U of T: Digital Marketing Management Certificate Review

By Lauren | March 8, 2015 | 3 Comment

Program:
Digital Marketing Management

Format:
In class (University of Toronto St. George Campus) or online

Classes:
Foundations of Digital Marketing Management 

This course is meant to be the intro to the rest of the certificate program. It addresses the key foundations of digital marketing from the principles of web design and content, search engine marketing and optimization, social media, email marketing and web analytics. This course covers a lot but does not go very deep into any of the mentioned topics. Most of the information that was presented was already stuff I knew, so my key takeaways were from the SEO and SEM standpoint as those were my weak points going into this program.

The most rewarding part about this class was that the final project. You were given options of what you could do. The options ranged from researching and learning about a certain tool, starting a blog, or building an online website/portfolio. I didn’t want to take the easy way out, so I decided to build an online portfolio with a blog for my project (the website you’re reading this blog post on now).

The one pitfall of this course is that I found the teacher was a really hard marker for a continuing education class, and didn’t provide much feedback on where you lost marks. Although grades weren’t my biggest concern in these classes, I found it especially annoying when I followed a project outline and completed exactly what was outlined, and ended up losing marks still.

(Keep in mind that although I’m so happy I took the time to build this website and blog, it was a self taught project and by no means do they teach you how to do this in the class.) 

Social Media Strategy

The Social Media Strategy course I felt was the least rewarding for me as since I currently work in social media much of it was pretty basic. I found that it did not focus much on the strategy side of things but more so the community management and content development side which was still great to learn about content calendars, etc. but not what I was expecting. I think that with a course like this it should be a requisite that students already know the basics behind each social platform, because it would have been nice to get to skip the social media 101 portion at the beginning of this course.

The projects for this course were fairly straight forward and easy, the first project consisted of picking a social media network and learning how to use it more effectively. I used Pinterest and I had to set up a page with pins, etc. and garner a certain amount of traction. The second project is due in multiple stages throughout the final weeks and goes through the steps of developing a social media plan.

I completed this course online. I didn’t find I got as much out of the online course as I would have in class. Also I did it online so I could get ahead and do at my own pace, but they never posted the lectures more than a week in advance so my plan backfired.

Search Engine Marketing

This was the most rewarding of the three classes in this certificate in my opinion. If you have a pretty good understanding of basic social media and online practices, you will probably also feel the same. This class dove into Google AdWords, developing campaigns, choosing keywords, etc. We also learned about click through rates, impressions, conversion rates and quality scores and how they effect your SEM.

We not only learned about paid search (SEM) but also organic search (SEO). The tools and tricks I learned about in SEO are things I implemented into my blog and website right away and gave me a better understanding on what businesses can be doing online to instantly improve their search engine optimization (and it’s actually worked for me).

Another class that would probably be better in person as oppose to online since we had a lot of in class discussion and lots of chances to ask questions.

Note: When I first started the certificate it consisted of 4 courses. They removed Social CRM which was my least favourite class of them all and I found that it didn’t fit into this certificate. Thankfully they must’ve seen that to and removed it. 

Overall I’m really happy that I completed this certificate. I think that the hefty price of these courses should be cut in half though as I don’t feel like they are worth the $600+ per course. The most rewarding things I got from this certificate was being able to build this website (which in reality was a self taught project) and learning more about SEO and SEM.

Did you take the U of T Digital Marketing Management Certificate? Leave a comment and let me know what you thought about it!

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