wow

-

w

.

n

Generally a useful course and I liked the presenter. I know nothing about marketing so it was a nice introduction that's not too specialist but goes into enough depth to actually be useful (some coursera courses tend to be too vague and common sense based that renders them useless, this was not the case here).

The course overall created a favorable impression of UC Davis. I was actually offered to do an exchange with you last year, but declined as I was unsatisfied with the academic programme and the rude treatment I received from your staff, both admin and academic. Finding out about the pepper spray incident on campus and attempted cover ups by the uni was also pretty shocking. I would never study at a uni that treats its students that way. But after taking this course, It's nice to know that UC Davis has at least some decent staff who are friendly and have decent teaching skills. If you ever read this UC Davis, treating your students poorly affects your uni brand so please take lessons from the courses you teach and apply them in practice.

To improve: the podcast/downloading additional materials was very inconvenient, which is ironic, considering how the course emphasized the importance of clarity and and 'easy' customer experience. In this case, I am your customer and you're pitching your course to me; I wasn't impressed. Structure could also be improved. Some terms used also lack clarity eg acceleration. Perhaps it's a convenient 'A', but the link between expanding my network and acceleration of business is a bit too far fetched, which is again ironic, considering how the course emphasized the importance of matching words to the message you're trying to convey. More clarity would be nice. Tbh I expected a bit more critical reasoning skills from a presenter with a history degree ;)

Overall, however, not a bad course.

This is a solid grounding in understanding the basics of how online content is optimized to market your services, products and you as a brand.

There are some technical weaknesses in that doing this course via your smartphone means you miss some of the cues for the additional materials - ironic since optimizing for mobile is one of the basics of content marketing. That's a bug I hope will be fixed.

Many of the videos feel very similar and become "meta" in that they are discussing how to build content that will market you yourself as a content marketer. It would have been more helpful to have a throughline of examples that are real world.

And finally -- this course is a few years old and does NOT cover the importance of Instagram or the rise of influencers as part of the tool kit. The course is very highly focussed on written content, no discussion of video or audio or how those elements work in content marketing in 2020.

But if you are a freelance writer or consultant who needs to market themselves to sell your services -- this is a good grounding you can utlize for yourself. Will it teach you how to navigate digital/programmatic marketing or create a campaign using social media platforms? No, you'll need to find that elsewhere.

Pros:

*Good for people with a basic knowledge of marketing.

*Various topics are covered.

Cons:

*A lot of reading, which is quite repetitive at times.

*Course hours stated are not accurate when you take all of the reading/audio into consideration.

*Assignments could be explained better and with examples.

I have given the course 4 stars based on the fact that when I enrolled, it was free. So, I would say that for a free course it is pretty good and there are some useful topics, including headline writing/keyword research/empathy and experience maps. Overall, I have some good takeaways to explore. However, the repetitive and extensive reading made the course a lot longer than expected and a little tedious at times. I would have also appreciated more detailed instructions for the assignments and more examples of work throughout the course e.g. empathy maps/how to include the "7 As". It would also be useful for people like me, who are just starting out, to have more info on whether to trust stock photos, including free trustworthy sites and free keyword research tools, etc.

I've learned a lot which I'm definitely going to put in to practice. This course provided a lot of usable information and whitepapers which is great. It really felt like a good quality course. A few critical notes: The workbook for the empathy map is vague, why don't you use a real empathy map as an example? A lot of people I've reviewed really had no clue how it was actually supposed to look or what they were supposed to be doing. The criteria used to grade peers is also different compared to what you're supposed to do in the assignments, I didn't like that either. You work hard on an assignment only to find out you get points on a lot of different stuff not mentioned in the criteria before you send in your assignment. Something that also annoyed me was peer reviewing, you get either lucky someone understands what they're supposed to be doing or you're screwed and you have to send in your assignment again to hopefully get a good grade. Overall a good course but could improve a lot with a few little tweaks.

This class was fantastic! I really appreciated the free pdfs and exercises. Ms. Simone's voice was so calm and soft while delivering powerful words. She went in-depth with content marketing and explained each segment really well and clearly. I will definitely review the content she presented once more!

