10 Best Digital Marketing Courses To Stay Ahead In The Digital Era

Over $70 billion is spent on digital marketing in the US, taking Digital Marketing Courses is now more useful than ever!

Taking Digital Marketing Courses is a great way to pick up one of the most important online businesses and media skills. If you have a blog, e-commerce product, Instagram page, or a cat video that isn’t reaching your target audience, then it’s time to roll up your sleeves and apply some digital marketing magic to your content.

But like all magic, you need to learn the tricks of the trade from a master first. Luckily, many marketing industry leaders are willing to share their secrets and have developed well-put-together Digital Marketing Courses. Some of the courses are free, while others come at a price.

They are great not only for business owners who can’t afford to hire a digital marketer but people who want to work as a digital marketer. With millions of dollars spent on digital marketing, acquiring skills to promote your business are more useful and cost-efficient than ever.

We’ve rounded up 10 of the best Digital Marketing Courses for training available online for the complete novice to help you.

1) The Complete Digital Marketing Training Course on Udemy

With over 300,000 students and a 4.5, The Complete Digital Marketing Training Course is one of Udemy’s bestselling courses.

Udemy is one of the largest destinations for online courses and offers a certificate upon completing the course. The program combines more than one thousand courses divided into eight topics that cover everything you need to know about digital marketing.

The topics include:

• Digital Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Google Ads (Adwords)
• Copywriting
• Marketing Strategy
• Facebook Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Sales Funnel
• And Mail Chimp.

Students are taught through a series of video lectures and projects at the end of each section to practically apply what they’ve learned.

Udemy’s Digital Marketing Course costs $200, but you can often find it at a discounted price if you continually check up on the page every once in a while. Today, it’s at a whopping $10.44, but don’t worry if you missed it, as the offer is bound to return.

If you enroll and don’t really like what you’re getting, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee. A month should be enough time for you to gauge how useful it actually is for you, and you can then check out other Digital Marketing Courses.

You can check out Udemy’s digital marketing training course here.

2) Adwords Digital Marketing Training Course by Google

Knowing how to use Adwords, and get the most out of it, is a given for digital marketers today. And what better place to learn about it than from the company itself! Google has a short and free guide on the best resources to guide you through how Adwords works called the Google Online Marketing Challenge.

The topics included in its digital marketing training course include:

• Introduction to Digital Marketing
• Adwords Fundamentals
• Search Advertising
• Display Advertising
• Mobile Advertising
• Video Advertising
• Shopping Advertising, Analytics
• Tools and Best Practices
• And Google My Business.

In over 9 years, more than 100,000 people from across 100 countries have taken part in this challenge.

The fun part is that Google awards prizes to the best and offers up to USD 10,000 per month for student teams to develop online advertising campaigns and implement the same for at least 4 weeks and get conversions for their nonprofit partner. You can visit the site here.

3) Digital Marketing Nanodegree by Udacity

Udacity is one of the most popular centers for online learning on the internet, as it offers certified credentials that you can list on your CV.

This year it has introduced the digital marketing Nanodegree – a 3-month course that costs $499. The course has been built in partnership with frontrunners in the marketing industry: Google, Facebook, HubSpot, Hootsuite, Moz, and MailChimp. The Nanodegree does come at a steep price, but it is worth it.

You get quality lectures from industry leaders and the opportunity to interact with mentors, other students, and the instructors in virtual classrooms. You also get access to forums where you can discuss problems and ideas.

Topics included in this digital marketing training course are:

• Marketing Fundamentals
• Content Marketing
• Social Media Marketing and Advertising
• Search Engine Marketing and Optimization
• Display and Video Advertising,
• Email Marketing
• Measurement and Optimization with Google Analytics.

They also offer one-to-one mentor and a career coach.

So if you’re interested, hurry up and enroll by November 13th! You can check out the Udacity Nanodegree here.

4) SEO courses by Moz

Moz is a software company that specializes in making marketing products that focus on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), which is the method used to optimize your website to draw more traffic from search engines.

Considering SEO is their specialization, they know it inside out, and they’re not holding back on what they know.

You can visit Moz Academy on the Moz website, which offers “fresh, frequently updated content on how to do inbound marketing.” In short (and free!) video lectures, you get the opportunity to learn all about SEO, link earning, social media, brand, and content marketing – all from the comfort of your home.

