Inbound Marketing University (#IMU) Offers Curriculum to U.S. Business Schools

Inbound Marketing University (IMU), a virtual educational community for those aspiring to become Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals, just had its 1-year birthday. Over the past year, IMU has attracted over 18,000 class registrants and 2,272 inbound marketing exam takers, as well as certified 1,560 inbound marketing professionals.

With video classes featuring knowledgeable inbound marketing experts, an exam designed to reinforce concepts taught in these classes and a blog that fosters a community in which marketers share their experiences, Inbound Marketing University has come a long way to make its inbound marketing curriculum helpful. Now HubSpot is bringing inbound marketing into actual classrooms with inbound marketing curriculum—a milestone for our one-year growth.

While we recognize the ease of learning by watching videos and browsing for marketing tools online, we also know that professors may teach students in classroom settings more effectively with a formal curriculum. Therefore, we decided to bring a part of Inbound Marketing University offline to make our curriculum more accessible to professors and students.

How do IMU classroom materials differ from the online curriculum?

The goal for developing classroom materials is the same: to provide a comprehensive overview of the concept of inbound marketing and how each component can be implemented to achieve business success. The format of the materials, however, has been adjusted to fit the learning style at a typical American business school. Here are a few characterizing elements:

1. Principle Overviews With Discussion Questions

We developed documents of three to four pages that explain principles such as blogging, search engine optimization, social media business marketing and lead conversion in depth.  In addition, each overview is coupled with discussion questions intended to encourage students to think critically about how to implement inbound marketing to achieve business results and overcome challenges they may face. We hope the combination will both inform students of a novel marketing approach and engage them to explore the frontier themselves.

2. Original Case Studies of Successful HubSpot Customers

Case studies are exclusive to IMU classroom materials. They are unique because:

• Our case study targets are HubSpot customers who have achieved significant business growth using inbound marketing strategies;
• Our case studies are developed entirely by in-house talent—HubSpotters!

Like many other businesses, HubSpot customers featured in our case studies encountered marketing challenges that limited their business growth. After conducting customer interviews, we were able to integrate specific incidents in the transition of our customers’ marketing strategies, which we hope can help students—that is, potential business owners or marketers—gain insight into when to implement which aspects of inbound marketing.

3. Class and Student Activities

We think it’s important to provide professors and students tools to practice inbound marketing principles. As a result, we designed fun activities for students to practice in groups, on their own, or using the HubSpot free trial. By encouraging real-life marketing practices and decision-making, we hope to empower business school students to think like a marketing-savvy business owner.

IMU has already made its first step into business schools. Gordon Adomdza, a professor at Northeastern University’s College of Business Administration, has not only adopted the IMU curriculum into his marketing class but has also run the entire class on HubSpot’s Free Semester Trial.

Although the curriculum has been designed for use in a classroom setting, everyone is welcome to download, use, and share the materials! No matter what way you learn inbound marketing, we look forward to having you as a member of the inbound marketing community.

Download the inbound marketing classroom curriculum materials today!

Photo by Seth Sawyers 

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