor that you would ever need to consider.

The Competitor Website Scorecard was, to put it bluntly, a rude awakening. It's completely changed how I look at websites, both my own and my chosen company's. Now, every time I visit a site, I find myself analyzing it, thinking about user experience, content quality, and all those other factors we learned about. I say it was such an awakening, because I realized where I had fallen short pretty substantially. That being said, now I feel like I know specific areas to address, which will help me be more efficient and complete in my future work.

I'm excited to see how much more I learn as I work on our Capstone Project. Every decision I make, every strategy I consider, will be grounded in these fundamental concepts we've covered. It's like I've been given a toolbox full of new tools, and now I get to build something awesome with them.

Looking ahead, I'm already thinking about areas I want to explore further. I definitely need to dive deeper into content marketing strategies, or learning more about how to effectively communicate complex tech concepts to a general audience. Working in the field, even in a limited capacity, I find myself accidentally using terms that are overly technical for a general audience. As I wrap up this course and continue with the rest of the Digital Marketing program, I feel like I'm seeing the digital marketing world through entirely new eyes. I now understand exactly how deep the relationship is between a company and its potential customers.