What does a digital marketer do? | with the University of Liverpool

Ever wondered why you follow certain brands on social media over others? Or how you set up deals with influencers? Dr Natasha Clennell joins me to discuss the evolving role of digital marketers, and the online course that prepares students for leadership roles

Participants

• Emily Slade - podcast producer and host, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ
• Dr Natasha Clennell - lecturer in marketing, University of Liverpool

Transcript

Dr Natasha Clennell: That's our intention, and our aspiration is to really try to ensure that the students leave as graduates who are really effective and professional digital marketers. So they might be managers. They might end up being leaders.

Emily Slade: Welcome back to Future You, the podcast brought to you by graduate career experts, Ä¢¹½ÊÓƵ»ÆƬ. I'm your host, Emily Slade and in this episode I speak to Natasha Clennell about the MSc digital marketing course at the University of Liverpool.

Dr Natasha Clennell: I'm Natasha Clennell and I work at the University of Liverpool management school. So a little bit about my background. I worked in marketing as a practitioner for more than 18 years before I started my academic life. So I had quite a long career. I mentioned 18 years already. I worked for the BBC for about 11 years then I moved to the north of the UK, and I worked for different firms, like a big nursery group called Bright Horizons and a law firm called DWF in Spinningfields. So I've got a kind of appreciation of what potential students might want to understand from a marketing career, but also from an academic perspective as well, as well. So in 2016 I embarked on a PhD at the University of Manchester, and I completed that, and I've been at the University of Liverpool now for about four years, just over four years. So I'm a lecturer in marketing, and I'm Director of Studies for the MSc in marketing, which is on campus, and also the online program, which we're here to talk about today, which is the MSc digital marketing program, the program that's focused online. So I'm postgraduate lead for marketing, and that covers the MSc in marketing, the digital marketing program we'll talk about today, and also MSc advanced marketing and the MSc digital marketing and analytics programme.

Emily Slade: So to begin with, what does a digital marketer do?

Dr Natasha Clennell: A digital marketer will so this is a role that has evolved over my career, really, because when I started out, emails were probably the only aspect of, I don't know it's one, one small fragment, really, of a digital marketing's aspect of their role. But email was really, really new. So quite some time ago, email was new. But can you imagine now we wouldn't live without it, would we so a digital marketing manager would be focused on many different things. They'd largely be focusing on the strategy of a firm, because it's really important to get that digital marketing strategy right. And then there are different things that underpin that, so things like SEO and also pay per click. So they'd be looking at the advertising paid for advertising campaign, they'd be looking at social media as well, and making sure that, I mean, right now we're doing a podcast that essentially is, is an element of social media, isn't it? And they could be curating that. They might be creating video content. They might be managing relationships with influencers. So that might be part of the social media element. There are lots and lots of different parts of this. So other things could be things like analytics as well. So they might be running analytics reports and trying to track sales funnels. And what we try and do, and I will go into more depth in this in a minute, what we try and do is equip the students to think about the digital marketing strategy, so they could be collaborating with company leaders to adjust their particular strategy, and then think about all these other elements, so their search engine optimisation, trying to improve the firm's website positioning, search results and their social media, but really, the all these different skills that we're going to be teaching would be enabling them to understand the underpinnings of their strategy, perhaps, and what they want to include in a particular campaign.

Emily Slade: Brilliant. Can you sum up the course for us?

Dr Natasha Clennell: Yeah, it includes many different things. So it's a fully online part time program. And Liverpool University, the management school is triple accredited. So we are an elite business school, management school, and that accreditation comes from Equis Amber and AACSB. So that accreditation is, is really important and underpins everything that we do. So the program tries to take advantage of current marketing theory, but also practice, and trying to understand the current digital marketing environment and how it's influenced marketing strategy. So where I started out, which was really, truly understanding traditional marketing theories. The students would understand those theories and practices, but also the digital marketing element, how that is enmeshed with those traditional marketing theories, and how they fit in, so looking at future trends and practices. So the curriculum would combine content like marketing strategy, which I've mentioned quite a lot, consumer behavior. So consumer behavior explores the underpinnings of consumers and how we behave in the way that we do so it might be understanding a little bit more about the psychology of our behavior we. Also have a course on digital communications and social media marketing and brand management. So we've got those core modules, but we also have other modules which will try and support the students with particular business skills that will help them with marketing practice. So they're things like leadership and data and financial management and business ethics and corporate social responsibility. So although what the MSc in digital marketing is focused on digital marketing, obviously, that's really critical, but without making sure that the students truly understand leadership and things like data and financial management, they're not going to be properly prepared for their future employment. So, and that's our intention, and our aspiration is to really try to ensure that the students leave as graduates who are really effective and professional digital marketers. So they might be managers. They might end up being leaders. But the intention is that we are really ensuring that they have all those building blocks, and they're able to strategically influence the firms, the organisations that they're working for.

