How to gain more Digital Marketing knowledge?
There are great reasons why one would like to self-educate in Digital Marketing. To name a few:
- If you’re new to Digital Marketing: to understand if you’d like Digital Marketing and like to start doing it yourself and to demonstrate your interest in the field which could help you to get your first Digital Marketing job.
- If you’re already working in a role that includes Digital Marketing: to improve your Digital Marketing planning and execution knowledge which improves your efficiency.
But what would be the best way to learn Digital Marketing? This blog post outlines the different learning methods, organisations that offer these learning opportunities, and what to consider when you make your choice.
Online vs. Face-to-face learning
Often training courses are available in an online or offline environment. There are different reasons why people choose one or the other, if not a combination of the two called blended learning.
Education Institutes vs. Online Learning Platforms
Another decision to make is where you’d like to do your Digital Marketing learning, at what type of organisation. You can breakdown the organisation that offer Digital Marketing courses into two types: education institutes and online learning platforms. Where education institutes are companies that often offer both face-to-face and online learning opportunities and are specialised in a particular industry, for example in Technology, online learning platforms offer a lot of different online courses in many different verticals, from business to creative courses in both hard and soft skills. Prices will be higher for courses you’d take at education institutes, but it’s discussable if the quality is better. The main benefit would be that courses offered by educational institutes have a better reputation than online learning platforms, and this could impact the selection process positively when you apply for a job.
These are 2 educational institutes that offer Digital Marketing courses (both online and f2f) in Australia with a good reputation in the industry:
You’d find universities and other educational institutes offer Digital Marketing course too.
There are many online learning platforms that offer online Digital Marketing courses as part of their big variety in course offerings. This is a selection of the most prominent ones:
Free Digital Marketing learning opportunities
As the above-mentioned education institutes and online learning platforms would charge you to participate in their course, there are free learning opportunities. These free courses are offered by the big players in the market: Google and Facebook. Both offer a variety of different courses with Google specialised in Digital Marketing and Data & Tech, and Facebook in Social Media Marketing.
- Google’s Learning Platform: Google Digital Garage
- Facebook’s Learning Platform: Facebook Blueprint
Another to add to this list, which I’d personally recommend, is HubSpot Academy. HubSpot is a Marketing Software provider, and they have an outstanding Academy in where you can learn about different aspects of Marketing, Marketing Technology, and Digital Marketing.
Something to highlight in regard to these free learning platforms of large organisations is that their primary objective is to sell their products and services. So always consider your options and decide for yourself if it’s beneficial for your organisation or client to start advertising on Google or Facebook, or to buy Hubspot software and services.
Other resources
The list of sources where you could learn about Digital Marketing isn’t complete yet. We’d have to add a few more sources:
- Industry bodies: Industry bodies like ADMA (Association of Data-Driven Marketing & Advertising) and MFA (Media Federation of Australia) who educate the industry in various subjects.
- Blogs / Vlogs: there are a lot of bloggers and vloggers out there who publish content about digital marketing, share their experience, and show you how to implement and manage different digital marketing campaigns and activities. For example:
- Neil Patel
- MOZ (for SEO)
- Analytics Mania (for Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager)
- Many more who you’ll come across of when doing an online search
- On-the-job learning: learning can also happen on the work floor where colleagues could share their Digital Marketing experience with you. This is seen as a very effective way of learning as you can ask a direct question and get a specific and relevant answer back that can be implemented straight away.
The value of self-educating in Digital Marketing
There is great value of learning Digital Marketing via completing course(s) and/or by following blogs and videos, and there are many ways to increase your knowledge. It provides you basic (to more specialised) knowledge of Digital Marketing which could make you more employable. But be aware, most of your value and the way to grow as a Digital Marketer comes with experience and by “doing” Digital Marketing. So, you can only call yourself a Digital Marketer once you’ve got experience implementing, managing, and reporting on Digital Marketing activities.
If you’d like to learn more about Digital Marketing and gain experience at the same time, you could participate in the Lente Digital Marketing Traineeships to become an all-round Digital Marketer. Please get in touch here.
For comments or questions about this post, please reach out to Lidy (Founder of Lente) via Lidy@LENTE.com.au.
