Course Assignment: Design and launch a digital marketing campaign with real money!
Employers greatly value the practice-oriented experience of SSE Riga students, while SSE Riga students appreciate that despite the fact that the BSc programme is academic, it includes quite a lot of practical activities and has a strong connection with the job market.
This is even more important in the marketing field where many tools are very practical, so our students this year will repeat a highly successful project in the Marketing Course that provides valuable insights into the digital marketing. Specifically, they will run ads on Facebook!
Below: ad visuals for student-run campaigns on Facebook
As Marketing Course Director Marius Raugalas briefly explains: “The project requires students to create Facebook ads for real businesses, using real money up to 100 EUR per team, and to drive desired results for real companies - awareness/traffic, leads/registrations or sales.”
In order to achieve this, first-year students conduct a situation analysis (including a call with the assigned company representative), design and launch the ad including a definition of the target audience, creative (image or video(s)) and message, and later summarize their analysis, decisions, and results in a business report and live presentation.
Raugalas summarizes some key statistics:
“Overall, last year when the assignment was implemented for the first time, students spent nearly 3200 EUR on Facebook ads, delivering over 3 million ad impressions around the world and over 40,000 website visits for 16 participating companies, with nearly half of them also reporting some generated leads/sales, on top of useful learnings and insights.”
The companies involved rated their overall project experience at 4.4 on a 5-point scale, with all but one of them saying that they would be willing to participate again next year. Students themselves found this experience deeply rewarding and rated the Marketing project/assignment at 6.2 on a 7-point scale, with the overall course at 6.3.
Feedback from the companies involved shows that campaigns also brought tangible results:
“As we see in statistics, after this project we have about 20 new applications to the football school, showing the value of the ads is clearly there – the student teams did a great job!”
“We appreciated the videos that one of the groups prepared for us and we continue to use them in our campaign. The campaign generated good results in terms of vendor registration.”
“The student team put a tremendous amount of effort into understanding our target customer and creating a professional ad. We had a series of calls at various stages of preparation.”
At SSE Riga, practical experience has for years been integrated into the study programme – students already begin working on real-life projects in their first study year and also gain work experience during internships.
Such hands-on experience is an obvious advantage in the job market; so students can expect a very similar Marketing Course assignment this spring as well!