As a university director, you are responsible for ensuring that your institution’s curriculum is up-to-date, engaging, and prepares your students for successful careers in their chosen field. For marketing programs, this means developing lesson plans that not only cover essential marketing concepts, but also provide students with hands-on experience in real-world marketing scenarios.
Here are some creative lesson planning ideas that can help your marketing instructors create dynamic and engaging classroom experiences for their students:
Encourage Creative Play
Encourage your students to play around with the marketing resources at their disposal and get creative. Have each student come up with a marketing plan for an imaginary business and encourage them to be as outside of the box and wacky as they can be in their marketing strategies—students will have fun and, while the marketing plans might not be practical, some innovative ideas and strategies are sure to arise from this exercise.
Engage with Industry Professionals
Oftentimes, instructors teaching digital marketing do not have current experience working in the field, which can make it difficult to teach the most relevant strategies and new technologies. When possible, bring in digital marketing professionals to speak to the class about their area of expertise, and use textbooks written by industry experts who have experience working in the field.
After having an industry professional speak to the class or having students read a piece written by a professional, have them list strategies and technologies mentioned by the speaker/author. Then, hold a class discussion on how they could successfully implement these in a marketing campaign.
Data-Driven Approaches
When planning your lessons, start with the data and build from there. Incorporating data-driven approaches into marketing lessons can provide students with valuable insights into consumer behaviour and market trends. You can use tools like Google Analytics or social media analytics platforms to show students how to analyze and interpret data to make informed marketing decisions.
Teach What Not to Do
A big part of understanding how successful digital marketing works is understanding how unsuccessful digital marketing works. Have students create practice campaigns intended to be successful, but also ask them to create social media posts or email newsletter designed to make as many marketing mistakes as they can think of. This is a creative way to learn common mistakes that should be avoided and how to create a successful campaign by knowing what doesn’t work as well as what does.
Make lesson planning easier and more efficient for the instructors at your college or university by providing them with materials that include pre-made lessons, creative assignments, and input from industry experts. Mujo’s line of digital marketing textbooks contain all of these resources and are designed to streamline lesson planning, so instructors can focus on providing quality courses and student support.