BI

When you buy through our links, we may earn money from our affiliate partners. Learn more.

edX

Marketing analytics are essential to a company's core business, driving important decisions related to the four P's of marketing: product, price, place, and promotion.

If you want to learn more about marketing analytics and advance your role in your company without spending thousands of dollars, we recommend the Marketing Analytics MicroMasters Program ($896.40), offered by UC Berkeley through edX.

Students who successfully complete the program earn 75 credits towards a Master's of Marketing degree at Curtin University. The courses are an affordable, flexible way to accelerate a postgraduate education.

Marketing comprises everything a company does to attract and retain customers, which includes determining where and when a product is sold, its optimal price, how it's creatively positioned in consumers' minds, and even actual attributes of the product itself.

Behind such important decisions is the quantitative data, which takes skill and practice to analyze.

An MBA or Master's in Marketing degree helps professionals gain a more in-depth understanding of marketing analytics and adds value to their marketing careers. But the degree comes at a cost: top business schools such as those at Columbia, USC, and Vanderbilt charge annual tuition fees of $50,000 to $60,000. Unless you're lucky enough to have your company sponsor your time in school, you're likely to be set back financially.

Online programs are increasingly accepted by students, employers, and schools as legitimate and cost-effective alternatives to traditional academic programs. The Marketing Analytics MicroMasters Program, offered by UC Berkeley through leading online learning platform edX, is one popular, well-received example.

The program is comprised of a series of four courses, each of which takes about five to seven hours per week and four weeks to complete. Completion of all four courses grants two useful benefits:

A verified certificate that can be shown to future employers and educational programs.

75 credits towards a Master's of Marketing degree at Curtin University, a globally-ranked Western Australian university.

As its name suggests, the MicroMasters Program is a mini precursor to a full master's degree. It provides a more affordable and convenient pathway to postgraduate education. If you apply to the university that accepts the MicroMasters certificate for credit and are accepted, the certificate will bring you closer to your degree, and you don't have to spend as many thousands of dollars to do it. EdX offers MicroMasters in a variety of other highly relevant, in-demand fields, including Robotics (UPenn), Supply Chain Management (MIT), and Design Thinking (RIT).

edX/YouTube Here's what students learn in the Marketing Analytics MicroMasters Program:

Marketing Measurement Strategy: Best approaches and practices for marketing measurement, including how to use metrics to measure success. Price and Promotion Analytics: How to use price and promotion analytics to effectively allocate your marketing budget to maximize profits. Competitive Analysis and Market Segmentation: How to analyze your competition and effectively segment your market to improve overall customer satisfaction and company profits. Products, Distribution, and Sales: How to identify what your consumers want in a product and the best distribution and sales channels to engage with your chosen markets.

The instructor, Stephan Sorger, guides you through it all and has taught for over a decade at UC Berkeley Extension. He previously led product management and strategy at Oracle and SAP and is the author of two marketing textbooks.

Right now, the full program costs $896.40, or $224.10 per course, a significant discount from traditional grad school marketing programs, which can cost at least $1,000 per credit taken. As with any edX course, you can also audit the courses for free, though you would not receive official recognition or credits for doing so.

According to past students, the program gives back everything you put into it, and then some:

"I am now happily employed and was able to use some of the skills I learned in the class to help make a marketing decision for my company. It was so great to see that the numbers backed up my instincts and made me much more confident when presenting it to the president of the company."

"It is one of the best Marketing classes that I have taken in my academic life. It provided me with a very useful set of tools for the planning, execution, and evaluation of different marketing strategies."

A common complaint about academia is its lack of real-world application. However, the Marketing Analytics MicroMasters Program clearly offers real value for professionals looking to make a measurable impact in their company.

Looking for more e-learning? Here are some of the best online classes you can take

Source: Business Insider

Powered by NewsAPI.org