Best Digital Marketing Courses

Digital Marketing Overview

If you are thinking about building a career in digital marketing, your decision is more than rational. First, however, you have to get familiar with all the details surrounding this business field, like the benefits and perks of being a digital marketer, what specific jobs you can land, which tools can make your work easier, and where to find the best digital marketing courses, etc.

It may sound overwhelming, but you have to learn the details. Luckily, we’ve decided to help you by creating this detailed guide on digital marketing. So, let’s begin!

Best Way to Learn Digital Marketing

The truth is, there are many ways to upskill and learn more about digital marketing for anyone looking to enter this marketing field.

You could enroll at a university or college and earn a traditional degree. This learning path may provide you with an in-depth knowledge of the subject, but in most cases, you will end up knowing the theory and lacking practical experience. So perhaps, you could look for other learning methods.

As a second option, you could enroll at some local digital marketing academy and get a certified diploma similar to a college or university degree. This learning option takes less time than a university degree, though it may cost you a significant sum of money.

You could also make use of online resources to self-learn. For instance, you could listen to digital marketing podcasts, watch videos and webinars, follow digital marketing influencers on social media, read blogs and books, and enroll in some of the best digital marketing courses online.

Just bear in mind that it’s important that you have practical skills beyond theoretical knowledge. To get more hands-on experience, you could do an internship or find a fitting company and learn on the job

Why Learn Digital Marketing

Globally, people consider the internet the best way to access information, communicate, and complete an incredible spectrum of daily tasks, one of which is shopping. Statistics show that more than 50% of the world’s population uses the internet.

So, it doesn’t really come as a surprise that companies are going digital to offer and sell both products and services. What’s more, the pandemic has kept people in their homes for quite a long time, bringing the most rapid digital transformation in marketing history.

As more companies turn online to sell, the demand for digital marketers is constantly growing, resulting in high pay wages. The average digital marketing salary in the United States is around $60,000, which is pretty much decent. But, depending on the seniority of the role, company size, industry, and other factors, the numbers are going up.

Important Benefits of Digital Marketing

Being one of the hottest industries in today’s world, digital marketing provides numerous benefits, including:

Broader Target Market

One of the most beneficial advantages of selling products and services online is that businesses can reach a broader target market regardless of location. Digital marketing can indeed remove any geographical barriers allowing companies to reach a global audience.

Detailed Marketing

Digital marketing can also help your business reach out to specific target groups that fit your criteria. For example, when marketing on digital platforms, you can use particular filters to cater to audiences likely to purchase your product or service.

Trackable Performance

Thanks to digital marketing, you can track and measure the results of your strategy and get a detailed analysis of your success or failure. This will then increase your awareness and understanding of segments you should improve and what to continue doing.

Healthy Competition

Finally, digital marketing can help you survive the competition as many online businesses depend 100% on digital mediums and others with brick-and-mortar shops and a solid online presence. There won’t be healthy competition without marketing online, and your business will most likely fail.

Digital Marketing Trends 2022

As already noted, the pandemic has put a lot of pressure on companies and their marketers as everything moved online. As a result, numerous trends have appeared to meet the requirements for successful digital marketing. Here’s what we could expect in 2022:

Email Marketing

To be able to take advantage of email marketing, you have to ensure you send the right message to the right person at the right time. In other words, you have to focus on personalization, appreciation, and design when sending emails in 2022.

Social Media Channels

Statistics can help you decide which platforms to prioritize based on monthly active users and user engagement rates. For instance, TikTok has the highest number of active users a month – 689 million, whereas Instagram has the highest user engagement rate.

Blogging and Vlogging

Creating unique and exciting content for your target audience will never go out of style. In 2022, this trend continues but with a stronger focus on valuable tutorials, tips, and memes. Also, you have to ensure your content doesn’t overwhelm users with lots of ads and pop-ups.

Social Commerce

Here’s one trend that’s slowly but steadily becoming the most preferred option among users. Social commerce means that the shopping occurs immediately on the social platform used or takes the user directly to a product page where an immediate purchase can be made.

User Reviews

What’s the first thing you look for when going on eCommerce websites? User reviews, right? Allowing current customers to give and potential customers to read unbiased comments will eventually boost your company’s reputation.

Better Product Visualization

Authenticity and better product visualization has become a norm since numerous websites try to sell low-quality replicas of specific products but use images of the original product. Hence, ensure you include preview images, 3D models, product videos, etc., to increase customers’ trust.

