A degree in marketing opens up job opportunities in this field and beyond. Here are the best online marketing and digital marketing degrees in Australia.
You should consider a marketing degree if you're solid with numbers and a good communicator. A grasp of psychology helps too. Marketing pros help businesses grow by reaching customers and convincing them to buy products.
A Bachelor of Business (Marketing) is normally the degree to go for if you haven't been to university before. If you have a degree already (any discipline), consider an online Master of Marketing.
Further study options also exist. A graduate certificate is a way to gain general or specialist skills and perhaps get started on a masters. Digital marketing degrees are available. And you can study marketing in the field of data analytics.
1. Bachelor of Business (Marketing)
A Bachelor of Business (Marketing) or Bachelor of Marketing is a general business degree. Along with marketing, you study subjects such as accounting, economics, finance and management.
The degree prepares you for almost any business career and advantages you in applying for numerous jobs. After graduating, you can develop additional professional expertise through on-the-job training.
Popular subjects in a bachelor program are business analytics, campaign strategy, consumer behaviour and research, and digital platforms... READ MORE
2. Graduate Certificate in Marketing
If you have a degree (any discipline) or significant job experience, a Graduate Certificate in Marketing could be a good option. The course is quite short, often consisting of four (4) subjects from a 12-subject Master of Marketing.
You can do an online graduate certificate to test if marketing is for you and perhaps go on to get a masters. Alternatively, you can use the course to upskill, gaining general knowledge or digital marketing skills.
Courses may contain foundation units for a masters or let you choose subjects for yourself. You can do an online course while working full-time... READ MORE
3. Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing (Beginner)
Some Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing courses are designed for people with a non-marketing background. The courses are popular with professionals from areas such as journalism, sales management, and business management.
An introductory course may cover subjects such as consumer insights and customer-orientated marketing, before moving on to digital marketing methods.
Benefits from a beginner course include that you get to know the potential for digital marketing, gain insight into how to work with DM agencies, and lay foundations for further learning... READ MORE
4. Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing
For those who just want to learn about online methods, specialist Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing courses are available. To gain entry, you'll generally need to have a suitable background in the form of bachelor studies and/or professional experience.
Topics you may study could include digital customer behaviour, analytics-driven campaigns, digital technologies today, and online marketing strategies.
Digital marketing is a big field, meaning you'll normally have to invest in further education and development after graduating to build genuine expertise... READ MORE
5. Masters in Marketing
A Masters in Marketing is a 12-subject professional degree for people who are serious about a career in the field. Classes are made up of a mixture of experienced marketers and those looking to launch a career.
Generally, marketing masters are quite comprehensive programs. You can expect to do some foundation, principles-based subjects. As well, you will have the opportunity to do advanced studies in areas of your choosing.
Accelerated online degrees can be completed in two years of part-time study. Essentially, you do a subject from start to finish every couple of months... READ MORE
6. Masters in Digital Marketing
Digital marketing is a large and growing field that calls for advanced, specialist skills. Hence, the popularity of dedicated masters degrees.
With this program, you do in-depth learning of digital marketing concepts and gain the tools to be effective using online media. The program is ideal if you're keen to be a rapid technology adopter who is able to work independently.
Your learning won't be finished once your done due to the fast-evolving digital landscape. But you'll have enduring strategies and analytic skills that are hard to gain in other ways... READ MORE
7. Masters in Marketing Analytics
For marketers with strong maths skills, a Master of Analytics (Marketing) is a potentially lucrative education opportunity. Students develop analytics capabilities for extracting useful insights from data.
Earning a Master of Analytics with a Marketing specialisation gives you a career advantage. Businesses need skilled analysts to produce and interpret statistical information. An ability to convert metrics into practical guidance for campaign strategy makes you valuable.
A 12-subject analytics masters can be completed online while you work full-time... READ MORE
8. Master of Business Administration
While a Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a general management program, you can also specialise in marketing. Alongside core business management subjects – such as accounting, economics, finance, organisational management, and leadership – you'll explore several marketing topics.
An MBA degree with this specialisation is open to marketing professionals as well as those new to the field. You'll study the subject from a manager's perspective.
MBA graduates are well positioned for executive marketing roles, such as CMO, as well as general management positions... READ MORE
What You'll Study (Course Structure)
Marketing degrees and postgraduate courses vary in structure and content. A bachelor degree consists of 24 units or subjects, less than half of which may be about marketing. A masters program is typically 12 subjects, most or all with a strong marketing focus. Graduate certificate courses offer a sample of a master’s degree and are comprised of four subjects.
The difference between regular and digital marketing degrees largely comes down to the proportion of digital content. With a digital specialisation, you’ll likely do more study on topics such as digital platforms, data analytics, and social media.
To give an idea of what you can study, here are example subject descriptions from different Australian university programs.
