The Henley Global EMBA offers an opportunity to select one elective module on a topic where you want to deepen your knowledge and skills. The elective modules consist of self-study materials, one day workshop and a written assignment where we apply theory to practice.
I chose to do my elective in Digital Marketing, which is something I’m already quite knowledgeable about, but want to leverage this strength even further. I was curious to see how up-to-date and relevant information a business school can provide about this rapidly evolving topic.
The Digital Marketing workshop took place during the electives week, which followed immediately after the Management Research Challenge workshop. This allowed us to travel to the wonderful Greenlands campus of Henley Business School for one full week of studying.
The workshop was delivered by Dr. Rodrigo Perez-Vega who has studied digital marketing extensively but also gained some hands-on experience in growing a modern company in the healthcare space. As we only had a small group of people in the workshop, we were able to have deep and personal discussions with Rodrigo, which was highly appreciated.
We also went through some models and frameworks which I found highly useful. The first one was the innovation adoption curve by Everett Rogers. The second one was the four different digital business models by the strategy consultancy Strategy&. The third, and in my opinion the most useful one was the RACE Planning System for digital marketing by Smart Insights.
In the written assignment I took the challenge of sharpening the digital marketing strategy of my company Asselmointi. After careful analysis and competitor benchmarking, I came up with five concrete recommendations:
1. Setting separate but synergic marketing goals for personal branding and company advertising
2. Increasing the share of earned media with more focused content creation and active communication towards media and industry stakeholders
3. Supporting and encouraging our consultants in strengthening their personal brands
4. Gradually shifting focus and metrics from brand awareness to brand preference
5. Targeting marketing efforts to the first 50% of the innovation adoption curve
I shared these recommendations with my business partner and he happily accepted all of them. Now it’s just a matter of putting these recommendations into practice and starting to measure the impact of the changes. I’m planning set targets to be reached by the end of the year for each of the five recommendations, and ensure progress with monthly follow-up.
I’m happy that I took the Digital Marketing elective because it allowed me to analyze all our digital marketing efforts and reflect on their usefulness and relevance. As a result, our small growth company now has a sharper and more concrete digital marketing strategy in place.
You can follow my EMBA journey through weekly updates with the hashtag #JuhoGoesEMBA on LinkedIn.
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