Video Ads

Last but not least, it is estimated that by 2023 the world’s population will reach nearly 8 billion for the first time in the history of humanity. Also, 39% of this whopping number of people will prefer watching digital videos. That said, focus on vertical and shorter video ads.

Digital Marketing Jobs

Learning digital marketing opens up many job opportunities for you to explore and further your career. Briefly put, here’s what you can do once you master your skills:

Product Marketing Jobs

The overlap between marketing, sales, and product is known as product marketing. These marketers are in charge of to-market positioning and messaging for new products and features while focusing on both potential and existing customers.

Product Marketing Specialist

The skills needed to get a product marketing specialist include strong verbal and written communication, attention to detail, multi-tasking, and excellent analytical skills. The primary responsibilities of these marketers include conducting competitor research, developing testimonial and referral programs, creating blog posts and webinars, etc.

Product Marketing Manager

A product marketing manager requires exceptional verbal and written communication, organizational, and program management skills. In addition, a manager should promote new features and services to customers, organize and host meetings to promote new products. Along with strategic messaging to sales and marketing teams for creating collateral.

Director of Product Marketing

As you climb the ladder, your communication and organizational skills should become superb. As a director of product marketing, you have to be able to handle several projects at the same time and be an excellent leader. Moreover, you should guide executive stakeholders, be both an internal and external expert in product knowledge. But, also deliver an ongoing stream of product innovations.

Content Marketing Jobs

As you can guess from the name, content marketers are in charge of creating comprehensive and relevant content for the targeted audience. With this action they’re encouraging the audience to interact with the company through site visits, sales, or content downloads.

Content Marketing Specialist

Content marketing specialists should have excellent writing skills applicable to various styles and tones and be able to meet deadlines. Main responsibilities include researching and creating blog articles, landing pages, product pages, and newsletters. All this while paying attention to SEO strategies like site structure, link building, keyword-centric search, and image optimization.

Content Marketing Manager

Exceptional writing skills are needed to be a content marketing manager. These marketers need to have a clear and detailed understanding of SEO tactics, traffic analysis, and conversion data. They should also be able to manage and coordinate other writers, both in-house and freelance. Therefore, utilize keyword search to get blog topics for reaching business goals, and cooperate with digital and print marketing teams.

Social Media Marketing Jobs

Audience building is the utmost priority of social media marketing. Through social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc., this marketing field allows businesses to reach out to a broader audience and build communities.

Social Media Specialist

The skills needed for being a social media specialist include decent writing and communication skills. As well as familiarity with social media practices, understanding of management tools, and all the social media platform trends. Furthermore, you should create and keep a calendar for social channels, engage with the target audience daily, keep a consistent brand voice, and manage social campaigns if you are such a specialist.

Social Media Manager

Managers must understand graphic design, SEO basics, paid and organic social promotion, contests, reporting, influencers, and community management. They should develop strategies to boost traffic and social media campaigns. Also, social media managers should work closely with content, product, and sales teams and implement new trends and technologies.

SEO Jobs

Understanding and implementing SEO (search engine optimization) best practices is a must if a business wants to grow traffic and brand awareness. It focuses on a combination of user-focused optimization and content marketing to ensure a company builds a strong online presence.

SEO Specialist

Working with tools like Screaming Frog, SEMrush, Search Console, and Google Analytics should be an everyday activity of SEO specialists. They should also have experience with HTML/CSS and possess excellent analytical and writing skills. In addition, SEO specialists should develop keyword research frameworks, link-building strategies, and track traffic.

SEO Manager

If you prove to be able to work cross-functionally and influence others, you may become an SEO manager. Yet, you should also have superb communication and organizational skills and understand analytics platforms and keyword/ data mining tools. In addition, SEO managers should collaborate with content teams to implement SEO best tactics, monitor content, and analyze data and results.

ECommerce Jobs

For those who aren’t yet familiar with the term, eCommerce refers to business transactions conducted online. In other words, it commonly refers to online shopping or the process of selling and buying things over the internet.

ECommerce Manager

To be an eCommerce manager, one should have strong organizational, analytical, planning, and technical skills and have in-depth knowledge of the current market competitors, pricing, products, and trends. Plus, being a manager means you should manage teams, develop financial plans, evaluate KPIs, monitor trends and performance, identify relevant contractors and vendors, etc.

