Designing Your Digital Future

Digital marketing has grown year on year as the world has gravitated to e-commerce. However, the pandemic has been responsible for a seismic shift in consumer behaviour with lockdown forcing more people than ever before to go digital. As a consequence, brands are dramatically increasing both spending on their digital channels and the number of digital marketers that they need to recruit. 

Digital marketing uses digital channels, such as social media, websites, search marketing and apps, to communicate directly with consumers. As a digital marketer, you may either work across several different aspects of digital marketing, including strategic planning and positioning, or you may specialise in a particular niche.

With a strong commercial focus now on e-commerce and digital marketing, graduates with a specialist digital business marketing and management skills are in high demand.* It’s a fast-paced and ever-evolving environment, but our professionally-developed degree course helps you to realise your potential and ensures that you are employment-ready upon graduation.

At the University of Bolton, in Greater Manchester, the BSc (Hons) Digital Management and Marketing will prepare you for the real-world situations that you will face in your day-to-day activities. As well as getting to grips with the theoretical aspects of digital marketing, our course will help you to understand how the sector and your employer will need you to respond and react in this fast-paced dynamic industry.

Digital marketers need a keen eye for detail and the ability to maintain a strategic and analytical overview of the objectives. With traditional marketing, the turnaround is slower; however, in digital marketing, the need to assess the return-on-investment can be instant and campaigns metrics are measured in hours and days, rather than weeks and months.

What Can I Expect as a Digital Marketer?

Digital Marketing is a growth area, with superb employment opportunities. A graduate can reasonably expect to secure a starting salary of around £22,000**, with strong career prospects.

Roles for graduates of BSc Digital Marketing degrees include:

Campaign assistant

Customer Relationship Manager

Marketing executive

Pay-per-click (PPC) associate

SEO executive

Social Media Executive

Responsibilities can vary from role-to-role but could include:

Content development and creation

Development of PPC campaigns

Generating market intelligence reports

Keyword research

Managing email campaigns

Website analytics reporting

What will I learn?

Our digital marketing degree represents the opportunity to truly immerse yourself in the world of digital marketing and discover what you can do to help maximise the impact on campaigns. You’ll understand what channels can and should be used for what type of content and explore how to target your audience. In terms of business marketing and management, you’ll be better placed to understand how digital marketing fits into the strategic direction of an organisation.

Developing Your Business Acumen

During the core modules on the digital marketing degree course, you will share teaching time with business management students. This will enable you to hone your understanding and knowledge of wider business practices and become better able to appreciate how a business operates. A graduate with a greater understanding of the business environment will have the advantage over a graduate with deep knowledge of a digital niche without any awareness of where they fit into business operations.

Digital Specialisation

At the heart of this digital marketing degree, however, is the opportunity to explore the many different aspects of digital marketing. At Bolton, our real-world approach to teaching means that you will understand how different digital channels work on their own, how they can integrate to generate powerful results and how you can assess the impact of your activity.

As well as learning digital marketing theory, you will also work with practitioner professionals to develop your skills, knowledge and understanding of digital marketing.

In addition to improving your knowledge of more generalised business marketing and management, the specialist modules on the digital marketing degree cover the full spectrum of digital marketing applications, from e-commerce and social media to data analytics and emerging technologies.

You will be able to develop your knowledge of digital marketing from the ground up, advancing from a solid foundation in the fundamental principles of digital marketing to exploring your creative opportunities in terms of content. The course will also help you to understand how everything that you do in digital marketing relates to the customer experience and you can manage the audiences you are communicating with. As well as segmentation, the practice of breaking audiences down into manageable segments, you’ll also learn how to assess the messaging that best fits each audience and learn how to measure the impact that your message has.

(Big) Data Driven Marketing

On Bolton’s digital marketing degree, you’ll discover why big data is so important to the marketing function and why transforming data and insight into meaningful information that will inform marketing campaigns lies at the core of digital marketing. The greatest amount of big data comes from just three sources - social data, machine data and transactional data – which highlights just how important both e-commerce and social media are to modern organisations.