Moz has also designed the immensely popular SEO Training Course on Udemy, garnering over 200,000 students. The free digital marketing training course for SEO covers SEO Strategy Development, Site Audits and Structure, Keyword Research Basics, On-Page SEO Fundamentals, Link building, and Off-Page SEO, SERP Features (a.k.a. Featured Snippets), and Reporting on SEO.

In 18 short lectures, the course does not feel overwhelming and is backed with the latest SEO statistics. You can visit Moz Academy here or the SEO Training Course by Moz on Udemy here.

5) Diploma in Social Media Marketing on Alison

To master digital marketing, you need to be great at social media marketing. Businesses use social media differently than casual users – they have a different set of tools and a much tougher audience to woo.

Even if you’re active on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you will still need to learn how to leverage these networks to attract traffic to your website or social media page.

Alison is a large community that offers certified courses for free to its more than six million registered users. The center for online learning has a pretty impressive course for social media marketing.

The topics it covers include the “use of email marketing, affiliate marketing, using social media tools such as Twitter, podcasting and blogging, and how to use Facebook to create a business page and get it noticed by current and potential customers.”

Check out Social Media Marketing Courses & Certifications on Alison here. The Digital Marketing Courses by Alison are among the most preferred courses online.

6) Content Marketing Certification Course –HubSpot

As already known, content is the cornerstone of digital marketing. There is, hence, little doubt about HubSpot’s content-based course being a handy one. The course is absolutely free for those who are willing to learn, and a certificate will be given to those who take it.

It contains 52 videos, each of which deals with the techniques and essential tips to create relevant and eye-catching digital marketing content. The course is sure to give you a peek into the many ways how content can do wonders for a digital marketing plan and why it is so important. Below you can see the course topics:

• The power of storytelling
• Building a content creation
• Framework
• Planning a long-term content strategy
• Generating content ideas
• Creating quality blog content
• Your audience loves to read and share
• How HubSpot uses blogging to rank #1 on Google
• Extending the value of your content through repurposing
• Creating topic clusters and pillar pages
• How to create a successful video marketing strategy
• Building a guest blogging
• Strategy powered by SEO
• How to effectively promote content
• Measuring and analyzing your content

When it comes to Digital Marketing Courses’ benefits, this one surely sets high standards in content-based marketing strategies. You can visit here.

7) PPC University Course – Wordstream

The PPC University course contains useful articles relating to PPC and search engine marketing. You will learn how to find relevant keywords and how best to use them. For the advertisements, you will learn tricks on measuring the quality to determine what parts to work more on.

You will also be taught the important point and basics of paid search engine marketing and the more advanced PPC strategies relevant to digital marketing. The course is absolutely free and open for those who want to learn advanced PPC strategies.

8) eMarketing Institute Online

The eMarketing Institute course contains 10 e-books that are absolutely FREE for those who wish to read them. Ranging from basic SEO marketing to email campaigns, these ten books on this online course cover various topics.

The course also provides a certificate that can prove to be very helpful for you. All the more reason to join the course for absolutely free and learn the important tricks in the trade relating to digital marketing in general. This course also includes a Web Analytics course, and it provides certification for the same.

9) Social Marketing Training by Hootsuite Academy

Dealing primarily with social media marketing, this course by Hootsuite is also absolutely free for professionals who want to brush up on their SMM skills. The course contains 6 chapters, all dealing with social media marketing, and its running time is 6 hours.

The topics covered in the course will range from optimizing social media profiles to more advanced social media promotional strategies.

The course deals with the techniques and tricks that are prevalent today, and it helps professionals stay updated with the changing trends in the world of SMM. The best part is that the course is absolutely FREE. You can visit here to view the course.

10) Inbound Digital Marketing Course by HubSpot Academy

The term “inbound digital marketing” is coined by HubSpot academy. The term describes a funnel that attracts consumers into your business. Hence, the topic of this course is inbound marketing.

The Inbound Digital Marketing Course by HubSpot will teach you how to create content for your marketing campaign through 34 videos. Inbound marketing is all about the content that can somehow suck-in the customers into the funnel, and this is what you will get with this course.

