Over the coming weeks, we’ll be highlighting the best online courses to sharpen your skills in 2021 as part of our new #alwaysbelearning series. From copywriting to paid advertising and SEO, we’ll share the best resources out there. After all, we are professional and self-development enthusiasts here at inSegment, and we’re all about setting yourself up for success in the new year.
To kick things off, here are the 10 best digital marketing fundamentals courses:
1. LinkedIn Learning – Online Marketing Foundations
In this course, you’ll learn how to promote your business effectively online and develop a targeted online marketing strategy that engages potential customers throughout the digital landscape. Topics covered include paid search, video, social media, email marketing, display advertising, and performance measurement.
2. HubSpot – Inbound Marketing Certification
Designed for business owners and professional marketers, this intermediate course includes 10 inbound marketing-focused lessons and tons of videos, broken down into easily-digestible topics. Included is a downloadable study guide and quizzes to test your new-found knowledge, plus an optional exam.
3. SEMrush – SEO Fundamentals
This is an inSegment favorite and as certified SEMrushers ourselves, we can attest to the quality of this course. There are 31 lessons included which cover all the SEO basics in a mere four hours. Each section is broken down into video lessons of just three to five minutes, making this ideal for those with busy lives who prefer quick, digestible knowledge bites, rather than a full four-course meal in one sitting.
4. Skillshare – Introduction to Social Media Strategy
This is one of Skillshare’s most popular classes in online digital marketing and is designed to help newbies harness the real power of social media to build brand awareness, drive traffic, and increase sales in just 45 minutes. The courses are led by Brian Peters from Shopify and are packed with tips and tricks for marketing rookies.
5. Udemy – The Complete Digital Marketing Course
This is perfect for pre-startups that want to invest time (and some money) in becoming knowledgeable in all areas of online marketing. The course covers SEO, YouTube marketing, Facebook marketing, Adwords, analytics, and more. For anyone who wants to get an idea off the ground, there’s even a guide to building a WordPress website in an hour without any coding, with other more daunting areas like Google Adwords are also broken down
6. Coursera – Marketing in a Digital World
This is a structured course with quite a bit of homework for those who want to understand the trends driving digital marketing and are willing to put time aside every week for a month. Of all the courses outlined, this is certainly not for the fainthearted – this is a program that is designed to be completed in four weeks and combining videos, reading, practice projects, and peer-graded assessments, with about 10 hours of work doled out in the first week.
7. Moz – The Beginner’s Guide to SEO
This guide is designed to cover all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site. If you’re serious about improving search traffic and are unfamiliar with SEO, we recommend reading the Beginner’s Guide to SEO front-to-back.
8. eMarketing Institute – Web Analytics Course
eMarketing Institute provides free beginners level digital marketing courses with certifications and eBooks. With this Web Analytics Course, you will earn certification upon completion (did we mention for free?) and cover the basics of analytics. You will learn about web analytics tools and software you used for tracking performance, as well as which metrics you need to track in order to get the full picture of your website’s activity and success
9. Digiteers – Social Media Marketing Intensive
This course will take you through the latest and greatest techniques for creatively engaging social media, featuring strategies to maximize your results. You’ll learn how to take a methodical approach to your social media campaigns and boost the impact of your marketing initiatives with in-depth advice that will help you deliver positive, measurable results on all the major networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more
10. SEMrush – Content Marketing Fundamentals
With this course you will dive into the inner workings of content marketing and learn how you can use content to complement and promote your brand in this series of video lessons. This is a free, 2-hour course that is comprised of 13 lessons. If you want to incorporate content in your marketing strategy, but don’t know where to start, take this course and you’ll learn how it can enrich and promote your brand online.
