Three groups of students of the Master in International Business & Entrepreneurship have developed digital campaigns on promoting dissemination activities for the Horizon 2020 project PrimeFish. Their endeavors in the course of “Digital Marketing and Business Modelling” have increased the international traffic to the official website of PrimeFish and to its Facebook profile, raising awareness about the short film on seafood consumption that the project is currently carrying out.

The short film contest for PrimeFish built the basis and real-life background for the students’ digital marketing strategy. They analyzed the PrimeFish website and Facebook page, put forward a profiling of their potential target group and they designed and implemented a 3 week campaign running with Google and Facebook Ads. Birgit Hagen, Professor of International Entrepreneurship and Marketing, values the experience as very satisfying: “In our courses, we aim to link theoretical concepts with real-life projects and with the PrimeFish video contest our students had a perfect setting for their digital campaigns. They not only had much fun, they also learned a lot because they did not only design a strategy on paper, they also had the opportunity to implement, to analyze and to adjust”.

As an example, one of the campaigns was completely re-thought after a deluding start for, finally, reaching half of the clicks of the most performing campaign in just one week. The experience allowed all of the groups to enhance their performance indicators of impressions, clicks and average time spent on pages after various improvements of the pictures, text and targeting of the campaigns.

These goals were achieved with an extremely low budget, points Hagen. “With a total budget of around 450 Euros for the 3 campaigns our students got more than 1,300 clicks among the target audience of European art and design students” showing the enthusiasm and professionalism of the MIBE students. For them, it was also a learning experience which increased their knowledge and their consumption of fish during the campaign.

MIBE is a Master Programme in the Italian University of Pavia which lasts for two academic years (4 semesters). It focuses on topics in the area of International Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, with two possible areas of specialization: “International Management” and “Digital Management”. The latter curriculum provides students with the managerial and analytical skills to understand the dynamics and potential of the Digital Economy, including areas of work like: Web-based and IT start-ups/companies, implications of Industry 4.0 and in management of High Technology.