Bachelor degree
The unit explores how to design, conceptualise and execute campaigns digitally. Strong attention is given to methods unique to digital technologies and the network property of social media platforms. The subjects covers brand building, target audiences, public relations and online communications. The aim of the subject is for students to build a knowledgeable and intuitive understanding of the digital consumer journey.
Source: University of Sydney Bachelor of Commerce
This subject explores basic concepts to do with consumers. Students develop an understanding of the overall consumer psychological processes and also a basic understanding of consumption decisions, consumer culture, and ethical and social responsibility issues in a consumption context. Throughout the subject, you are exposed to industry-based problems and situations that allow you to develop research, analytical and communication skills for future professional practice.
Source: UTS Bachelor of Business
This subject builds student knowledge of market and business research concepts. The unit explores the purpose, methods and uses of market business research; helps students to appreciate a 'users' and 'doers' viewpoint; and teaches you how to increase the managerial value of research for decision making. Topics include the statement of the research problem; study design; data collection tools and procedures; statistical data analysis methods such as multiple regression analysis; and how to interpret and use research findings.
Source: University of Melbourne Bachelor of Commerce
This study unit provides an overview of contemporary theory and practice of marketing communications. Included are components of advertising in the main media (television, print, radio, outdoor and cinema), sales promotions, personal selling and new media, such as online. The unit provides students with a solid theoretical and conceptual foundation. As well, students learn strategic and practical perspectives on communications planning and application.
Source: University of Sydney Bachelor of Commerce
To thrive, organisations need to be responsive to the needs and wants of customers. This subject covers marketing principles with a focus on the customer. You learn the traditional 4P’s (Product, Price, Place and Promotion). Students also explore a consumer-based perspective on the marketing mix, including the 4 C’s – Consumer wants and needs, Cost, Convenience, and Communication. The subject also builds knowledge and skills in: analysing competitors, digital and non-digital communication, and strategies for generating customer value.
Source: UTS Bachelor of Business
The marketing of services presents unique challenges and also opportunities to enhance value to customers. A service has an intangible, heterogeneous nature and depends on service personnel for delivery. Strategies to respond to the challenges and opportunities are shown. Topics include: buyer behaviour for services; managing service environments; the vitalness of measuring service quality, consumer satisfaction, perceived value and loyalty; relationship marketing principles and practice; managing perishable services; how service personnel and customers impact on value creation; minimising stress for service personnel; quality failures, customer complaints and service recovery.
Source: University of Melbourne Bachelor of Commerce
A vital intangible asset of any organisation is the brand or portfolio of brands. Marketers employ internal and external communication approaches to convey the brand's value proposition and experience to key stakeholders and target customers. The basis for brand equity are the names, symbols and slogans, along with underlying associations, perceived quality, brand awareness and customer base. Most brands fail due to inadequate market research and analysis. The brand's core values must be articulated, with accurate positioning strategies and alignment between internal and external brand-building communication. This subject helps students to understand brand equity and management. You learn how to create, position, build and maintain brand equity.
Source: University of Sydney Bachelor of Commerce
Why do some companies perform better than others? This is the fundamental strategy question. This subject builds knowledge and skills to create and sustain higher performance in the marketplace based on market-led strategic management. Students examine strategic issues such as identifying opportunity, formulating strategy and implementation. There is seldom one right answer in a business scenario. But strong analytical skills deliver a much better set of potential answers than weak analysis. The subject develops competence to cultivate marketing within organisations as a strategic force and not just an operational department.
Source: UTS Bachelor of Business
Graduate certificate
This subject explores how and why consumers buy and use goods, services and solutions. By examining practical and real-world cases and examples, students build an understanding of consumer behaviour frameworks. They can then apply the learnings to develop their own consumer insights.
Source: UTS Graduate Certificate in Marketing and Digital Strategy
The digital space continues to evolve and has changed technology, the marketplace, consumers and competitors. The new platforms and changes present opportunities and challenges for today’s marketers. This subject explores digital platforms, customer interactions with them, and how marketers can use platforms to achieve organisational goals.
Source: UTS Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing
This subject teaches you a strategic approach to communications planning. You develop a principles-based appreciation and practical understanding of modern concepts. In particular, you study communication techniques that help develop strong brand equity.
Source: RMIT Online Graduate Certificate in Marketing
Australia is a service economy. The fastest growth rates in job formation are in service industries. This subject provides an overview of strategic concepts and issues in services management and marketing. The unit helps students build knowledge about the characteristic of services across industries and how to manage and market services. Students learn how to create and build relationships with customers by providing service solutions and plans to recruit and retain service professionals. Students also learn about contemporary service thinking, both in research and practice, in areas such as service innovation and design thinking.
