What I Know Now About Digital Marketing
When I wrote my first post for my digital marketing class, I was trying to answer a seemingly simple question: What is digital marketing, really? I ended up in a rabbit hole about a Diesel billboard inside a PlayStation game and whether something non-clickable could even count as digital marketing. I landed somewhere I still stand behind: a screen doesn't make it digital. The data and the tracking do.
That hasn't changed. Everything around it has.
If you’re new over here:
I'm Coach Nane (Vanessa Marquez-Kramme). I'm a multi-hyphenate human, passionate about helping people and brands tell their stories authentically. You can learn more about me and what I do in my About section. But in short, I’m a coach, communicator, and hospitality professional. Currently, I'm studying Integrated Marketing at NYU SPS and working as a Senior Social Media Specialist at NYU Steinhardt.
The marketing portion of this blog was proudly sponsored (ok, required) by Theodore Davis's Digital Marketing Class, which has now come to an end, so we’re taking some time to reflect on it.
Now back to Digital Marketing...
I work in social media every single day — as a team of one, managing a large institutional account. By the time I close my laptop, I have zero desire to scroll, post, or think in captions for myself. I came into this class a little burned out on the execution side of things, and I didn't expect how much a Saturday class would feel like coming up for air.
Understanding digital marketing as a system gave me language for things I had been doing instinctively for years. It helped me understand that I thrive in projects that push me past production and execution, and into strategy and direction-setting—not just what to do, but why, and how to read an ecosystem and figure out what's actually going on. And the scope of digital marketing is incredibly extensive: digital out-of-home. SEO, SEM, AEO, GEO. Email. Paid social. Content strategy. Attribution, etc. We are exposed to so many marketing touchpoints every day, and most people — most marketers — don't even clock them. That notion is equally impressive and a little unsettling.
The breadth also showed up in unexpected places. One of our last assignments was a case study on Squatty Potty, and I sat there (pun intended) reading the data, automatically noticing patterns, flagging what I'd do differently, and making sense of numbers I hadn't worked with before. That surprised me. I've always known I think in big picture. But seeing it work in real time, on EXCEL of all places, made it legible in a way that trusting your gut at work doesn't always do. You can see my report here.
Our Final Project...
The holy grail of this journey was our final Duolingo project. My team's recommendation was essentially: don't kill the unhinged energy, but bring the “lingo” back into the app, into Duo. The virality is working, but the mission needs to come through, too.
The day before we presented, Business Insider published a piece about how Duolingo is planning to dial back its unhinged marketing. There are a million ways to read data and a million ways to execute on an insight, so I'm not going to sit here and say we got it objectively right. But seeing a major company land in the same place we did, independently? That was validating big time.
My Aha Moment...
And all of our assignments—the Duolingo project, the Meta media planning, the Hims & Hers audit, the Duolingo SEO deep dive—kept pointing me back to the same place: I have been doing this. Not accidentally. On purpose, with a real point of view, for a long time.
I've been in communications and social media for eight-plus years. I have a background in hospitality, health tech, nonprofits, and higher education. I have done the work. And yet there has always been a little voice calling me an accidental communicator—someone who fell into this without the "right" credentials, performing confidence on the days imposter syndrome wanted to run the show.
This program, and this class specifically, has been slowly making that voice quieter. Not by giving me more things to memorize, but by reminding me how my brain works. It's time I stop treating my career like a happy coincidence and start shooting for rooms where I'm thinking the big ideas and handing the execution to someone earlier in their career.
On that note, this was my favorite class of the semester. I'm saying that in an ungraded post, with nothing to gain, so #realtalk. To Professor Davis: thank you. I hope you're teaching something else before I'm done here.
I started this blog because a class required it. And I’ll keep it going because it turns out I like the long form, the space to think without a character count. As someone who makes short-form content for a living and is completely tapped out by it, finding out that I enjoy writing long things has been one of the better surprises of this semester.
The class is ending. The blog isn't. Stay tuned.
— Nane
Where Theory Becomes Practice
Want to see how I’m applying what I learn in this and other classes to projects and client work?
Explore my portfolio to go behind the scenes of the strategies I talk about here.
rr88 mình cũng kiểu nghe mọi người nói nhiều nên vào nghía thử cho biết chứ không có rảnh mà đọc kỹ. Vừa mở lên thấy trang nhìn sáng sủa, khoảng trắng vừa đủ nên không bị bí hay rối. Mình thích nhất là cách họ chia nội dung theo từng khối, kéo xuống tới đâu biết tới đó, không bị lẫn lộn. Có mấy chỗ trình bày dạng bảng cột nhìn gọn, liếc cái là hiểu ý chính luôn. Thanh menu đặt khá dễ thấy nên mình bấm qua lại vài mục thấy cũng nhanh, không phải mò mẫm tìm đường. Nói chung cảm giác dùng nhẹ nhàng, không bị “ngợp” như nhiều trang nhồi chữ. Nhìn chung điểm…