ECommerce Director

Superb written and verbal communication skills, a proven track record of creating high-quality teams, and a strong ability to collaborate and lead cross-functional teams are vital to becoming an eCommerce director. The primary responsibilities of this job role include developing and implementing eCommerce strategies, identifying and testing new initiatives, and analyzing relevant data.

Customer Acquisition Jobs

Customer acquisition refers to the process of growing interest in the business’s products or services. It’s also called demand generation and is commonly characterized by inbound marketing – both paid and organic strategies that help in driving sales-qualified leads.

Digital Marketing Specialist

Digital marketing specialists should have experience working with Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Ad Manager, Bing Ads, and automation tools like Salesforce and Marketo. They should also understand SEO best practices and have decent analytical skills to perform competitive analysis and use data to create strategic recommendations.

Acquisition Marketing Manager

As you can guess, becoming a manager requires an excellent understanding of the aforementioned tools. Furthermore, an acquisition marketing manager has to have SEM expertise, superb analytical skills, and exceptional knowledge of CPA and ROI. Main job tasks include channel budget planning, daily/ weekly/ or monthly performance reporting, conducting performance data analysis, etc.

Acquisition Marketing Director

At last, after years of experience in working with web analytics, testing tools, campaign management platforms, tag management solutions, and all the needed tools, you may be promoted to acquisition marketing director. Having such a job means that you should manage and mentor specialists, measure and report KPIs, lead forecasting, and budget management for marketing channels.

Digital Marketing Tools in 2022

To work and be successful in the digital marketing world, you have to have and use the right tools, everything from email marketing and analytics to CRM (customer relationship manager) tools. Such tools can only help you execute an adequate strategy and stand out from the competition. Let’s now learn which tools can help you run impactful campaigns.

Social Media Marketing Tools

Sprout Social

The ultimate social media management platform for businesses aiming to increase social presence and results is Sprout Social. It helps create a content calendar and organize assets all in one place and allows companies to publish and schedule content across several platforms. Sprout is also great for communication and collaboration between colleagues and customers. And it provides a complete suite of social analytics.

Price: from $89 to $249 a month per user, billed annually, depending on the plan

Loomly

Here’s one perfect for smaller social teams searching for the right tool to help them organize and collaborate on content. Thanks to Loomly’s built-in calendars, deadlines, and workflows, scheduling and brainstorming content is super easy. What’s more, the tool itself creates content ideas based on trending topics and recent tweets.

Price: from $26 to $269 a month, billed annually, depending on the plan and the number of users

Audiense

The Audiense tool is ideal for those who genuinely want to identify trends and potential customers through social listening. It helps businesses pinpoint and divide their social media audiences. This helps in running laser-targeted ad campaigns and getting familiar with your customer individualities. Diving deeper into demographics, personality traits, and beyond, Audiense provides all the critical information.

Price: from a free version to $696 a month

CRM and Email Marketing (Customer Relationship Management) Tools

Lemlist

One of the best email marketing tools out there is Lemlist. The platform is mainly focused on deliverability by emphasizing the ideal times of day to send your emails and their frequency to deliver more opens and clicks. Other features include personalization tools that help your emails sound less spammy and follow-up email sequences to get more replies.

Price: from $25 to $83 a month per user, billed annually, depending on the plan

Hubspot CRM

If you are looking for the most innovative CRM tool on the market, you should definitely go for HubSpot CRM. This customer relationship management provider is designed initially to meet the needs of small businesses, although there’s a freemium model and a great range of add-ons. Its user interface is quite intuitive and includes unique email integration features.

Price: free, but with a range of paid tiers starting at $50 per user per month

Zoho CRM

The most recognizable and well-known CRM provider of software for SMBs (small to midsize businesses) is certainly Zoho. With Zoho CRM, you can rest assured that you will get a unique feature set and powerful email marketing tools at a very competitive price. Plus, there are plenty of integrations, as well as gamification modules.

Price: free trial, then from $14 to $53 a month per user, billed annually, depending on the plan

SendGrid

SendGrid provides businesses with a complete suite of email marketing services. More importantly, many of these are easy to use, even for beginners. Some popular features include visual, drag-and-drop editing, coding, or a mix of both. There’s also in-built in-depth deliverability and performance analytics to help you improve results.