Source: University of Tasmania Graduate Certificate in Marketing
Masters degree
Marketing is a business function that encompasses the whole process by which value is created, captured and made available to customers. This unit focuses on developing your knowledge of how marketing works and its importance to business. The subject describes the theories and concepts upon which the marketplace may be understood, analysed and targeted. This unit equips you with foundational knowledge and skills for engaging in and managing the process by which a company’s value offerings are marketed to customers.
Source: University of Tasmania Graduate Certificate in Marketing
In this multidisciplinary core unit, students learn approaches and technologies used by firms to research business problems and develop effective strategies. Via hands-on use of key theories and research tools, you build skills in collecting and analysing data on the business environment (e.g. consumers and competitors) and generate insights to help create value through process and product innovation. You develop skills in business research, working in teams and using powerful visualisation tools to present business insights. The unit forms the foundation for further study across business disciplines.
Source: QUT Graduate Certificate in Business (Marketing)
The subject covers product management, including new product development, services innovation, user-interface design, product portfolio management, product-line extensions, understanding buyer reactions to innovation, and developing an innovative culture.
Students learn how to improve new product launch rates across different industry contexts, including business-to-consumer and business-to-business, and ‘product’ and global contexts. The intent of the unit is to be interactive and challenging. It has been designed to encourage discussion and self-directed learning.
Source: RMIT Online Master of Marketing
Consumer behaviour forms the cornerstone of marketing strategy, in turn becoming the focus of the business and managers. This subjects explores how to understand consumers and leverage that knowledge to improve business profitability. Marketers strive to develop more effective strategies to attract, reach and keep their customers. Strategy formulation relies on understanding how consumers are affected by both internal and external factors to the firm.
Source: QUT Graduate Certificate in Business (Marketing)
The subject provides a holistic understanding of the emerging marketing technology (MarTech) landscape, including data, technology and platform ecosystems. By understanding the driving trends, leaders will be open to “emerging technologies” and able to identify the value and relevance of MarTech to companies. The unit focuses on implementing suitable Martech use cases to achieve goals. Marketers must prioritise the benefits and features of a MarTech stack and examine various implementation requirements and issues.
Source: RMIT Graduate Certificate in Digital Marketing Leadership
This subject provides you with an opportunity to investigate and analyse strategies and activities in business markets. Teaching is descriptive and also practical in nature.
Students look at how value is created internally and via networks, so as to be competitive in the marketplace. You also build your understanding of value exchanges and relationships between suppliers, distributors and customers.
Source: RMIT Online Master of Marketing
This subject equips students with knowledge and skills for working as an executive in the service economy. You examine the characteristics of a service, recognise the challenges involved in service delivery and consider strategies to manage, innovate, communicate and apply solutions. The unit requires you to leverage evidence-based information and research to (a) analyse services issues and opportunities and (b) design innovative solutions.
Source: RMIT Online Master of Marketing
This subject uses a real-world digital marketing consultancy project. Students apply the learnings from the program to make recommendations for the business. Depending on the session, the company can be a student’s choice or a client company provided by the subject coordinator. Students apply theories from marketing and other disciplines covered in their degree to solve the company’s task.
Source: UTS Master of Digital Marketing
Marketing analytics masters
The subject helps students develop their capabilities for using advanced analytical tools to address marketing problems – key skills that numerous companies have stated they look for in marketers, particularly in challenging business environments.
Students are exposed to a range of statistical tools and techniques, from classical statistical tools to emerging big data techniques. The emphasis is not on formulae of statistical tools, but on how to apply and interpret a range of statistical techniques to help answer questions posed by marketers.
The course is organised around daily business problems. Students are strongly encouraged to start thinking as marketers by asking questions of their data, setting their own direction for the analysis in the project and thinking about how a company could use the results in practice.
Source: UNSW Master of Analytics (Marketing)
This course explores the impact of the social media and digital technology. Students are introduced to analytic methods for converting social media and digital data to marketing insights. You examine the impact of social media and digital technology on customer acquisition, customer retention, customer development and customer relationship management. Learners build foundational skills of social media and digital analytics, including the creation of monitors and common analytical metrics.
Source: UNSW Master of Analytics (Marketing)
To understand consumers and build up a relationship with customers is the first step of every marketing decision. To be effective, managers should know how to identify what target customers need, where they go for shopping and how to interact with them in a marketplace. This course integrates customer relationship management (CRM) and big data analytics in applications ranging from attracting new consumers, retaining customers, and encouraging referrals to re-inviting infrequent or lost customers using prediction, recommendation, and natural language processing.
Students will exercise hands-on data analytics and then tackle real-world customer problems. No prior knowledge of R is required.
Source: UNSW Master of Analytics (Marketing)
Data available to firms grow exponentially. Firms that possess the analytical skills to navigate data-rich environments and to utilise such data are taking the lead while firms that do not have those skills are increasingly left behind. Currently, marketing analytics skills are very scarce on the job market, yet increasingly high in demand.