The insights from big data can not only inform but power the strategic direction of all marketing activity. Smart decision-making should be based on data analytics. In simple terms, that might mean creating business intelligence around a new product depending on the number of ‘likes’ or ‘shares’ a social media post has or measuring the click-throughs of a Google advertising campaign.

Our supportive teaching staff are on-hand to help you to understand the decision-making process that comes into play when analysing data. Using real-world scenarios, you’ll experience the financial decision making and strategic management used in digital marketing departments of global organisations. You’ll be able to develop and finesse your own critical thinking so that you are in a position to make robust decisions backed by market intelligence and data-driven insights.

Personal, Professional Development

At Bolton, we’re creating and shaping the digital marketers of the future. We will equip you with the professional skills that you need to operate in a marketing department and help you to realise the interpersonal skills that will set you apart, supporting your career ambitions.

The transferable skills that you’ll develop during the digital management degree, such as resilience and analytical thinking, will help you to become a well-rounded professional that’s ready to hit the ground running. You’ll also develop an understanding of the value of creativity and innovation in the digital marketing environment.

With Bolton’s digital marketing degree, your solid grounding in digital marketing practices, techniques and technical skills are an important part of your education, but our professional teaching staff will help you to refine the communication and time management skills that are so attractive to potential employers.  

Teaching and Learning

With a wide range of professional backgrounds across our teaching team, our students can count on a wide range of perspectives, real-world insight and experiences that will inform your own development and thinking. The course has been developed to bring together conceptual and academic knowledge from business marketing and management with specialised teaching and learning of digital marketing, data analytics, web design and app development. It’s this powerful mix that means our students are ready for professional life. Our Business, Management and Marketing courses are No.1 for Satisfied with Course and Teaching.***

You will have the opportunity to listen to guest lecturers and begin to grow your own network of industry connections. Live briefs offer you the opportunity to get the experience of working on a digital marketing campaign and to assess the decisions you make as you put your theory into practice. During live briefs, you’ll be in a position to explore your innovative and creative side as you design, develop and execute your own digital marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing – business futureproofed?

It’s a good question and one that stands up to scrutiny in the light of the Coronavirus pandemic. E-commerce, social media and push and pull digital marketing already plays an important part in our day-to-day life, but that was supercharged when the UK went into its first lockdown in March 2020. With high streets and retailers shut up shop, consumers were forced online to buy everything. That meant greater use of e-tail for some, but, for others, it represented their first online shop. For brands and organisations, it created a tidal wave of new data that could be used and analysed to better understand the customer lifecycle, the purchasing process and to measure customer sentiment through reviews and social media monitoring.

For digital marketers, their audiences grew overnight, but many of them were ready to scale up, simply amplifying their messaging and talking to bigger audience segments. Creativity sky-rocketed as brands inherently understood that their customers needed them more than ever. Not only did they have to keep their brand and product promises but digital brand interaction was many consumers only touchpoint with the outside world. For anyone interested in a career in digital marketing, the future looks bright.

Digital evolution

One constant in the world of digital media is the fact that it is always changing and evolving. Keeping updated with the latest industry trends and technological advances is an important part of learning.

You will be able to develop your understanding of how event management and digital marketing integrate and see how data generated by one informs the other. While events and digital marketing may have operated as distinct entities previously, the crossover that’s occurred during the pandemic, creating more online events than ever, means that events professionals and digital marketers are working more closely than ever before.

Throughout our digital marketing degree, you will develop your understanding of disciplines, including web design and app design and development. We also ensure that you have the opportunity to choose from specialist modules in your final year, including blockchain and the psychology of digital consumer behaviour. We’ll help you to understand the power of digital disruption and how it can improve day-to-day life for both retailers and consumers. 

If you’re ready for an exciting and dynamic career, explore our digital marketing degree course and discover why the University of Bolton is your right choice. Come and enjoy #UniAsItShouldBe.

*https://www.marketingweek.com/steep-rise-demand-marketers-digital/

**https://www.prospects.ac.uk/job-profiles/digital-marketer

***The Guardian University Guide 2022 – North West