Emily Slade: Oh, incredible. So who would suit this course? Who is this sort of course aimed at?

Dr Natasha Clennell: Well, it could be that it's somebody that's done an undergraduate degree already in a business related field. It might be somebody that studied economics, perhaps, or business before, or management. It could even be somebody that is, perhaps like me, a while back, that studied marketing and wants to specialise in digital marketing. So there might have a background in business, but equally, the it is a is a Masters program that is designed for anybody who has an undergraduate degree. So it could be somebody that's perhaps an engineer and wants to move into the digital marketing field. So it's, it's really an opportunity also for people that might have experience and they want to expand their knowledge and that perhaps might help them move a step up in their career and benefit them having all of that underpinning knowledge in those particular modules that I was talking about.

Emily Slade: So just on that. Do you have to come to this course with an undergraduate? Or can you come without?

Dr Natasha Clennell: Ah, yeah, that's a really good point, not necessarily you can come without. So many of our students do have an undergraduate degree, and that is, I suppose, the simplest way of entering the programme, because we would understand that the students have a really good understanding of what a degree program's like and the academic aspects of that degree programme, because we will be assessing students across a range of different skills, and we do assess authentically, so we would be asking them To write reports. And it's not all about writing academic essays, because we we know that we want to assess students in a way that's going to help them in their future careers. So in order to answer the question and get back on track, it might be that somebody is in their career, and they've been in their career quite a while, and they haven't got an undergraduate degree, and they feel that this program might help them. So we assess everybody, everybody's application, and sometimes we'll have meetings with potential candidates. I've done that in the past. Sometimes we'll meet with them just to understand what their background is, but usually when I have those meetings, it's to understand if they've got the ability to get through the course, because it is an academic program, and it isn't a programme that is entirely practical. So it does have that element of theory connected with practice, because what we want to be doing is trying to ensure that the students that come to us are really grounded in these basic principles of theory, and they understand how to connect that theory with practice, and that really helps the students you know, to launch into a leadership level type role.

Emily Slade: Yeah, fantastic. So to lean more into that, what are the career opportunities once they graduate?

Dr Natasha Clennell: Well, because we're not talking about entry level roles, you know, we're not, we're not talking about those first level roles. Let's just think about the environment that we're in. And I literally did just go on the university's library website to have a look at some current data. So there's and that's wonderful as well, to be able to access that at the drop of a hat, so that's what students would have access to as well. So there's a reporting sister is like a kind of economics database. So you can just tap into this database and ask for current statistics. So I just had a look at the current statistics on online sales. So the prediction, I think, by 2027, is that virtually a quarter of all of our retail transactions will be online. At the moment, we're heading in that direction then, and there are a huge number of transactions that happen. But you know, if you think about all of the retail transactions that happen if a firm is not engaged in digital marketing at all, they're going to be missing out on lots of opportunities, aren't they? But if we look at, you know, the trends that we're going in, they've been sped up massively by covid Because although it wasn't that long ago, it's hard to remember what it was like only a few years ago, we were stuck at home, and you know, the main opportunities we had were to buy things online, and the firms that didn't step up to that and change their behaviors got left behind. So some firms are kind of reverting to some of their old practices, because it depends on their business models. I was looking at the grocer today, so that's like a retail journal for people that wanting to understand retail trends. And Aldi are no longer going to have click and collect, so they're going to change that. They've been having click and collect in their stores for the last four years, but it doesn't support their model anymore, so they're going back to more traditional processes. But that makes sense, doesn't it? For Aldi?

Emily Slade: 100% because the whole fun of Aldi is that middle aisle, and you can't have that on click and collect.

Dr Natasha Clennell: Exactly, you've got to go into the store, absolutely. But for the majority of firms that don't have a mod a business model like that, the mainstay of firms are going to be to have an online presence, and even if they don't make all of their retail transactions online, then I think it's something like 78% of all people that use the internet will do research before they actually make their purchase. So if we think about those stats, they're all heavily leaning into the fact that firms need to be vigilant. They need to make sure that they are ready and their websites are optimised, that they've got the right advertising, that they've got the right social media campaigns, that they're collaborating with influencers who connect with their brands. You know that their branding is appropriate for the audience that they're they're speaking to and connecting with so it is a really important field, and we will get to a point where I think digital marketing won't be a thing. We won't mention digital anymore. It will just be part of marketing.