One key challenge in the world of marketing analytics is to make the transition from applying academic concepts and methods to case studies only, to generating real-life solutions for companies. This course equips students to make this transition by putting them in the driver seat for the solution of a real analytics problem that makes a difference. Through the course, students are being optimally prepared for the job market as they solve a case study.
Source: UNSW Master of Analytics (Marketing)
What Is a Digital Marketing Degree?
A digital marketing degree may be a good choice if you are especially interested in reaching customers online. Topics such as ecommerce, blogging, email campaigns, the online customer experience and social media campaigns may be emphasised.
However, digital marketing should feature prominently in any good marketing course. There may not be a great difference between a degree with "digital marketing" in the title and one without. For any given program, you should check course details to see how well the degree meets your education goals.
A social media marketing degree and digital marketing degree are essentially the same thing. Marketing instructors usually talk in terms of digital platforms, a term that refers to social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram but also covers apps like Spotify and Uber.
When you learn about social media marketing, the focus is generally on conceptual tools and skills that are long-lasting and transferable. The exact details of how to succeed with social media are constantly changing along with the digital landscape.
Study Online
An online marketing degree is a good choice if you lack the time, inclination or option to attend a campus. Every type of marketing program is available online.
You can expect a high-quality learning experience with online study. The best marketing degrees are designed exclusively for online learning and are great for working professionals.
The normal pattern of study is to do one subject at a time, with each unit completed over a 6-8 week teaching period. To keep you engaged, you can connect to classmates through online discussion forums, social media and other channels.
Learning Outcomes
Any degree in marketing prepares you to take on roles where you’re helping to sell a product. You’ll have insight into consumer behaviour, strategies and tools to reach a target audience, communication skills to inform and persuade, and business know-how to profit from campaign dollars spent.
Marketing use to be considered a field where, after learning key principles, the rest of your development could mostly happen on the job. But that’s increasingly not the case with technology advances and the sophistication of modern techniques.
Master’s degrees in Marketing, Digital Marketing and Marketing Analytics allow you to build skills and insights that put you ahead of other professionals in the field. For example, you can learn strategies for finding and understanding consumers using analytics. Marketers can be more systematic and less hit-and-miss using what they learn from modern programs.
What Can You Do With a Marketing Degree?
A marketing or digital marketing degree gives a robust foundation for you to be employable and have a good career. The training is general and qualifies you for many business jobs.
The marketing industry itself is deep in terms of work opportunity. More than half a million Australians are employed in related occupations. The largest categories are "Advertising, Public Relations & Sales Managers" and "Advertising & Marketing Professionals".
Marketing skills also allow you to work anywhere. Nearly every business or other organisation needs advertising, branding and promotions to be noticed. Skills are highly transferable between entities and across industries.
Career Opportunities
Graduates with a bachelors in marketing or a masters degree are typically employed in roles such as campaign manager, digital marketing manager, digital advertising manager, SEO specialist, content marketing specialist, brand manager, and social media manager.
To give you an idea of the career opportunities, here is a random selection of job ad summaries.
Job ad examples where a degree is advantageous. Random sample.
Marketing and Communications Executive – Hilton
You will be responsible for the development of the marketing plan and activities to increase brand awareness, communicate promotions to target markets and address our hotels' business needs. Must be educated to college level and have experience in a similar role.
Marketing Manager – CarNext Door
You will be responsible for developing and implementing a Search Engine Optimization strategy to build our site’s content. Must have a strong understanding of analysing and optimising websites to improve site structure, rankings and conversion.
Sales And Marketing Manager – Polite Social
You’ll handle outbound sales and marketing activities, enquiries, quotes, bookings and schedules with an organised, fastidious approach and excel at multitasking. Must have a passion for all things events and marketing and a Bachelor Degree or higher.
Brand Manager – Follow that Style
You need unique sales skills and an ability to build strong relationships with new and existing customers in order to increase sales revenue and sell through. Key responsibilities include account management and keeping up content on all social media.
Brand and Advertising Manager – Perpetual
The successful applicant will be responsible for delivering consistent messaging across all channels, whilst maximising effectiveness through regular data-driven insights and analysis. Marketing experience and familiarity with digital monitoring/reporting tools is desirable.
Brand Manager – Parmaleto
You will be responsible for building and implementing the brand strategy in the Cheese category. You must be degree-qualified with a genuine passion for marketing.
Digital Advertising Manager – Bolster
The dig ad manager will deliver successful campaigns and exceptional service to our clients. Skills and attributes required are an extensive knowledge of digital advertising systems and tools, a bachelor’s degree or higher and a love of music, entertainment and its industry.
Content Marketing Specialist – Medibank
You will be responsible for creating compelling and differentiating health, wellbeing and member content across a range of digital mediums such as web, video, social media, email and audio. Must have content production and distribution management skills including web publishing, social, email and SEO.