UNB’s ‘Hands-On’ Learning Helps Students Tap Into Success
Running a hands-on social media marketing campaign for a real client is a very valuable experience, according to UNB student Caroline Stephen.
“I’m not a business student; I’m actually a mechanical engineering student,” Stephen explains. “I was working on completing a business minor on top of my undergrad.”
Buttressing her technical degree with real-world marketing skills obtained through the Faculty of Management’s social media marketing course will be a winning combination for Stephen. Plus, she got to run a campaign for a company she knows and loves.
As a part-time tap instructor at The Dance Connection, Stephen has a good understanding of what the organization was looking for. But she still learned a lot from running the campaign.
Her work with the client made it easier to access the social media accounts and to get the consent of parents to use their kids’ images and performances on the various media platforms that the campaign operated on.
The goal of the four-week campaign was to increase engagement and follower count on Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok. They did that by providing entertaining content that increased brand awareness, working with influencers, and incentivizing engagement with giveaways.
The team got authentic experience with time allocation, budgeting, and learning about the trends and algorithm systems on these platforms.
Stephen isn’t a big social media user, so the project was valuable in terms of getting familiar with how these platforms work.
“I don’t have like a personal Instagram or Tik Tok so that was a bit of a learning challenge for me … trying to jump on something that I haven’t been on in quite a few years.”
Keeping up with ever-changing social media trends is one of the lessons of the course, according to professor Hsin-Chen Lin, who teaches marketing courses in the faculty of management.
“Social media is always changing. The platforms that people use are changing; the options that people have on specific platforms are changing; and the ways people act on social media are changing,” Lin says. “The program and projects always differ according to these various aspects of change within social media.”
That cutting-edge nature of the program helps keep it relevant for the students and makes it a valuable source of real-life work experience.
“Running this type of campaign allows students to experience coordinating and executing real-life professional marketing communications that have tangible consequences and that involve making important decisions. This puts the students in a situation to use the skills they have developed from this course, and other courses at UNB, where they need to pay attention to the realities of their client’s context to ensure positive outcomes from their campaigns.”
Stephen agrees. She says effective social media strategies go beyond just taking a picture and posting it. Thoughts about who the target audience is, and how they use the platforms, guided her group’s strategy.
She says the group was astonished by the reach their Tik Tok posts had; once it gained some traction with the algorithm, videos could be seen by huge numbers of people. Even though their engagement didn’t keep up, their follower count benefited immensely.
“There’s just a lot more that goes into it than I really understood and that’s the whole reason why I took the course, so it definitely exceeded my expectations,” she says.
Another aspect of the overall course that Stephen found valuable was at the end of every lesson, the groups got a chance to apply what they had learned to their campaigns, and to deliver a mini presentation about how they were going to apply that lesson to their campaigns.
“That was definitely an interesting component of the course as well, but nothing like I’ve ever done,” she says.
Lin says the immediate feedback of social media and its ever-changing nature make it a challenging but fun milieu for learning about marketing.
“To me, the most important thing for students to learn in this class is for them to find their own best way of conducting effective social media campaigns,” she says.
“The students gain first-hand experience in tailoring their marketing strategies and tactics to the specific needs and conditions of the client, considering the responses and feedback from real-life consumers, and reporting on the actual metrics about the performance of their campaigns. Each of these broader types of experiences also involve more specific skills and activities that they get to practice.”
“I think they did a wonderful job.”
This story is sponsored by the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Management.