One part that would have been wonderful or rather a bonus if she would have talked more about making your content portfolio and establishing your personal brand on your own website some more. And I wish we had access to the podcast/ interview with her colleagues. Other than that, I am well pleased.

The ethics and copyright section was crucial due to the online world we live in now. I am happy she covered this and emphasized to not lie when it comes to content. Followed by giving credit and permission when it comes to photos. This is very important and can save you a headache. (And money)

After taking this course, I am more confident about creating my own website and content. Thank you, Ms. Simone.

The course content was very informative. I found most of the sessions helpful and Sonia Simone very engaging to listen to. I did feel the readings were quite a lot given the time we had and wish there were more visually appealing snapshots of the 40+ pages of content we could keep at the end of it summarizing each article. There is just so much to pore over! But I appreciate the information shared and level of depth. I do have one grievance. Your peer-review assignments don't work for serious learners because a lot of them are in here just for a free certification and have no clue as to what they are grading. Some of the submissions I have read were pathetic and lacking the most basic level of understanding. Please involve a moderator for your wonderful courses - someone who can fish out these folks as they are just wasting the time of those who need to get their work reviewed fairly.

This course certainly helped me to gain insights on Content Marketing, with the different strategy - from market research, crafting a "wow" headline, understanding your audience, to the type of content and how you are going to manage these contents.

The assignments were great to not only test my understanding of the lesson, but also created a platform to try-fail-learn and got valuable feedback from other students. *Prepare yourself for some heavy content to read and absorb!

Now, it is really the time to put these theories into practicality.

Before I sign off, I would like to extend my invitation to you, yes you who is reading this, to connect with me on social media, and expand our network! Click on the links below now!

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholasseow

instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nicholas.seow

Thank you all!

Nicholas Seow

As someone who is a beginner content marketer, I found this course very helpful. However, there are a few things I would change:

-Use video lessons and transcripts only. I found the podcast lessons hard to follow at times because the hosts would share unimportant anecdotes or it would become an ad for Copyblogger or Rainmaker Media.

-Include a sample assignment for each peer-review assignment given. I think providing an example of what is expected would clear up any misunderstandings about the assignment and make it easier for people to grade their peers' work.

-Integrate more of the learnings from the readings in the quizzes. I found that most quizzes only tested you on the podcast or video lessons. This then made it feel like most of the readings were pointless (especially for week 4), even though they had the most information.

This was a very good introductory class for understanding content marketing and how to be successful at it. I actually learned quite a bit and believe it will help me as I develop a new business. I appreciated Simone's professional, warm and enthusiastic approach. The written materials are excellent and will be invaluable for future reference. I think that having someone from the university or business do the reviewing and grading of assignments would be useful; I didn't think the feedback I received from course students was particularly helpful. I also wonder about such a strong focus on Copyblogger; while they are clearly skilled and successful, and I appreciated their information and insights, I would have appreciated hearing from a greater variety of individuals on the podcasts. Overall, I highly recommend this course.

The course is very good, the content of the videos and podcasts are interesting. The reading materials are a bit repetitive and not always related to the topics discussed in the week, but they still have value. The only reason it is not a 5-star course is the evaluation system. The whole evaluation is made by peer-review, which would be great if all the students were really involved in making a great course out of this, but sadly many are here only for the certificate, and they do not care to make good work nor a good review. I invested time and effort to make a good piece in week 4 and received a review that was literally "a" just to fulfill the mandatory comments. It was very frustrating and made this course lose a lot of its power.

I learned a great deal from this course. You get a lot of useful and practical information. As a former journalist, I was most interested in the material on copywriting, as well as all the stuff on how content interacts with the technology. I would have given this course five stars but I think the peer-review system is its biggest weakness. It seems to me that some of the reviewers have not studied and absorbed all the course materials. Others review your submissions in the most superficial way. You have situations where one reviewer will give you maximum marks for a submission, and a second will award the lowest possible for the same piece of work! This doesn't give you a lot of faith in the scoring system.

