Office Hours With Dr. Magda Marchowska-Raza

Dr. Magda Marchowska-Raza is an Assistant Professor of Practice at North Dakota State University. A social media specialist, her research explores how social media brand communities (SMBCs) facilitate meaningful interactions between consumers and brands, fostering value creation and ethical marketing practices. In the classroom, Dr. Marchowska-Raza empowers the next generation of marketers to learn beyond the textbook. She frequently partners with local businesses to help students identify and solve real-world marketing challenges. As a judge for the UK Paid Media and Global Content Awards, Dr. Marchowska-Raza also understands the importance of innovation in the AI age.

In her undergraduate digital marketing course, Dr. Marchowska-Raza finds that most students have limited experience with digital media beyond their own use of social media. Integrating Novela’s simulations alongside her textbook illustrates complicated digital marketing terms and concepts through interactive engagement rather than relying on static learning and rote memorization.

To give students a foundational knowledge of social media strategy, she chose Novela’s Social Media Advertising (Meta Ads). In this simulation, students are in charge of designing a campaign for a brand called Aura Cosmetics, based on actual data and customer personas from a leading cosmetics brand.

Here’s how Novela has helped North Dakota State students understand complex digital marketing challenges.

How does Novela’s Social Media Advertising (Meta Ads) simulation fit into your syllabus?

While Marchowska-Raza finds the course textbook an invaluable resource for introducing students to digital marketing concepts, teaching the language of digital marketing often isn’t enough to demonstrate the practice of social media strategy.

“It’s so helpful to have a simulation in the week we cover social media,” Dr. Marchowska-Raza tells Novela. “Students need the vocabulary, and the book has a great dictionary attached with acronyms that the industry uses.”

However, based on her personal experience as a social media marketer, she finds there are gaps the book doesn’t cover.

“The book isn’t as specific when it comes to metrics,” Dr. Marchowska-Raza explains.

That’s where Novela comes in.

“Novela’s simulation explains social media metrics. It’s good for students to have what’s not explained in the book.”

During the week, the class learns social media concepts and strategy. Dr. Marchowska-Raza assigns Novela’s Social Media Advertising (Meta Ads) simulation. Students can play as many times as they like, testing the concepts they’ve just encountered in class.

“With Novela, they have the opportunity to perfect their social media strategy.”

Why teach social media advertising using a simulation?

Most of Dr. Marchowska-Raza’s students have had access to social media their entire lives and tend to view social through a personal, rather than marketing-based, lens. As a social media specialist, Dr. Marchowska-Raza finds it useful to give students access to the measurement tools she uses in her own practice. Novela provides students with the same metrics and dashboards they’ll be using in real-world marketing jobs within the controlled environment of the classroom.

“I have Meta-suite, and I print screens to show them what it looks like, but a still image can’t show the whole process,” she says. “Behind the scenes, social media is complex, and it’s something textbooks can’t describe. Students struggle to imagine how the process really works.”

Using Novela’s Social Media Advertising (Meta Ads) simulation, they don’t have to imagine.

“Using the simulation, students are forced to think strategically. They can plan and track their progress. For those who struggle with the concepts, it helps to come up with a plan. Novela teaches that strategic approach.”

How does Novela’s Social Media Advertising (Meta Ads) prepare students for real-world marketing jobs?

One of the big challenges of teaching students who engage constantly with social media is teaching a test-and-learn strategy that creates replicable, rather than one-off, success. Often, students can achieve goals on the first try but struggle to repeat that success in subsequent attempts. This, for Dr. Marchowska-Raza, is a unique learning opportunity Novela’s simulations provide.

“The simulations teach students to plan ahead. They need to check what happened and really track the results back to campaign activity.”

Incorporating multiple simulations and having students develop a strategy based on holistic, rather than individual, campaign success replicates the experience of actually working as a digital marketer.

“I assign the first challenge, and then the second one. Then students really find out if the strategy they’ve created works. Often, they have to completely change their mindset. Which is also something that very much mirrors digital marketing in itself. Every campaign is different, and you need to change your mindset. You can't just repeat what you've done. The steps might be similar, but the approaches will be different.”

How are your students using what they learn from Novela’s simulations outside the classroom?

At the end of the semester, students have a real-world digital marketing challenge: Helping real businesses improve their online campaigns.

“Part of my class project is having two or three businesses present a problem to students. The students pick a problem and create a digital marketing strategy,” Dr. Marchowska-Raza says. “This experience gives them a bit more inside knowledge.”

Having already experienced the tools they need to build successful campaigns through Novela’s simulations gives students the insider knowledge they need to pitch their solutions with confidence.

“They know what tools are available and how they can utilize those tools to grow and achieve the business objectives they’ve learned at the beginning of the semester.”

How do Novela’s digital marketing simulations support learners at all levels?

Meeting students where they are with the instruction they’ll need in a crowded job market is the chief objective for all higher education educators. And whether professors are using Novela’s digital marketing simulations to support B2B marketing education for MBA students or to help undergraduates think about social media from a business standpoint, Novela’s simulations provide AI-powered insights into audience, strategy, and execution. Alongside Ela, our AI copilot, students learn to use AI as a tool for developing strategy, not as an answering service. As Dr. Omar Rodríguez-Vilá, Professor in the Practice of Marketing at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, recently explained, AI is changing marketing on every level, and what students need most is technology that teaches students to understand how traditional marketing concepts apply in a new era of technology:

“It's hard,” Rodríguez-Vilá told Novela. “Conceptually, students might understand how choices feed each other or hurt the outcome when they're not thought of in a comprehensive way. But with the simulation, I think they get a deeper appreciation for what goes into marketing decisions. What level of understanding is needed about the market and the nuance involved in details that matter, such as content design or channel decisions.”

If you’re ready to give your students a firsthand look at the lecture-to-skills pipeline, find out how to incorporate Novela into your course curriculum in just two days. Schedule a demo here!