Digital Marketing Resources (Three Free Courses)
In today's digital age, having a comprehensive digital marketing plan is crucial for businesses looking to reach their audiences, increase their leads, and grow. The digital marketing landscape can be incredibly complicated, however, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed about where to start and how it all works. Fortunately, there are a number of online courses available that provide great insights into every aspect of the digital marketing industry and its individual components. In this article, we'll highlight three courses that are great starting points for anyone looking to improve their digital marketing skills. From building a sales plan to creating engaging content and developing a social media strategy, these courses cover all the basics and more.
HubSpot Academy: Digital Marketing Certificate
4 hours + Exercises and Exam
If you’re looking for an introduction into the multifaceted world of digital marketing world, a great place to start is by completing HubSpot’s Digital Marketing Certification. The course has 10 individual modules that total roughly four hours of lessons, plus a few more hours of quizzes, worksheets, and an exam. The lesson structure offers flexibility, allowing you to chip away at it over time, or comfortably finish it in a day, if you prefer. During HubSpot’s Digital Marketing Certificate Course, you’ll learn the fundamentals for everything needed to conduct a successful digital marketing campaign, teaching you the basics of building sales personas to carve out your niche, establishing an online presence for driving brand awareness, and increasing conversions by engaging your audience with effective content.
The course takes you through each of the steps toward building your sales plan, creating your digital marketing strategy, and developing your content calendar. It also provides a brief but detailed overview of each of the fundamental tactics of digital marketing, and how to maximize your results with each. It covers digital marketing strategies such as social media, blog and email marketing, search engine optimization, and paid search advertising. The course also provides worksheets and downloadables to help you in your learning, and provides access to Hubspot’s marketing forums, allowing you to network with other marketing professionals and discuss tricks of the trade.
Once you’ve finished the course, you’ll be able to complete the exam to receive your certification. Then, if you’re interested in learning more about any of the concepts, they also offer more in-depth courses on many of the strategies covered in the certificate course you just finished. The HubSpot Digital Marketing Certificate is a great starting point for anyone starting in the digital marketing industry, whether you’re a business owner looking to build their first marketing plan, or someone who is looking to get into the marketing industry as a career, and it’s Ridgeway Communication’s first recommendation
Canva: Graphic Design Basics
22 Minutes + Exercises
Graphic design is an important skill for almost every aspect of digital marketing. Eventually, you may opt to hire a graphic designer, however, in the meantime, we creating a free Canva account. Canva is a drag-and-drop design tool that makes it easy for anyone to create beautiful graphics for marketing documents, signage, and social media posts, even with zero experience. Once you create your account, a great place to get started, learn how to use the platform, and become more familiar with graphic design concepts, is by completing Canva’s Graphic Design Basics Course.
During the course, you’ll learn some of the basic principles of graphic design, such as proximity, alignment, spacing, contrast, and basic colour theory. The program consists of a series of short videos that pair with guided exercises in Canva that cover each topic. In total, the course will take you less than an hour, and is a great way to introduce yourself to the platform and learn the basics of graphic design. Even if you opt for a different platform, because the course covers broad design techniques, the course is still useful. Even if you plan on never designing anything in your Digital Marketing Journey, the course is still valuable because it will give you some of the language you will need to more effectively communicate with a graphic designer. Plus, it can theoretically be completed during a lunch break, so what do you have to lose?
Later: Social Strategy: Setting Goals and Choosing the Right Platforms
30 Min + Exercises
Social Media is one of the cornerstones of a great digital marketing strategy, and one of the most important factors for success is using the right platform. Later, a social marketing management platform, has a great course called “Social Strategy: Setting Goals and Choosing the Right Platform. The course teaches you about making detailed social media objectives, and provides a detailed summary of what each platform does best so that you can decide which platforms will be best for reaching your goals.
Later’s course is roughly 30 minutes of lessons, with some quizzes sprinkled throughout to check your understanding. Unlike the other courses we’ve highlighted, this class is primarily text-based, and offers lots of case studies of real-world examples. Whether you’re just starting out with digital marketing and social media and don’t know where to begin, or you’ve been at it for a couple years and want to make sure you’re on the right track, this course is a great resource for that. There are also several more courses covering strategy, analytics, and other useful concepts, which we recommend you check out afterward.