The essential tips and tricks are another boon you understand and implement an effective content-based digital marketing strategy. This course is among the most innovative and effective Digital Marketing Courses you can find.

Don’t want to do full Digital Marketing Courses?

See Other Ways to Stay Ahead of the Curve in Digital Marketing

The world moves fast. Digital marketing moves even faster. It takes a lot more than simply buying the latest iPhone upon release to keep up with digital trends. Billion-dollar social companies seemingly pop up overnight, algorithms change daily, and millennials are already on to the next thing.

It’s hard out there for a digital marketer. How is it possible to keep up with an ever-evolving market? Here are the top five ways to maintain your edge if you don’t want to put your trust in any Digital Marketing Courses.

1) Stay Active On Social Media

Social media serves a lot of different purposes, but one that it excels at is spreading information. Follow the right people, and all of the most up-to-date digital resources will flow your way effortlessly in links and infographics.

Social media allows you to reap the benefits of somebody else doing the hard work, spending hours researching, and publishing the data. Find digital marketing influencers that you trust to keep you up to date on what’s happening in the world.

You will have to put in work to maintain a valuable network, making sure your feed never gets stale. And, once you get the links, you can move on to the second-best way to stay up to date.

2) Read

It’s not enough to look at headlines and 280 characters’ worth of opinion. You need to dive into the weeds. Grow a list of blogs to read regularly—and then really read them. Need to keep up with search marketing? Try Search Engine Land.

Which company is the latest to raise series A funding? Tech Crunch probably has the answer.

Use the influencers you’ve been following on social media to guide which blogs to follow. It would be impossible to read every piece of content on digital marketing produced. Form a foundation of high-level blogs and magazines (print isn’t completely dead) and then build off of that into specific areas of interest.

3) Get Out Into The Real World

Just because digital marketing only exists online doesn’t mean you have to. Joining marketing organizations and attending events is a great way to absorb what other people are doing to build off for yourself.

If your town isn’t a bustling metropolis filled with marketing associations, consider starting your own. Either way, getting a group of digital marketers together is a sure-fire way to stir up some good old-fashioned innovation. You won’t always be the smartest person in the room, but with the exchange of information, you’ll be able to build off of others and formulate new theories to test.

Conferences offer another great opportunity to learn from other experts in digital marketing. Oftentimes conferences draw in people from beyond your immediate vicinity, offering new perspectives you might not receive locally.

4) Have a Mentor and be a Mentor

Like the previous point, mentoring is an exchange of expertise and a way to build off others’ ideas. In any profession, you should have a mentor, but especially in digital marketing.

Find someone to learn from that’s been in the industry for more than 10 years. The changes that have happened in digital marketing in 10 years are staggering. Learning from someone who has navigated each of those changes successfully will be invaluable in staying ahead of the curve in the future.

You should also consider becoming a mentor yourself. The younger generation will always be leading the way in new technology and platforms. So while you’re providing wisdom, you might just get some tips on what’s new back from them.

5) Always be Testing

This last point is probably the most important way to stay up to date in digital marketing. All of the other options have relied on other people to do the work. When you rely on others, you’ll never be number one.

You might be an expert and a thought leader, but never quite the top. The only way to truly get ahead of the pack is to challenge industry assumptions and test new solutions.

Be experimental. But, base your starting point and hypothesis on data gathered from the other 4 methods above. Success in digital marketing is often achieved by standing out from the crowd. What’s going to make users click your AdWords campaign? What type of posts works best on Facebook? Test your theories and then use your findings to blow the competition away.

Your tests won’t always work, but they will always help you grow. These are essential tips if you don’t wish to look for Digital Marketing Courses online.

In conclusion

There is no secret that you can not learn marketing by listening to a professor inside a classroom in the current days. The digital world is changing so fast that even the most powerful universities cannot be up to date with their programs.

So go out there and learn it. Check the best courses online, take advantage of those that are free. If they are not enough, consider starting the paid ones.

In case you don’t believe in certificates, go ahead and stay on top of the knowledge following blogs, forums, Twitter, or reading the main publishers, such as Techcrunch, Social Engine Land, Social Engine Journal, or any other that you like. Podcats are also becoming a rich source of information.

With all this information available, don’t think twice. Make learning a part of your routine, and you will end up getting used to it and even liking it.