Do you want to study Digital Marketing? Do you like to communicate? Do you love to be in contact with people and understand them? Are you not only good with words, but also with numbers? Have you ever thought about studying marketing? Marketing is a broad field of work, which may show you many opportunities and possibilities.

In the following blog article we want to talk about a course of studies in the field of digital marketing and ask ourselves what this actually means, what the difference to ‘traditional’ marketing is and how you can later put the knowledge gained in the course of studies into practice. We will briefly discuss how marketing works online, why the mathematical part is so fundamental and how a digital marketing degree course is structured. At XU Exponential University, you can study digital marketing and focus on various topics such as social media or design during your studies.

If this seems exciting to you at first glance, we recommend that you take a look at our study program page in addition to this blog and even register for a personal study counselling session (digital, of course). Here you can see the open dates. To learn more about XU Exponential University, you can also download our study program brochure.

This blog article is structured in the following way:

• Introduction to Digital Marketing
• Difference to traditional Marketing
• Studying Digital Marketing
• Studying at XU Exponential University

Digital Marketing – What does it entail?

Generally speaking, digital marketing is a collective term for all marketing activities that take place online, including the optimization of your own website (SEO), ads in search engines or as banners, affiliate programs, such as with affiliate sites or influencers, email marketing, PR or social media. In short: All channels that can be used to inform potential customers about a product or service, to get them excited about it and finally to persuade them to buy.

Just like ‘traditional’ marketing, online marketing is also divided into the 4 P’s that you have probably heard of. This model, which was developed by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960, determines how a product reaches the market or customers at the right price through a certain channel with the right message. In English these are the 4P:

• Product
• Price
• Place 
• Promotion 

These 4 P’s thus represent the four most important factors in marketing. What kind of product do we need in order to be successful on the market? What price do we have to set so that the product is interesting for customers? How do we distribute the product so that it is successful on the market? What kind of communication do we use to inform potential customers about the product?

Digital Marketing = Just Marketing? 

Now you might think that digital marketing is simply marketing, in another medium. Instead of designing communication through a catalogue or physical store, everything is shifted to the Internet and an email or website is used. But it’s not quite that simple, because the tools we have at hand in online marketing are quite different.

Unlike ‘traditional marketing’, online marketing gives you much more information about your customers, your market is often much larger than in a traditional store and competitors can appear out of nowhere fast. You should view your website as your store and now it’s all about getting customers to come to your store to buy a product or service.

We differentiate between Inbound and Outbound Marketing

• Inbound marketing aims to get your customers’ attention and proactively approach you.
• Outbound marketing, on the other hand, combines all activities through which you proactively approach your potential customers.

One example of inbound marketing is search engine optimization: Your site must be optimized so that a person who makes a search query on Google (or any other search engine) will find your ‘shop’ directly. An example of outbound marketing is the classic email marketing, where you address your potential customers directly.

But even with such a simple undertaking, online marketing offers you completely different information than an advertising flyer that may end up in your physical mailbox. Often you know what products the person on your site has looked at, what their social media behavior is, what demographics they fit into and much more. With so much information it is easy to create personalized email marketing campaigns. The campaign preparation and delivery is fast and cheap, your emails are sent in a few seconds and the most interesting thing about online marketing is that once the communication has been sent, your work is far from over. While in traditional marketing you send out flyers, hoping that people who receive them will come to your store, in online marketing it is easy to track. You can always see what kind of contact points a person already had with your brand and you can consciously control your communication.

Online Marketing and Social Media Marketing Bachelor’s Degree 

Almost every business model, from a restaurant to a digital startup, today must be represented and communicated online. Therefore, more and more well-trained experts who are familiar with online marketing will be needed in the future. If you can imagine working in this field, studying digital marketing is the first step to getting there. At XU Exponential University, we have created a bachelor’s degree program with the title Bachelor in Digital Marketing and Social Media because we wanted to set a special focus on social media.

At the beginning of the first semesters, however, we lay the foundations: Here you will learn all the strategies and instruments that will help you understand the individual channels and their interactions with one another. Later in your advanced semesters you can then set priorities and decide on individual subjects. In the various group projects you will learn how to apply these. In case studies, you will develop entire communication concepts, work out strategies for the launch of a new product or focus entirely on one channel and consider how you can use TikTok in a company, for example. In all our projects, the focus is always on target group orientation and practical relevance.

In this bachelor’s program, we focus on social media and their influence, and you will also play an active role in this area. You probably use social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok all day long, but have you ever wondered what it takes to make a social media story go viral? What makes good social media marketing? How can Likes and Views be optimized and why are they so important for a brand? If you are interested in exactly these topics of social media marketing, we have created the ‘Social Media Marketing’ specializiation for you, which you can choose in your bachelor’s degree course. You can also choose from Digital Marketing Communication, Digital Branding or Digital Customer Relationship Management.

Admission requirements for a study degree in Online Marketing

In addition to the university entrance qualification, we believe that it is extremely important that you enjoy being online. You need to be passionate about technology and not afraid of change, because digital marketing moves fast. What’s in use today can be forgotten tomorrow. So before you start studying, you should be aware that you’ll be learning new things in this field for life.

You should be interested in business contexts, enjoy juggling with complex numbers and expertise and still be confident in your communication.

Your career after graduating from an Online Marketing degree 

What can you expect after your Bachelor’s degree? Which professional fields are open to graduates of the Bachelor degree programme in DIgital Marketing? First of all, it has to be said that the study program has a future and that in the foreseeable future more and more experts will be sought who move digitally and secondly that the market is changing very quickly and the professions we know today were unheard of 5 years ago.

Nevertheless, there are a few common professions that will not change that quickly:

• SEO Manager 
• Social Media Manager 
• Content Manager 
• Performance Marketing Manager… 

These are some of the professions that exist and will exist in marketing teams of companies or agencies. You can take responsibility for a product in a marketing department, work as part of an advertising agency with clients on the launch of a new offer or think about the next publications in the online division of a large publishing house.

Request more information

You can find further information on our study program page and we are of course always available to answer your questions. Here you can register for a student counseling appointment so that we can answer all of your questions about studying, the requirements for your application, and student life at XU Exponential University. If you would like to read a little more about us beforehand, we recommend that you download our study program brochure here.