The Online Master’s in Marketing Degree

As a marketer, you must be ready to meet the challenges of a rapidly evolving digital world. The William & Mary Online Master of Science in Marketing degree program will prepare you to lead in this dynamic field, instilling deep, far-reaching expertise in digital marketing tools, technologies and strategies used by forward-thinking marketers across industries. Building on our history of innovation, this program is an extension of the long-standing foundation of excellence that places our graduate business programs among the highest ranked in the nation. Explore our curriculum to learn how you’ll get a deeper dive into marketing than you would in a general MBA program, and to see how you can earn your degree faster than you would in the average part-time marketing master’s program.

Whether you are looking to pivot your career into marketing or advance to upper management and the C-suite, our Online Master’s in Marketing offers everything you need to thrive as a marketer in this global, digital age.

Online MSM Program Details

  • Complete in as few as 15 months
  • Part-time schedule
  • 10 courses
  • 33 credits
  • 1 free Jump Start course
  • 1 on-campus residency
  • 2 opportunities to start per year

Earn a Degree That Employers Know and Trust

A degree from William & Mary is a recognized stamp of academic excellence. Define your career and stand out amongst your peers.

#5

Best Business Professors1

#1

Best Business School for Learning2

#18

Best Online Master’s in Business Programs (Excluding MBA)3

Learn More. Earn More.

A degree from William & Mary is a recognized stamp of academic excellence. Define your career and stand out amongst your peers.

The numbers are in, and your level of education can make a difference when it comes to salary. With a master’s degree in hand, you can earn 18% percent more on average than you would with a bachelor’s degree alone.4

$175,830
annual mean wage for marketing managers in Washington, D.C.-Arlington-Alexandria, Va.-Md.-W.Va.5
$227,429
average base salary in Washington, D.C. for a CMO6

Build Your Career on the Strongest Foundation With Focused Core Competencies

The program focuses on three core competencies, with courses that speak directly to each competency. These are further reinforced with the Marketing Challenge, which is incorporated throughout the program, creating an immersive experience that allows you to step up as a marketing leader who can effectively apply these competencies before you graduate.

#1 with student working on a laptop

Analytics & Insights

  • Use data to interpret insights
  • Speak the language of data

Courses:

  • Analytics for Evaluation & Situation Analysis
  • Analytics for Planning & Optimization
#2 with student smiling

Marketing Innovation

  • Implement interventions to develop products and services
  • Generate large solution spaces that visualize possibilities, seek feedback and test new ideas

Courses:

  • Product Management & New Product Development
  • Market-driven Innovation Strategy & Management
#3 with two students working together on a tablet

Integrated Marketing Communications

  • Amplify value through integrated campaign management and digital content management
  • Explore how modern IMC creates experiences that increases consumer engagement, strengthens brand differentiation and demand, and much more

Courses:

  • Integrated Campaign Marketing
  • Digital Content Management

Be the Leader You’ve Always Wanted

William & Mary's online program creates a new type of marketing leader by cultivating disparate skills at the intersection of data, innovation and creativity.

Marketing leaders are perpetual beta testers.

They are continuously learning, optimizing and experimenting.

They are adept at the digital and marketing analytics-based skills that drive innovative decision-making. They are capable and fluent in the rapidly evolving technology that defines their profession, and they recognize its role as a catalyst for collaboration and insight.

They are modernizers in a dynamic world and are not bound to the mechanistic rhythms of conventional workflows. Embracing ambiguity and iteration, graduates of this program understand that the best use of time is often nonlinear.

Marketing leaders see problems as an opportunity for innovation.

They treat even the most difficult problems as opportunities for strategic creativity and inventive brand strategy. They approach their work informed by, but not beholden to, time-tested methods: They balance the wisdom to respect proven processes with the courage to adapt them—or even radically change them—to meet current challenges.

Marketing leaders look outward.

They understand that broad collaboration is key to identifying problems and creating solutions. As a result, they act with humility, engage with empathy, and create a culture of respect in which all are challenged to do their best work. They cultivate new ideas by inviting diverse perspectives, engaging in deep immersion, encouraging open debate and treating every idea as a hypothesis to be tested.

They not only collaborate with colleagues, but with the customer. Social media invites dialogue and the ability for customers to opt-in. Customer empowerment and participation drive marketing leaders to experiment with and optimize marketing strategies.

Marketing leaders use colleague collaboration and customer input to make an impact on the problem at hand, positively affecting the companies for which they work and the markets they serve.

Video Transcript

Greg Roland:
Having a digital focus and having a digital skillset as a marketer is non-negotiable in today's world. William & Mary's Master's of Marketing program is unique because of its intentional focus on digital marketing and balancing analytics with creativity, and because of the professional development. Everything that I'm learning is useful for what I'm doing right now and where I hope to be. Specifically, some of the larger concepts of wicked problems, design thinking, disruption in the marketing industry. I'm absolutely at a different professional capability from the beginning of the program to even two classes in.

