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Summer of Learning: Digital Marketing at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School

October 24, 2019

By: Nick Umnov and Vivian Pan

Over the summer, our alma matra, Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, invited us to a three-day intensive boot camp on Digital Marketing Strategies in return for participating in career development activities for current students. Despite our busy work schedules, FINN was more than willing to accommodate our time at the workshop. After all, FINN values professional development and strives to ensure its employees are fluent in the most advanced digital strategies and tactics. 

The Bootcamp was led by renowned digital marketing experts. They guided us through new digital trends, the latest on maximizing return-on-investment (ROI) for clients, and tactics for paid and organic search. They also broke down proven paid and organic strategies across social channels, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and even Q&A websites like Quora. The final component of the workshop included details on using Google Advanced Analytics, Google Tag Manager, and Facebook Business Manager.

It was a busy three days, but four key takeaways rose to the top:

  1. Evolve or die: Always be learning new tools and frameworks: while digital marketing has been around for about 20 years, most major platforms, tools and tactics are still being developed and the landscape is constantly evolving. Tools that are dominating today could easily get outdated in a matter of months. As digital marketers, we either evolve or die.
  2. Get your hands dirty: you won’t be able to see the real big picture if you haven’t dealt with and make sense of the nitty-gritty of various digital tactics, and vice versa. Have the ability to zoom-in and zoom-out is important for all digital marketers, regardless of their position and level. 
  3. Frameworks are key: Digital consumers (i.e. everyone) are unpredictable in how they interact with brands online – almost none of them follow a linear path and most don’t do things logically. To solve for this, develop customer-centered frameworks.
  4. Less vanity: Vanity metrics might look nice and be easy to collect, but metrics that tie to the real dollar spend deliver true insight into what’s working and what’s not.

We are proud to work at a company that goes out of its way to feed its employees when they have an appetite for knowledge. At the end of the workshop, our hunger was satiated.