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Teach Brand Engagement in the Classroom

The way that brands engage with their audiences is constantly changing with social media platforms and new software tools. We created these courses to help you teach students an innovative approach to audience engagement and solve real business problems.

Explore The Seven Levels

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EPP Knowledge Base (4)

Brand Engagement - Coachella

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EPP Knowledge Base (5)

Brand Engagement - Essence Fest

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Bring practical education to your course with The Seventh Level Framework

Introduce your students to live case studies and influencer concepts on topics they care about. We worked directly with CatalystU and their co-founder, Amanda Slavin to put together our course materials on the Seventh Level Engagement Framework

We've put together two projects for professors, both deal with Brand Engagement, but you can decide whether to use either Coachella Music Festival or Essence Fest as the focus for the project.

The Brand Engagement project allows your students to apply the concepts they are learning in class to a real-world scenario, along with the opportunity to earn HubSpot Academy and CatalystCreativ certifications that will put them a step ahead of their peerss.

Explore our Courses

We partnered with Amanda Slavin, Co-founder and CEO of CatalystU and author of The Seventh Level, to create this classroom resource that follows the framework that Amanda uses to help businesses like Coca-Cola, NPR, The Oakland Raiders, and Google better engage with their audiences.

In the sections below, find the complete course materials to teach brand engagement and The Seventh Level in the classroom. Each course focuses on a different level of engagement and involves different software tools to solve business case scenarios.

These courses are based on The Seventh Level, the debut book from Amanda Slavin, Co-founder and CEO of the brand consulting firm CatalystU, and the developer of The Seventh Level Engagement Framework. The book is the most comprehensive exploration of the framework to date. 

The framework demystifies engagement by breaking it into seven distinct levels, and providing users with tools, questions, and a methodology for evaluating and elevating their own audience engagement. The Seventh Level Engagement Framework is the secret sauce behind everything Slavin’s team does at CatalystU, the creative agency that she founded with the CEO of Zappos, Tony Hsieh—this book is that recipe. 

Seventh Level Engagement- Full Levels

To effectively teach this course, you should first understand the framework. There are a couple of ways to get started; 

First, read The Seventh Level book. You can purchase/download your own copy here.

Second, leverage the resources available to you through HubSpot. In partnership with Slavin, HubSpot Academy has developed a free brand engagement course, which you can take here, as well as a 4 part blog series on the Framework, which you can read here.

In addition, within each of the lessons in this course, there are HubSpot Academy lessons to help teach additional concepts as well as links software tools that are needed to complete that lesson.

To learn more about The Seventh Level Engagement Framework and access additional free resources created by the CatalystU team, visit their website.

Learn More About these Courses

Open the sections below to read about all the different parts of this education.

  • 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.

  • ES CXS 221 Email Banner v3These 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.

Professor Testimonials

  1. Randy Harrison - Emerson College

    Randy Harrison, Emerson College

    In today’s world driven by digital transformation where the boundaries between sales, service and marketing are finally coming together in the service of the customer, understanding the emotional connections between companies, products and human beings is foundational to marketing, communication and business today. 
     
    This is where brand engagement lives and even though innovation and technology are moving a blistering pace, customer centricity in the context of one-to-one relationships is essential if brands are to survive moving forward. 
     
    What this means is it’s not just differentiation, but how a customer (or prospect) feels that also matters. 
     
    HubSpot came together with Amanda Slavin to create a course they call “Measuring Brand Engagement and Emotional Connection.” Her seven steps of engagement are brilliant and a practical roadmap every marketer and company needs to understand, internalize and apply. 
     
    This is why I have adopted this course into my courses now so that students will be empowered to help companies create even greater value in the future than they would without this framework.
    Read more professor stories on our community page here
  2. Yuvay

    Yuvay Ferguson, Howard University

    This semester, our students in a Digital Marketing Consulting class had the benefit of taking the 7th Level Engagement Certification Course and learned how to conduct a social media audit utilizing the 7th Level framework.

    It is clear that the students were able to master the concepts and were equipped with the tools needed provide meaningful insights to their small business clients about their online presence. The video tutorials, certification, and templates were instrumental in making sure we achieved the goal of preparing our marketing students with the capability to serve as Digital Marketing Consultants!

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