Digital Marketing in Action

After taking two marketing classes at Chicago Booth, Sheryl Sarna is eager to apply what she’s learned to a real-world situation. She aspires to a professional career in marketing, and turned to the Digital Marketing Lab for hands-on experience.

“This ended up being one of my favorite classes at Booth,” says Sarna, a Full-Time MBA student and a Kilts Fellow. 

Over the 10-week course, Sarna and a group of five other students worked on the marketing plan for a startup called TourMe, founded by Carlos Maier, MBA ’24. TourMe looks to connect travelers with new cultural experiences in the city they’re visiting. 

After interviewing Maier to learn about TourMe’s marketing needs, Sarna and her group recommended revamping the website to generate more user impressions. As a group, they created customer profiles, optimized landing pages, and used A/B testing to refine social media ads. 

By inviting students to consult on his business, Maier says, he gained resources and insights that have helped him build and define the marketing strategy of his bootstrapped startup. “It was really valuable. The most useful insight I received was to build a landing page for each customer persona I am targeting.”

Through the course, Sarna discovered just how much modern marketing is grounded in data-based insights. As someone who studied engineering but has a passion for psychology, Sarna says this realization confirmed her decision to pursue marketing as a career path.

“Marketing is no longer about intuition, per se. It’s become a lot more about data,” she says. “This entire class was about how to create a strategy that is self-sustaining and how to use data to make it better. That’s something I’ll take away.” 

Mastering Marketing Tools 

The Digital Marketing Lab started when Lil Mohan, adjunct associate professor of marketing, realized there was a cohort of Booth students who “love to get their hands really dirty,” but had no outlet in marketing. 

Mohan began teaching the Digital Marketing course at Booth in 2013. Over the years, he kept getting student requests to build out a lab version of the class. Like Sarna, these students wanted real-life experience. 

In 2017, with the help of Niraj Swarup, MBA 85, a marketing executive who’s currently CMO of the B2B marketing services company Accel2Market, Mohan launched the first Digital Marketing Lab. Each fall, he teaches the lab alongside his standard marketing course, which focuses mainly on digital marketing strategy. Though students are advised to take only one, Mohan gives interested lab students extra reading materials from the strategy course. 

Mohan’s aim for the lab has remain unchanged: Help students master the skills they will need for a successful marketing career.

“As a marketing professional these days, you have to use a lot of digital tools,” Mohan says, citing HubSpot and Google Analytics as examples. “Either you get very lucky and will have somebody else to do your dirty work for you, or you’ll need to understand how to use these tools yourself. We got our hands on half a dozen of these programs, which often require paid licenses.”

Gaining Real-World Experience 

When Mohan was first planning the lab curriculum, he figured that students would work on cases for fictitious companies. But then he met with students who asked if they could work with real companies instead—they wanted the real experience. 

That first year, students cold-called dozens of companies and secured seven to work with. Now, Digital Marketing Lab groups consult with 10–12 different companies each year, most of which come from established relationships with Booth’s James M. Kilts Center for Marketing.

Each student group is assigned a different company. They interview employees and complete relevant weekly mini projects for the company with a different marketing tool. Students might create blogs, web landing pages, data and analytics reports, or social media schedules, depending on a company’s unique needs. 

Mohan is largely hands off until the lab is over, allowing the groups to take the reins. This requires some courage from younger students, he says, but allows them to build their confidence in what are often their first professional consulting meetings.

Throughout the lab, each group presents their progress in front of the rest of the class, which Mohan says is his favorite part. The students learn from each other, especially because many take the initiative to do additional research for their projects. It also creates friendly competition between groups.

“Some of it is really good work; some of it requires help,” Mohan says, noting that about 80 percent of the time, the company gets a lot of value out of the consultation from student groups. In all cases, the students learn a lot. “That’s what the course is all about,” Mohan says. “It’s a safe atmosphere that lets students experiment.”

Staying Current

Mohan’s hope is that the Digital Marketing Lab gives students the experience they need to be successful in their careers, marketing or otherwise. And while the tools are important, so too is learning about the businesses themselves and their unique goals.

According to Sarna, truly understanding TourMe’s objectives allowed her group to do strategic work that was valuable to the company. After graduation, she hopes to work in a marketing role at a tech company, and she believes that her experience in the Digital Marketing Lab will help her meaningfully contribute immediately.

That’s what Mohan hopes for from the Digital Marketing Lab: To give students a preview of what a career in marketing may look like. Many students message him after starting a job to say that his class gave them a roadmap for where to take their company’s marketing plan.

To keep meeting that goal and help the lab evolve, Mohan hopes to adopt even more modern tools for students to use with company partners, including the most beneficial AI tools hitting the market.

“The big goal is to make sure that we’re staying current,” Mohan says. “That keeps this class going.”