Summary

Entrepreneurial organizations often have limited time and budgets for marketing, but also have some great advantages that can be leveraged to increase their user base and achieve success.

This course will look at traditional principles of marketing and how they can be applied to small entrepreneurial enterprises, including not only business, but non-profits and other pursuits.

We'll look at the most effective marketing tools for these types of enterprises, including customized direct mail, email, public relations, social media, and user-generated content. Course participants will share their own experiences (as a consumer and as a leader for their own enterprise or cause), and we'll share and analyze best practices.

Each course participant will be expected to write about their experiences and learning throughout the course. All participants are invited to personalize the course to meet their own learning objectives. One way to do this is through the assignments for each week, which will include "make-your-own-case-studies" and other activities through which participants can design an learning activity that meets their own goals.

The final four weeks of the course will allow participants to design and pursue a project to advance their own marketing experience. Ideally, this project will be a real-life exercise to increase the user base of something you're passionate about.

Communications
Most of the communications for this course will be asynchronous; however, I will keep online office hours in the course chat room and a tentative topic for this time will be set. Please indicate your preference of times for this here. (The time(s) set for this will be the same for each week, so just indicate your general availability for the week of Jan. 26.)
(See more details in Introduction + Week 1.)

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Learning Objectives

Participants in this course will:

• Gain an understanding the basic principals of marketing
• Learn how to adapt traditional marketing strategies for a small entrepreneurial organization
• Look at best practices in entrepreneurial marketing
• Develop their own project to gain experience in entrepreneurial marketing

Prerequisites

The audience for this course is anyone who has a business, non-profit, cause, hobby, or other interest that they want to market effectively.

The only prerequisites are having a basic knowledge of web usage (being able to follow instructions to set up a blog, use Twitter and FB, etc.) and having a passion for what you want to market.