Teach Brand Engagement in the Classroom

This is a series of free courses designed by educators , influencers, and HubSpot’s Education Partner Program to give educators the resources they need to teach Brand Engagement in today’s digital world. Every course is centered around real Brand Engagement problems that we see in businesses today, that are presented to students through case studies. These case studies challenge students to pinpoint problems affecting their business and provide solutions using HubSpot Marketing software.

As they go through these cases, our online lessons and how-to content will provide them all of the support they need to build out real marketing campaigns to solve these business problems. These campaigns will include the full stack of HubSpot Digital Marketing tools so that students can develop Instagram stories, smart content, nurturing workflows, and much more.

Our hope is that students taking these courses will learn how these tools work and encourage them to use software tools to come up with creative solutions to business problems when they graduate.

These courses look at engagement in a different light by introducing Amanda Slavin’s Seventh Level Engagement Framework, which focuses on the individuals that make up your audience and the engagement they feel with your brand. Instead of thinking of engagement as binary, where someone is either engaged or disengaged, this framework suggests a nuanced way to strategically re-engage your audience through seven levels of engagement until they become evangelists of your business.

Business examples are helpful in these types of exercises because it gives students context into why they are completing an assignment. Instead of creating a hypothetical solution for a problem, they can find a creative solution to a real problem. We want to inspire students to approach problems in innovative ways, so we allow them to develop their own ideas to solve these business problems.

The business cases in this course  focuses on asking students questions that encourage them to  evaluate a situation and the viewpoint of their audience as they approach a business challenge, so they can find the solution that solves for their specific customer. 

Marketing software tools are the things that help you structure and scale engagement with an audience. Tools like website chat, Instagram stories, smart content and Facebook Messenger present new channels that marketers are just beginning to use. The next generation of marketers will mold what the future of these tools looks like. We need to show them these tools so they know what they have to work with and to  help them think critically and creatively.

Every professor in HubSpot’s free Education Partner Program is given a free package of the HubSpot Marketing Professional tools so that their students can learn by doing.

We use assignments based on these case scenarios to present students with some ways we might use marketing tools to solve business problems, such as using the new Instagram close friends feature to incentivize Coachella attendees. Students taking these courses brainstorm and build these solutions on their own. By showing students how to use these tools, we aim to inspire them to come up with creative solutions on their own.