If you run your own business – or have to promote any kind of business – you need to know at least a bit about digital marketing. Like so many things, even if you leave that stuff to the professionals you need to at least be literate in the terms and concepts of digital marketing to be able to hire and delegate to the experts.
It also overlaps with analytics (for who and where to target your efforts) and copywriting (a lot of which will be used in digital marketing), so even if you aren’t solely responsible for digital marketing, you probably still use it in lots of different ways.
Digital marketing covers a really broad array of topics, so one of the best ways to start is to get an overview of the field and then start experimenting with niches.
Introduction to Marketing – University of British Columbia
This edX course gives you an up-to-date university marketing unit, which includes digital marketing techniques but contextualises them in a good grounding of marketing teaching. As with other edX courses you can pay to get a certificate at the end, but it’s otherwise accessible for free.
Internet Marketing for Smart People – Copyblogger
Because digital marketing is seen by so many as a get-rich-quick scheme it can be a bit of a wild west out there, with snake oil sales people looking to exploit newbies. Copyblogger, however, assumes that you’re not an idiot, you just don’t necessarily know anything about digital marketing yet. They lay it all out for you in a structured manner in this free course.
Social Brilliant – Laura Roeder
A lot of smaller companies just handball social media to someone who doesn’t necessarily have a master plan in place, but this course on Edgar University gets you thinking strategically about how you can use social media to drive traffic and bring in more leads.
Facebook Blueprint – Facebook
If you want to know how specifically to improve your use of Facebook for digital marketing, you could do a lot worse than look at the material Facebook have put together to train businesses to use their platform. It’s really a bunch of how-to and tips pages that have been cleverly linked together into a curriculum you can work through at your own pace.
Marketing for Developers – Justin Jackson
Okay, so you’re a developer. Do you really need to know about digital marketing? This course by Justin Jackson brings digital marketing nous to work out whether anyone will actually buy the software you’re developing. He then takes you through the next, equally if not more important step: how to get them to buy the software you develop. The course is also available separately as a book, if that’s your thing, or you can get a bundle that includes both the book and access to the course.
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