The best digital marketing programs include detailed lessons on big data analytics. Big data is any data that can be used to produce meaningful insights about market trends, customer preferences, patterns, and correlations that would otherwise remain hidden without data backing it up. Big data analytics are ways of measuring and understanding different sources of data so that organizations can use it to make better business decisions. For example, from their website, CRM, customer lists, shopping carts, sales, marketing, google ads, social media. Big data analytics combines all sources and are essential to any successful business, which is why today’s marketing students want to leave their college or university digital marketing program with a good knowledge of how to manage them.
Big Data Resources for College & University Instructors
Google Analytics
Google analytics is a resource that all university and college digital marketing courses should teach. Students who are confident with Google Analytics will be able to generate customized reports that chart how a given digital marketing campaign is performing through data such as how many people are visiting a web page, how they came to the page, what device they used to browse, and more. The best way to teach Google Analytics is through hands-on activities where students generate and interpret their own reports and discuss their findings.
Google Data Studio
Teaching analytics is more effective when instructors can present relevant data to their students in various ways, to illustrate different ways of showing big data depending on your needs. Google Data Studio is a great resource for college and university instructors because it is a free tool that can be used to visually show big data in a number of different ways. This helps students learn the value of communicating big data in varied ways and helps instructors teach more effectively while using a free tool that does not drain university resources.
SEMrush
SEMrush is a useful tool for instructors to show college and university students how big data analytics can be used to generate better content, analyze a website’s performance, and learn what competitors are doing. There is a free version of SEMrush, which is perfect to use as a teaching tool for students just getting their feet wet in digital marketing.
Minute-by-Minute Lesson Plans
The best resources a digital marketing instructor can have for teaching big data analytics are minute-by-minute lesson plans that include practical activities and discussion prompts for the above platforms. Having a minute-by-minute lesson plan already laid out means instructors can spend less time on lesson planning and will not require much–if any–support from the university. Mujo’s Big Data Analytics And Reporting Teacher’s Manual provides easy-to-follow minute-by-minute lesson plans that make teaching big data analytics simple.