Emily Slade: It will just be marketing. Yeah, we're almost there. I would say, really.

Dr Natasha Clennell: I think so.

Emily Slade: The word digital already feels old, like the word email, in a way.

Dr Natasha Clennell: Yeah, because we should all be embracing, you know, right now, we're speaking on platforms, aren't we? We're communicating with each other on on platforms that have kind of become ubiquitous, especially since covid. But prior to that, it would have felt, perhaps a little bit strange to have a meeting like this as a regular thing. We perhaps might chat to each other on the phone, and then we would have probably had a face-to-face meeting. And we might have used, I don't know, you might have had a special broadcast center or something to go to, I don't know, but yeah, it's, sped up really, really quickly. So they're going to be lots of opportunities. It's only going to grow, isn't it, it's going to grow and become bigger. This field is really, really key, and firms can't neglect it. So firms don't have a digital marketing specialist, they're going to get left behind and they're going to disappear. Yeah. So is a really important career. I also had a look at the types of financial enumeration that you might expect if you're going to be embarking on a role like this, and it's around the kind of £45,000 - £48,000 mark. So it's a really well paid job, and embarking on a Masters program, whether it's online or on campus, is, you know, it's a financial consideration, but if you think about where it might lead and the amount of money that you might earn in the future, if you understand all those core principles and important strategies that you might want to undertake as a digital marketing manager, yeah, it's it could open up a huge world of opportunities, couldn't it?

Emily Slade: Yeah, yeah, crazy. So you've sort of touched on this already. Is there anything else to add to why someone should study digital marketing, beyond the lucrative financial aspects, the inevitable importance of the roles how almost every single company in the world will need, if, if not one, probably a team of people. Anything else to add to those?

Dr Natasha Clennell: I think that's largely covered it, but it is really important. The digital fixing strategy is an essential part of any successful business, because they'll want to target that large number of Internet users that are researching their their products and. And particular services online. So the more that we're able to understand, or the, you know, future digital marketing managers are able to understand the analytics, you know, the way that us as consumers are using websites, the way the websites are designed. You know, if they're tracking that properly, that's a part of analytics that we cover, you know, we make sure that students understand the sorts of reports that might be helpful to them. Because, you know, you can produce lots and lots of reports, but unless you understand what the reports mean, and then you can interpret them. And then look at the strategy, perhaps tweak that, and then look at a campaign, an advertising campaign, or a social media campaign, and make sure that everything is on track and working. I think that that's really key, isn't it? And we're not really just talking about digital marketing managers. We're talking about leaders, you know? We're talking about people that need to understand how to develop their teams, how to get the best out of their teams, how to communicate well and communicate not just internally, but then also with the audiences that you know they're connecting with and making sure that they're communicating a story you know, brands need to be able to communicate their stories really well, because as consumers, if we're not convinced, we'll back away and we'll we'll spend our money elsewhere, or, yeah, you know, on our social media feeds, we'll look at other content that interests us more or excites us more, because our time's precious.

Emily Slade: 100% and I imagine this course gives you a really solid foundation in just as you say, understanding that theory, understanding the way these things work. So in five years time, two years time, six months time, when the new the technology keeps advancing, the new things keep coming, the way that looking at analytics keeps changing, you've got that foundational ability to sort of navigate that, and you can pick things up as you go along, rather than having to go back to square one and relearning everything again, you'll already have the key abilities to sort of figure those out. Would you say?