Price: free trial, then from $14.95 to custom pricing a month per user, billed annually, depending on the plan

Moosend

Moosend is yet another user-friendly and affordable email marketing tool providing an incredibly robust email solution for everyone just starting to build their email list. Some pretty amazing features are built into the platform, like codeless campaigns, easy-to-read reporting, and simple automation features. There are also some landing page features like mobile pop-ups or countdown timers, but they are included in the paid version only.

Price: free 30-day trial, then from $9 a month to custom pricing, depending on the plan

MailChimp

Finally, MailChimp is not only an email marketing tool but also a social advertising tool designed to automate and coordinate campaigns, especially email drip campaigns. This tool allows you to track the traffic generated from your campaigns and provides many integrations with SaaS companies. All in all, it is an excellent tool for engaging with your target audience.

Price: from free, $11, to $299 a month

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Tools

Ahrefs

Thanks to Ahrefs, brainstorming keyword ideas to rank better is such an easy task. This tool allows you to check any URL’s top organic keywords and estimate the exact amount of traffic any competitor gets for those words or phrases. Plus, it helps you determine top-performing content and backlinks that increase the site’s traffic and performance. In other words, Ahrefs is the utmost tool for competitive analysis.

Price: from $99 to $999 a month, depending on the plan

SEMrush

Here’s yet another SEO tool that helps with ranking. SEMrush lets you monitor the position of your keywords and provides you with other similar words and phrases to rank for. As it breakdowns keywords, difficulty, and variations, this platform is perfect for coming up with new content ideas and determining search intent.

Price: from $119,95 to $449,95 a month, depending on the plan

All in One SEO

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) is an excellent plugin for all WordPress websites, with more than 2 million installations. It comes with a great range of features for optimizing your site and content while providing you with a checklist explaining how to fix any errors and make adjustments to maximize click-through rates.

Price: from $49,50 to $299,50 a year, depending on the plan and the number of websites

Yoast

Last but not least, Yoast is one of the most popular plugins for both Gutenberg and WordPress. It helps you optimize content for search engines by choosing cornerstone content, focus keywords, individual content URLs, and internal links. But that’s not all. The plugin also monitors and assesses the page’s readability and provides a Flesch Reading Ease score.

Price: free version available, paid from $99 and up, depending on the plan and the number of websites

Digital Marketing Career Opportunities

There’s no doubt that there are plenty of reasons to choose digital marketing as a career path. First of all, it is a thriving industry creating countless opportunities for creatives and marketing professionals.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that the number of digital marketing roles will increase by 8% by 2028, which is remarkably faster compared to the average of 5% for all other occupations. Other statistics show that the role of ‘digital marketing specialist’ is one of the top 10 most in-demand jobs, with more than 850,000 job openings.

You don’t have to earn a university degree to be able to pursue a career in digital marketing or perhaps transfer from traditional to digital marketing. All you need is passion and willingness to further your skills and knowledge by taking some of the best digital marketing courses. Once you master your skills, you could start freelancing, land a job at a marketing agency, or start up your own.

Digital Marketing Prerequisite

Once again, there are no such prerequisites for digital marketing in terms of educational qualification. There are plenty of entry-level marketing jobs that simply don’t require any prior experience and provide you with the chance of getting training on the job. As you climb the ladder, your experience may take you to become a marketing manager or director.

But, of course, it’s preferable to understand and have experience in traditional marketing first, as digital marketing is a branch of the same tree. The end goal of both branches is to ensure that the product being marketed gets the proper exposure.

Where to Learn Digital Marketing

At last, let’s find out where to learn digital marketing and where to find the best digital marketing courses. We already mentioned before that you could learn the subject by enrolling at a college, university, or academy, or even self-learn through internet resources.

However, nothing surpasses the amount of knowledge and experience you may get in digital marketing by taking the best digital marketing courses provided by the leading online learning platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Coursera, edX, and Udacity.

But why opt for these platforms and their courses? Firstly, the reason is that they have long been in the online learning market and know the right skills that need to be taught in every field. Secondly, their instructors are all highly-qualified, well-known, and experienced professionals eager to share their knowledge with you. And thirdly, some may even provide you with an accredited certification.

Learning digital marketing online is the wisest decision you can make as it will take you a lot less time and money compared to other learning methods. And, you can always create your syllabus and jump to subjects you need to learn if you have prior knowledge of others.