A lot of us have big ideas which we think will change the world, we may have the skills to build solutions as engineers, doctors, or lawyers. Some of us prescribe to being entrepreneurs, some of us are creatives, designers.
But in order to succeed, we need customers, investors, and partners to learn about our business solution. In this digital day and age, one of the most effective ways to get the word out there is through digital marketing, and taking a digital marketing course will help you learn how.
If you have a business idea that you think will leave an impact or will make you rich but do not know how to get it out there, if you want to start a career in digital marketing but do not know where to begin, what resources to use, what digital marketers earn or what tools to use, then you just hit the jackpot because this article will introduce you to the best digital marketing courses out there.
In this article, we will introduce you to some of the main marketing platforms and tools out there as well as the free digital marketing course that provide you certificates in the process.
The most popular/effective digital marketing methods:
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Pay Per click (PPC)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Websites (advertising on other websites, co-marketing, backlinks)
- Content marketing
Most popular/effective digital marketing platforms:
- Google (SEM, SEO, PPC)
- Facebook & other social platforms (Social media marketing, content marketing)
- Websites – Shahid.net.
Digital marketing course platforms
- Google Digital Workshop
- Google Academy
- Facebook Blueprint
- Digital Marketing Institute
- Coursera
- Skillshare
We will discuss:
- Google Ads
- Google keyword planner
- Google Analytics
- Facebook ads
- Simple video design tools
- Simple email marketing tools.
Digital marketing course in running Google Ads with a certificate
We always talk of running paid promotion, one of the main channels is google. Google is where your customers turn to when searching for products or services, that’s why it is vital that you are there and that they see your website’s name there, this is what we call, being at the right place at the right time.
Google ads and showing up on the top of the search bar is not only related to who spends the most money, the payment is one of three factors the Google algorithm considers when deciding which website to show up at the top, Google calls this, the quality score
Think about it this way, when you search for sunglasses and get 4 main results at the top with the ad icon next to them, do you think the top one is the one who spent the most? Absolutely not, Google considers:
- Expected clickthrough rate (CTR): The likelihood that your ad will be clicked when shown.
- Ad relevance: How closely your ad matches the intent behind a user's search.
- Landing page experience: How relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad.
I know it all sounds too complicated if you are a beginner and that is why Google created the Google Skill Shop where students can enroll in free digital marketing courses, learn how to set a Google Ads account, key concepts of Google AdWords, the different kinds of ads there is, learn how to run those ads, all in an interactive way with quizzes, assessments, videos, homework, and in multiple languages. It surely is a good course to consider.
Related: you may check this article for digital tools, best ways, and tips on how to convert your leads into paying customers.
Google keyword planner
The Google keyword planner is a tool to help you understand what users search for, the volume those words have been searched for, the appropriate bids (payments) you should spend on those words. It is definitely a good skill to add to your digital marketing skills.
Let’s run a test, going back to our shoes example from earlier, you are a business that sells shoes in Dubai and would like to have a better idea what users search for when they look for shoes.
You can set the language the search is conducted with, the currency of the bids, the location, and many other filters. Then, voila, the tools shows you the terms related to your search, how much it recommends you to bid on those terms, the level of competition, which we recommend to stay away from highly competitive terms if you are still starting up and go for medium or low.
The tool helps you see that users don’t usually search for “shoes”, they look up things like: Nike air force 1, Jordan 1, Nike shoes, adidas shoes, and boots. Knowing this will help you better write your product description, your SEO, and essentially, your organic ranking.
Though it is easy to use, top digital marketing experts recommend checking the Google resources which provide a good course for free on how to use the tool.
Digital marketing course in Google Analytics for free
Imagine owning a restaurant but having customers walk in and leave instantly without saying a word, in the online word, this is what we call “the bounce rate”. Ever entered a website and closed the tab directly? Of course you have, this means you bounced off of that website.
