I Let 5 Marketing Students Compete — The Results Surprised Me!

I gave five digital marketing students a real business challenge: create social media content promoting my book. I published their work across my channels, measured the results, and asked AI to analyse what worked. The outcome? *4,398 views, 110 interactions — and some unexpected winners.* But the biggest discovery wasn't about social media. It was about how students learn. As an entrepreneur and digital marketing lecturer, I wanted to test whether experiential learning could generate something more valuable than a traditional classroom exercise. The students created different images, headlines, captions and hashtags. Their content went in front of real audiences, and after a week I shared the performance data with them. The competitive juices immediately started flowing! In Episode 13, I explore: • Which student generated the strongest overall performance • Why the content attracting most attention wasn't necessarily reaching the most new people • How different creative approaches performed on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok • What AI identified about persuasion, curiosity, trust and engagement • Where ChatGPT made mistakes and why human judgement remains essential • Why delivering experiential learning at scale is my next challenge This is part of my ongoing experiment to discover whether artificial intelligence can help me sell 1,000 copies of my book, An Entrepreneur's Story, in 12 months. *A question for educators:* Would you use real business performance data to assess your students' marketing skills? And for business owners: Would you let marketing students create and test content for your business? Subscribe to follow the experiment, including the results, mistakes and lessons. 📘 My book — An Entrepreneur's Story: Seen It. Done It. Got the T-Shirt! https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CHLDHKHD/ #ExperientialLearning #DigitalMarketing #AIinEducation