Hi, my name is Mike Ryder, and I'm the programme director of the MSC in digital and social media marketing. So, digital marketing has really come to the foreground in the last few years. Digital screens are pretty much everywhere these days, so marketing has had to adapt to this. We've developed this brand new degree, which is very much focused on careers in digital and social media marketing. It's taught by industry experts, and you'll also get a really good blend of theory and practice. So we've got a great new module, for example, on influencer marketing led by my colleague Haley Cocker, who has several really outstanding publications in this area, and it's something, I think, that really makes us stand out from some of the other degree courses.
Well you will be taught by some award-winning staff. Many of the staff teaching this module have have won University-level teaching awards. We have a really good blend, I think, of academic expertise and industry insights. I worked for the industry in 10 years across video, games, healthcare and higher education working a variety of content and marketing related roles, and I bring that into my teaching. It's not just me who does this. Numerous colleagues in our department will be bringing in that real world expertise to prepare you for the world of work.
In the first part of this degree, you will study foundations of marketing, including things like consumer behaviour, marketing intelligence, to give you the background you need to really understand Marketing in context and how it works. We then move on to a specialised digital section, where you will take an expanded module on digital marketing and social media in practice, so drawing on many of those things that I've mentioned already. And alongside this, you will also work on building up a digital portfolio so we've got this really nice new form of assessment in our degree programme here where you will create an online digital presence to showcase the things you're learning, and to use to help you with your employability. This will all be rounded off with a Capstone project. This is like a dissertation, but it's a project responding to a real-world client brief, so putting all those things you've learned on the course into practice. So this degree is ideal really for anyone with a good undergraduate degree. We would ask very much for a 2:1 degree, but it doesn't matter what discipline that happens to be. We welcome anyone from any sort of background - non-marketing, so it doesn't really matter. So if you come from arts and humanities, engineering, computer science. If you're just looking at maybe taking a career change, I think this degree will be perfect for you.
If you have any questions at all, do please get in contact with us via the contact details provided. You can also contact me directly. I am on LinkedIn. You'll see me all over LinkedIn, but you can also email me directly as well. My name is Mike Ryder, and my email is m. ryder@lancaster.ac.uk.