Google Analytics is another free tool to use, Google analytics helps you see what happens on your website, where your visitors come from, how long they spend on your site, which country and which city, what times, whether they visited using a mobile phone, tablet, or a computer, what brand is the phone, all the way to which internet provider they use. All of this data can be vital for your business.
Imagine you run a travel agency, you have a fantastic website that you built using the GoDaddy website builder, you have read this article, learned which Key words to target using step two, and then started running a paid promotion as you were taught in step one, and your ads run in Latin America. You notice that users visit your website using a mobile phone and that you have received few inquiries, but lots of users aged 40 and above using a computer visit your website by clicking on your ad and bounce directly, they basically get there and bounce off instantly and you start wondering, why? You do some extra digging and realize that most of them have Spanish as the language of their browser. Then you realize that maybe you should make your website multilingual and add a Spanish version.
Once the course finishes, You would have learned all those secrets and improved your digital marketing skills, all you have to do is to enroll in a simple free online digital marketing training course from the Google Analytics Academy and earn a free certificate from Google which will make locked and loaded to understand your users behavior on your website so you provide them a better experience there.
Related: In the digital world, Google analytics is a priceless tool that you do not pay for. you can check out how to set it up and analyze your website traffic here.
Digital marketing course to run Facebook ads for free.
Facebook and Instagram are great platforms to advertise your products and services given that they combined serve over four billion people around the world.
But running ads on those social media platforms can be challenging, you need to create a Facebook page, a business Instagram account, link them together, set a payment method, create attractive designs, know which channel to use, which form of posts to use, will you use a carousel? An image? A video? a regular post?,
Once you have figured all this out, you need to decide whether to keep users on Facebook or get them to visit the E-store that you built using GoDaddy, whether you would like them to fill out a form on Facebook or contact you on messenger or perform those actions on your website.
You must also set up your Facebook business ad account, and many other steps.
Luckily, Facebook has their Facebook blueprint platform which acts as their academy which offers a series of courses to provide you digital marketing courses free of charge to teach you how to run ads on their platforms as well as valuable updates to their new digital tools.
Related: Facebook for business cannot be ignored in the world of marketing, for more details you can read this article about running a Facebook business account.
Learn how to create simple videos
We live in age where content is produced every minute and you need to create something engaging enough to capture users attention, videos are more engaging to most people now a days.
The GoDaddy studio is an excellent tool to create visuals easily without turning to heavy software like Adobe Premiere which requires YEARS to master. It uses the concept of slides and drag and drop of images to create beautiful designs.
Another tool is Canva, Canva has free plans and paid plans that are friendly for a startup’s bank account, it uses a similar concept to the one used by GoDaddy Studio.
Canva has its own good course to introduce you to their platform.
Free email marketing tools
In marketing we have a term called, customer retention, which refers to retaining your customers, someone who has purchased your product or used your services is someone who trusted you in the first place, studies have shown that Almost 65% of a company's business comes from repeat customers.
One of the best ways to get a customer who purchased a product from you to purchase again is by sending them emails of your new products, your promotions, and your discounts.
GoDaddy’s email marketing is a fantastic tool that uses a drag and drop concept to get create lively beautiful emails.
You can personalize your emails by adding your customer’s name for instance, or automatically get an email sent to them on their birthdays with a birthday wish.
You could invite them to buy new products because they purchased previously related ones, for instance, if a customer purchased a laptop from your store, you could email them next week with an offer on new mousse or mouse pads that you have in store.
It is more effective than you think
The Godaddy’s How-To is a hub to provide you free digital marketing course to learn digital marketing. The how to use the GoDaddy email marketing is a fantastic digital marketing course that will get you ready to have those customers walk through the door again.
That’s a wrap
The digital marketing field though is a relatively new field, it sure is wide, there are hundreds of different tools and channels to use, wrapping your head around it can be difficult at first, We do not promise it will get easy with hard work but we can promise that you will get used to its difficulty by practicing.
