Marketing Professional

Hours: 250 / Access Length: 12 Months / Delivery: Online, Self-Paced

Course Overview:

This coursed is designed to prepare you to successfully working in the sales and marketing industry. Topics will include sales strategies and best practices, marketing strategies and best practices, understanding the customer, producing, marketing, and sales off goods and services, and the global marketplace.

Students will:

• Explain the fundamentals of marketing.
• Identify factors that influence buyer and seller decisions.
• Develop marketing and pricing strategies through the creation of a marketing plan.
• Describe various marketing channels that can be used to sell goods and/or services.
• Create solid pricing strategies that engage customers through advertising and promotional campaigns.
• Examine ways marketing can be extended outside of a local or regional market segment.
• Describe the concept of sustainable and social responsibilities marketing professionals must adhere to so their actions are ethical and proper.

Course Outline:

Lesson 1: Creating Customer Value and Engagement

What is the true purpose of marketing? That's a question a lot of people may find hard to comprehend or truly understand. If one is wanting to become a professional in this industry, however, they will need to fundamentally know what this is. This lesson covers marketing and its main purpose: creating customer value and engagement.

Lesson 2: Initiating The Marketing Process

Building on the fundamentals presented in Lesson 1, this lesson will provide reasoning as to why a business should have a marketing strategy so that any marketing effort created is sustainable for some period of time.

Lesson 3: Analyzing the Market Environment

Once a sales and marketing professional has fundamental understanding as to what marketing is, the next step in their knowledge journey is to gain comprehension in what the environment may be for their specific product and or service. Learners in this lesson will gain valuable knowledge as to how to analyze the marketing environment and understand customer needs and wants.

Lesson 4: Managing Marketing Information to Gain Customer Insights

As a continuation of analyzing the marketing environment, this lesson explores how marketing teams gather customer data and the steps in the marketing research process. This leads to an explanation of how companies use the marketing information that is gathered.

Lesson 5: Consumer Markets and Buyer Behavior

The customer or client is the primary reason a company is in business. Without them, there truly is nobody to sell to other than oneself. Having an awareness of how consumers behave and the markets they are associated with is the primary topic of this lesson.

Lesson 6: Business Markets and Business Buyer Behavior

In the last lesson, we learned about buyer behavior and how that affects marketing. In this lesson, we will gain knowledge as to businesses behavior. Businesses and consumers often behave differently and hence, require different marketing strategies.

Lesson 7: Customer Value-Driven Marketing Strategy

Theoretically speaking, a company may have an idea, product, or service that they want to sell to the masses. However, how are they going to achieve that? They have to develop a marketing plan in order to succeed and have a strategy to do such. The next lesson of the course reviews the most commonly-used marketing strategies to create value for the customers or clients.

Lesson 8: Products, Services, and Brands

After exploring customer-value driven marketing, this next lesson focuses on to tools companies use to implement their marketing strategies in order to deliver expected values.

Lesson 9: Developing New Products

In this lesson, learners will gain knowledge as to how to develop additional projects to capture customer value for the people they serve. Part of product development is managing the product lifecycle. That lifecycle will also be explored.

Lesson 10: Pricing

Up to this point, the marketing plan has been developed to the point someone has an understanding of the markets they are serving and have an idea that as to what they want to sell consumers. But at what price? The next lesson of the course reviews the concept of pricing. We will look at the external and internal factors that affect pricing decisions.

Lesson 11: Pricing Strategies

In the last lesson, we learned about what pricing is and factors affecting pricing. This lesson builds on this and explores pricing strategies for new products and pricing adjustments.

Lesson 12: Marketing Channels

Marketing professions are much like a Swiss army knife: they have to be knowledgeable in a number of different subjects in order to be successful in their roles. As time has progressed, the number of marketing channels one can sell through has increased several times. This lesson of the course reviews different ways marketing professionals can deliver value for their clients or customers and reasons why one should choose over another.

Lesson 13: Retailing and Wholesaling

Defining what a customer is or isn't can be difficult if one strictly deals with consumers or business alone or a combination of the two. For the purpose of this lesson, students will gain an understanding of how retailing and wholesaling works.

Lesson 14: Engaging Customers and Communicating Customer Value

This lesson involves the promotion of products. Marketers must persuade clients and customers of the value  of their product. The topics of this lesson include how to engage customers and communicate value through relevant marketing strategies.

Lesson 15: Advertising and Public Relations

Marketing is more than just price and the product itself. In the next lesson of the course, students will learn the concept of advertising and public relations and how it applies to marketing goods and services to others. Advertising is more than just billboards and flashy radio or television commercials. The role of public relations and how companies use PR to communicate are the topics of this lesson.

Lesson 16: Personal Selling and Sales Promotion

In the last lesson, we learned about corporate public relations. In this lesson, we will learn about personal selling and the integration with sales promotion.

Lesson 17: Digital Marketing

Furthering the discussion on the methods of selling, this lesson explores the world of digital marketing. Digital marketing includes online, social media, and mobile marketing.

Lesson 18: Creating Competitive Advantage

The next lesson of the course reviews the future of marketing and how professionals can create a competitive advantage that is both local and globally-focused.

Lesson 19: The Global Marketplace

In this lesson, we will look at the global marketplace and how businesses can remain sustainable in an environment like this.

Lesson 20: Sustainable Marketing

The final lesson of the course reviews the concept of sustainable marketing. Being socially responsible and ethical are topics that round out the course in this lesson which every professional must adhere to regardless of what area of marketing they decide to go in.

All necessary course materials are included.

System Requirements:

Internet Connectivity Requirements:

• Cable, Fiber, DSL, or LEO Satellite (i.e. Starlink) internet with speeds of at least 10mb/sec download and 5mb/sec upload are recommended for the best experience.

NOTE: While cellular hotspots may allow access to our courses, users may experience connectivity issues by trying to access our learning management system.  This is due to the potential high download and upload latency of cellular connections.   Therefore, it is not recommended that students use a cellular hotspot as their primary way of accessing their courses.

Hardware Requirements:

• CPU: 1 GHz or higher
• RAM: 4 GB or higher
• Resolution: 1280 x 720 or higher.  1920x1080 resolution is recommended for the best experience.
• Speakers / Headphones
• Microphone for Webinar or Live Online sessions.

Operating System Requirements:

• Windows 7 or higher.
• Mac OSX 10 or higher.
• Latest Chrome OS
• Latest Linux Distributions
  

NOTE: While we understand that our courses can be viewed on Android and iPhone devices, we do not recommend the use of these devices for our courses. The size of these devices do not provide a good learning environment for students taking online or live online based courses.

Web Browser Requirements:

• Latest Google Chrome is recommended for the best experience.
• Latest Mozilla FireFox
• Latest Microsoft Edge
• Latest Apple Safari

Basic Software Requirements (These are recommendations of software to use):

• Office suite software (Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, or LibreOffice)
• PDF reader program (Adobe Reader, FoxIt)
• Courses may require other software that is described in the above course outline.