On this episode of the podcast from our Digital Marketing Professors Series, we sat down with Eric Karson, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Marketing at Villanova University. In the undergrad digital marketing course that he teaches, Karson covers SEO, analytics, email marketing and social media marketing. However, a significant portion of time is devoted to a hands-on SEM simulator.
"SEO used to be the main component for digital marketing," Eric told us. "[Now] we spend quite a bit of time on SEM, because buying those keywords is critical in today's digital marketing space."
The move from SEO to SEM has marked a large shift in digital marketing itself, where marketers have transitioned from "being attitude theorists to being behavior analysts," Eric says. "The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and more and more we have the data on what behaviors our consumers are doing."