Dr Natasha Clennell: Absolutely And that's so sometimes, when students come to a university, you know, like ours, sometimes they're wanting to understand practical elements. While we do teach that we perceive that to be much more of a skills element. You know, learning an opportunity to learn how to use a particular piece of software or a particular package, that's a one off opportunity, isn't it? We perceive that to be something that's helpful, but, you know, it's just one small piece, what we want students to leave the program having learned is, you know, a comprehensive underpinning of how to lead and what strategy is all about. And looking overall, if we're talking to the students about finances, it's you know what the budget should be in terms of the overall spend, perhaps of the firm. So the students know, when they leave and they go off to work, that they can argue the case that they need a certain budget to deliver a particular campaign, which will in turn deliver certain results. So it's not necessarily about learning a particular package, they can do that, and we can advise them on that, and we even give them opportunities to learn particular software packages. But it is those broader skills that need to develop and thinking, Okay, this is the theory. But how do I develop my knowledge and connect that with practice? It's being able to communicate well, as you know, that's something that's really key. So on the programme, you know, they'll they'll meet other people that are like minded, but they'll be able to learn from their peers. So that's another thing that's really important. It's meeting other people that are not in their workplace. You know, they've come from different backgrounds, and they're working for different firms, they might be encountering different particular problems, and that's another reason why the online part time programme is useful, because it means that students can start the programme and then learn particular things and actually carry them out there and then, whereas not to be detrimental To my on campus activities, but in that situation, the students are working intensively for 12 months and then will go out into the world of work, whereas in the online programme, there's flexibility. They learn something, they might connect it with something that they're working on immediately, or there might be a peer on their programme that is encountering a particular problem, and they can resolve it together. It also develops inquiring minds. And you know, it might be that the students then go back into their workplace and start trying to unpick or understand why things are done in the way that they are, and perhaps be empowered enough to then recommend a different way of doing things.

Emily Slade: Yeah, fantastic. So what advice do you have to anyone looking to enter digital marketing?

Dr Natasha Clennell: I think if it's if it's something completely new to the student, then some things that I was talking about, I mean, the the grocer, is a really important journal that I look at day in day out, because I want to understand what's happening in the world. And although my life as an academic is, you know, looking at theory, and I obviously write my own papers, and I'm exploring different areas of innovation that interest me, in marketing, but I want to understand what's going on. You know, why Aldi changing? Because that's interesting. So I would encourage students to look at marketing journals, but not just that, you know, even their own social media feed. Who are they following? Perhaps broaden that, perhaps look at a firm that they want to work for. You know, it might Aldi, might not appeal to them, but maybe some big brands, maybe they're really passionate about Gucci or Louis Vuitton, perhaps follow them, try and understand a little bit about how the influencers are working with those brands and what they're doing. Even I'm really lucky in my role that I can access like the financial time, so I often will read that daily, or at least I have a look over the weekend to understand what the big stories are. And there are some great sections in the Financial Times about marketing and sales and AI, so trying to understand what is happening right now. And then think about what do I want for my future career? What interests me? So if you are really interested in what influencers do and why, then, you know, the program might be beneficial to you. If you're interested in, you know, developing your aspirations to understand how a whole campaign is developed from start to finish. So perhaps looking at SEO, a pay per click and an email campaign, how that whole thing is put together. Then perhaps read marketing week or campaign and explore that there are lots and lots of different media marketing journals that you can access without having to pay subscriber fees, in addition to the grocer and mainstream media like the Financial Times. So I would encourage them to look at that and then look at the programme, or even get in touch with me, to be quite honest. You know, that's really what I'm here for, and that's part of my job. So I think looking at the media, thinking about what they want out of their life, what they want for their future, if they are if they aspire to work in the field, then absolutely it's a really good thing to do. I won't be dismissive that. I think that's really, really critical. It's what I'm here to do, but I wouldn't embark on it if it isn't your passion. So I think making sure, because it's an important thing to think about your time, to think about the financial contribution that you've got to put towards it and how that fits in with your career aspirations. So if it meets with all of those things, have a look at the website. Engage with me. I'm, you know, really quite easy and accessible to get in touch with. Get in touch with me. We'll have a chat, and maybe even go over some of these podcasts again and and listen to it a little bit more.

Emily Slade: Fantastic. That's brilliant. That's been a really useful insight into the into the degree. Thank you so much for your time today.

Dr Natasha Clennell: Thank you. It's been a lovely chat. Cheers.

Emily Slade: Thanks again to Natasha for her time. If you've enjoyed the episode made sure to head to Apple or Spotify and leave us a review. You can find more postgraduate courses at prospects.ac.uk. For more content like this follow us on Instagram and TikTok, all the links are in the description. Thank you very much for listening and good luck on your journey to future you.

Notes on transcript

This transcript was produced using a combination of automated software and human transcribers and may contain errors. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.

Find out more

• Learn what you can do with a marketing degree.
• How to get into digital marketing.
• Explore jobs in marketing.
• Introducing MSc Digital Marketing.
• If you're enjoying Future You, head toÌý¾±°Õ³Ü²Ô±ð²õÌý´Ç°ùÌýSpotify to leave us a review.