Lead as a Modern, Forward-Thinking Marketer

Our graduates are:

  • Empowered with leading-edge digital marketing skills and strategic, imaginative vision
  • Adept at using analytical tools to drive decision-making
  • Fluent in quantitative and qualitative analysis techniques, including conjoint analysis, cluster analysis and customer lifetime value calculations

Master’s of Science in Marketing Program Overview

Faculty Director of the Online MSM program Matt Williams, shares insights into what makes this program unique. Learn more about how you'll grow as a marketer through the Marketing Challenge, the defining project that you’ll build throughout your coursework. Williams also shares how this program will help you put data and creativity to use for truly effective marketing efforts.

“When you have data that can inform creativity and creativity that can be tracked by data and can be optimized by data, you have two really powerful forces in the marketing world working together and that's what you learn in the Online Master’s of Marketing at the Mason School.”

Video Transcript

Matt Williams:
My name is Matt Williams. I'm a visiting clinical professor in the marketing area at the Mason School of William Mary. I'm also the faculty director of the Online Masters of Science and Marketing Program. In the online Masters of Marketing program, we're gonna look at brands who are managing their participation efforts in really interesting ways.

You're gonna see case studies of brands who have engaged their customers in ways that'll blow your mind, and how they capitalize on opportunities that just kind of came up outta nowhere. They didn't know this was gonna happen, but they were watching, they saw something they could capitalize on and they capitalize on. One of the things we're really excited about the online master's program is the marketing challenge. And the marketing challenge is something you develop personally in the very first class. Every student defines their own marketing challenge, which is a a big important issue that you think you can solve using all the tools of marketing, you're gonna define that challenge in the first class, and then you're gonna carry it with you through the entire 15 month program.

As you start to learn things about how to manage different aspects of the marketing mix through the master's program, you're gonna be applying those learnings to that challenge, and you're gonna be cumulatively building a solution to the challenge. One of the things you're gonna bring into that challenge is participation marketing. How could you use the tools of participation and the frameworks of participation to solve this big heady marketing challenge that you identified in the beginning of the course? At the end of the program, you're gonna have a marketing plan that addresses specifically your challenge and uses every lever of the marketing mix to solve it.

In our online masters of marketing program, we combine the two most important forces in the marketing world today. One is data, the second is creativity, right? So there's lots of places you can go and learn a lot about data. There are some places you can go to learn about creativity, but there aren't many places that do what we do, which is balance those two things and show how they connect to each other. Data without creativity is just information. Creativity without data is aimless. Ideas that don't have any grounding in strategy, both of those are a bad idea. But when you have data that can inform creativity and creativity that can be be tracked by data and can be optimized by data, you have two really powerful forces in the marketing world working together, and that's what you'll learn in the online Masters of Marketing at the Mason School.

Who’s Earning the Online MS in Marketing?

Our current students come from backgrounds in marketing, advertising, business, communications and finance. Get a snapshot of the people most likely to be in your cohort:

69%
female
31%
male
7
years of work experience
30
average student age

Finding a Common Ground: Residency and the Jump Start Course

Students in the Online Master’s in Marketing program arrive with a diversity of personal and professional backgrounds. That’s why our marketing master’s degree program includes two opportunities to begin building a shared experience with your cohort, both in terms of marketing knowledge and your interpersonal relationships with one another.

Professional student dressed in button up and tie sits in a chair working on Apple laptop

Jump Start Course

The Jump Start Course helps you start well and succeed in the intellectually challenging Online MSM program.

It’s comprised of three sections:

  • Knowledge Check: a short quiz designed to point out those areas where you might need to brush up on your marketing basics or confirm that you’ve all the knowledge you need to begin the program
  • Marketing Principles: Our discipline rests on some timeless ideas. This module includes the core concepts of marketing that you’ll need to understand as you begin the program
  • Marketing Math, Finance and Analytics: More than ever, marketing relies on data and marketing analytics to uncover insights and inspire ideas. These resources ensure you’re up to date on the principles and tools you’ll need to complete the data-oriented areas of the program

Residency Weekend

For the Residency Weekend, we invite you to make the trip to our beautiful Williamsburg campus to meet your online classmates and faculty face to face for the first time. In addition to bonding and networking over the course of three days, you will complete a one-credit course introducing you to unique aspects of the William & Mary experience and helping develop the interpersonal skills that are essential for any successful marketing leader.

students pose for a picture behind a large green banner that reads "Welcome Online Students"

The residency curriculum is structured around three themes:

  • Collaboration: Content and exercises designed to capitalize on face-to-face opportunities
  • Culture: Experiences to more tightly bind students to the culture of William & Mary and the Raymond A. Mason School of Business
  • Connections: Social interactions designed to create relationships between students and faculty that endure beyond the end of the program

Residency Weekends are offered twice per academic year. While we recommend attending the residency weekend nearest to the beginning of your time in the program, doing so is not required.
Not interested in our online marketing degree? Check out our other online or residential programs.

Interested in Our Online Programs?

Feb
16

Priority Application Deadline

February 16th
Summer 2024 Term
Apr
5

Application Deadline

April 5th
Summer 2024 Term
May
6

Next Start

May 6th
Summer 2024 Term
Questions? Let’s Connect.