The course was an incredible way for me to enhance my knowledge of marketing. I really enjoyed the different methods of learning; reading, listening to podcasts, completing assignments...etc. One thing I would've liked to see more of, is offering more real-world examples of how to apply what we've learned. At some points, certain aspects felt like we were just being told to do this or don't do that and I felt like some examples would've really solidified the concepts and helped us apply them in the real world.

Overall, I would recommend this course to anyone who has an interest in content marketing and copywriting or would just like to learn about something new!

Firstly, I would like to thank the course authors for their colossal work and sharing it for free here at Coursera! The course is indeed insightful and useful. Although it is already 5 years old, the information within the course is mostly up-to-date (especially if we are talking about theoretical basis such as 7A Framework, writing headlines or exploring your buyer’s persona). The only thing I missed was not enough examples of good and bad content marketing from different B2C and B2B businesses. The course authors mostly showcase pieces of content from copyblogger.com to illustrate their key points. But all in all the course is worth your time and attention.

The course material was great and there is a lot of insight and new perspective to gain. Downside was that there seems to be trouble with the assessment during the empathy and experience mapping exercises. Also, there were quite too many podcast sessions sometimes requiring 2-3 downloads. There is also a lot of E-books that are required to be downloaded. Preferably it would be a great if there were 1-2 downloads used as a work book and then maybe one podcast episode per section so that one does not have to download a lot of material and store them on their computer. Outside of this, I thought the course was a great learning.

I take this course not because of business but for non-profit purpose. I think most of the content can be applied in other fields as well. This course is very helpful. The deadline for submission is good as I have more motivation to finish every lesson on time. The assignments are challenging as well, I learn and understand better through the assignments. But, I hope there are subtitles for podcast learning, it's a bit difficult for me to catch some of the info in the podcast. And, the peer review should be done by a professional tutor instead of classmates as the mark/score can be given by begging other people? Thank you.

The course is quite complex. One of the best I've taken on the subject. They give a lot of real-life examples, especially in the podcast sessions. They also include a lot of extra reading material which helps clarify some of the points that couldn't be tackled in the video or audio courses.

If I were to suggest an improvement, that would be better explanations of peer-graded assignments. Or more simplified peer-graded assignments. I had trouble receiving accurate evaluations of my submissions. My guess is that many course takers didn't understand what was required of them.

A valuable experience overall.

I enjoyed this class and felt that it was a very helpful and useful course. My only suggestion for improvement: update some of the pdfs and include more up to date information. It is obvious that most of the content written for the pdfs was written around 2010 (mentions of Google+ and Tumbler) and there is no mention of newer social media platforms like Instagram. It makes the content feel dated. I'd also recommend someone go through and edit the documents as there were numerous spelling mistakes, not a great look for a course focused on writing. Other than that, great course! I loved taking it.

Great course with easy written techniques and content. It's a combination of videos, podcasts, assignment and written text all-in-one. Only downside for me were the actual assignments. It would have been nice if they had given some examples of what was expected of the students and improve the assessment process. Instead of them connecting you to other students to review, you have to ask for others to do this via their forum. I did not enjoy that part at all. Thank you for this course! I would still recommend it if you want to know more about content marketing on a more beginner level.

There was a great deal of edu material provided in this course via several different methods - video lectures, podcasts, eBooks, etc. I prefer visual over audio content, so there were too many podcasts and not enough videos for my learning style. I see some value in peer graded assignments, but would have preferred to have my work reviewed by the professor, or an expert in the field. Some of the peer reviews were very thoughtful and helpful, but others didn't even make sense in the context of the rubric for the assignment. Overall, the course was engaging and well worth the cost!

The course material is really interesting and I liked the content a lot! However, I think that written assignments shouldn't be reviewed by other classmates. Some of the people in my class didn't do half of the required bullet points in their work but still got marked well by someone who asked them to do the same in return. This helps people who have no idea about whole content of the course or didn't even learn anything get the certificate... on the other hand those who worked hard to get good grades can be marked badly just because some of the classmates may have a bad day :D