Hirst AcademyMarketing in Practice
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Free · Self-paced · 2026

From reading the market to leading marketing.

One continuous journey through 15 topics for UK students and early career marketers. Pick one real organisation, apply every task to it, and finish with a portfolio that shows what you can do as a digital marketer and a marketing manager.

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15
Modules
64
Lessons
~72
Hours
15
Interactive tools
The 15 modules
Each module includes full lessons, a worked example, a knowledge check, curated resources, and an interactive tool.
01

The Digital Marketplace and Business Intelligence

Choose the organisation you'll work on for the whole course, map its digital marketplace, and build a habit of business intelligence from sources you can trust.

4–5 hours
02

Customers, Buyer Behaviour and Research

Understand how your organisation's customers decide, then plan and run small, ethical research that tells you something you didn't know.

4–5 hours
03

Segmentation, Targeting and the Path to Purchase

Divide your organisation's market into segments that matter, choose who to target and why, and map the path each target customer takes to buy.

4–5 hours
04

Proposition, the 7Ps, Brand and Portfolio

Write a value proposition your target customer would recognise, test it across the 7Ps, and see how it fits your organisation's brand and portfolio.

4–5 hours
05

Regulation, Data Protection and Ethics in Marketing

Check your organisation's marketing against the UK rules on advertising, consumer protection and personal data, and decide what's right as well as what's legal.

4–5 hours
06

KPIs, Analytics and Baselines

Choose the KPIs that show whether your organisation's marketing works, find the baseline for each, and bring the Foundation stage together in a strategic audit.

5–6 hours
07

Integrated Communications and Budgets

Plan communications that work together across channels for your organisation, and set and split a budget you can defend.

4–5 hours
08

Content, UX and User Journeys

Map how people actually move through your organisation's website or app, and fix the content and design that stop them getting what they came for.

4–5 hours
09

Search, Email and Social Communities

Plan how your organisation is found in search, keeps in touch by email and builds a community on social platforms, with each channel doing the job it does best.

4–5 hours
10

Briefing Creative and Managing Agencies

Write a brief that gets good creative work, judge the work fairly, run an agency or freelancer relationship well, and pull the Practitioner stage into one campaign plan.

5–6 hours
11

Ecommerce and Routes to Market

Compare the routes your organisation could use to reach buyers, online and offline, and work out which ones make money once every cost is counted.

4–5 hours
12

CRM, Customer Experience and Loyalty

Use customer data responsibly to keep the customers your organisation already has: improve their experience, plan your CRM and work out what a loyal customer is worth.

4–5 hours
13

International and Cross-Cultural Marketing

Choose a second market for your organisation, adapt the offer and the message to its culture and rules, and plan how to sell there online.

5–6 hours
14

Performance, Attribution and ROI

Judge what your organisation's marketing really achieved: compare results with baselines, understand what attribution can and can't tell you, and calculate ROI honestly.

4–5 hours
15

Business Cases, Risk and Leadership

Review your organisation's marketing performance, make the business case for what it should do next, manage the risks, and lead the people who'll deliver it.

6–7 hours
Pick your pace
Same 15 modules — just a different weekly commitment.

Standard

~19 weeks

~4 hrs/week · About 16 to 20 weeks alongside study or work, a topic every week or so.

Accelerated

~10 weeks

~8 hrs/week · About 8 to 10 weeks, for a placement year or a career move.