No matter how much you already know, in today’s fast-paced marketing world there’s always plenty more to learn.
Today more than ever options for learning new marketing skills abound, and the sheer number of choices can sometimes be overwhelming.
Online courses can be an excellent way to advance your career through learning, and offer a go-at-your-own-pace cadence along with the ability to fit in as much or as little instruction as you wish, whenever and wherever you want.
With more than 70% of companies seeing online learning as essential to long-term strategy (Digital Marketing Institute), it’s no wonder that online courses are flourishing.
We’ve picked out 10 organizations offering online courses for optimizing your marketing skills, and best of all, each one is either completely free or offers free trials that allow you to try out content before you make a commitment.
Let’s dig in.
Course 1: Stukent’s Expert Session Program
Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cornell, and many other top universities utilize Stukent for staying current with online courses, and the number of excellent digital and social media marketing-related options is impressive.
Here are five of the fine marketing-related courses available at Stukent through its expert session program:
- B2B Advertising Essentials, by A.J. Wilcox of LinkedIn
- Social Listening: What You Need To Know As A Marketer, by Tori McClellan of IBM
- How to Make the Best Content in the World, by Matt Siltala of Avalaunch Media
- 5 Proven Chatbot Strategies for Marketers, by Larry Kim of MobileMonkey
- SEO, Social Media, & Content Marketing For Profit, by Scott Cowley of Arizona State University
Additionally, Harvard University itself offers a selection on free online courses, including 14 relating to data science and five in the computer science category.
Course 2: BuzzSumo Academy
Many marketing professionals use BuzzSumo daily, but with a slew of features few know all the options the platform offers, which is why BuzzSumo created its BuzzSumo Academy program. The program offers a number of courses on how to use BuzzSumo to gather and research information, and you’ll find BuzzSumo Academy here.
Our CEO Lee Odden was recently featured in a helpful BuzzSumo article by Susan Moeller, exploring “How to Generate Endless Blog Post Ideas for Content Marketing.”
Course 3: HubSpot Academy
Operating since 2012, HubSpot Academy offers a strong selection of free online learning resources.
Here are five selections to get you started:
- Lead Nurturing With HubSpot: How to Craft a Killer B2B Campaign Using Workflows [Part 2], by Tammy Duggan-Herd
- Making an Impression: Aligning With Your Audiences in Facebook and Google Ads [Part 4], by Marjorie Munroe
- Create a Sunset Policy and Improve Your Email Engagement Metrics, by Jess Swazey
- How We Achieved B2B Campaign Success Using Hubspot, LinkedIn, and Google Analytics Data [Customer Story], by Natasha Kvitka
- One Step Ahead: Using Proactive Outreach to Delight Customers, by Juli Gaudette
Course 4: Google Analytics Academy
Google Analytics is widely used, but with what can be an overwhelming array of features and options, few tap into the true power the measurement platform can provide. Google Analytics Academy aims to change that by getting more people using the advanced featured of the platform, and with numerous free courses available — including “Getting Started with Google Analytics 360” and “Google Analytics for Power Users” — now is the time to dig in and learn more.
We’ve also written about analytics recently, including “New Year, New View: 3 Ways to Approach Analytics in 2019,” and “Measuring Content Marketing Success: Analytics Advice & Insight from the Experts.”
Course 5: SEMrush Academy
Widely-used analytics and search tool platform SEMrush offers a variety of free online courses, exams, and lessons through its SEMrush Academy program. Topics covered include SEO, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), and content marketing. Here are several courses of interest to digital marketers:
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- SEO Fundamentals Course with Greg Gifford, a 31-lesson four-hour course
- Technical SEO course with Bastian Grimm, a 34-lesson course
- PPC Fundamentals Course with Joel Bondorowsky, a 36-lesson course
Course 6: Traackr Academy of Influencer Marketing
Traacker’s Academy of Influencer Marketing (AIM) online learning program offers a free course on influencer marketing. “Setting Sail on an Influencer Marketing Program” includes eight videos, five quizzes, 10 texts, and five downloads, all taught by Johns Hopkins University faculty member Shonali Burke.
Shonali also has another course in the works for Traackr AIM, with the upcoming “A Treasure Chest of Influencer Marketing Case Studies.”
Course 7: Hootsuite Academy
Hootsuite offers several free courses through its online Hootsuite Academy program, including frequently-update lessons on using its service, and other more general marketing courses, including a six-hour “Social Marketing Training” course which includes six chapters covering such areas as:
- Optimizing Your Social Media Profiles
- Growing Your Advocate Community
- Content Marketing Fundamentals
- Social Advertising Fundamentals
Course 8: Jeff Sauer’s PPC Mastery Course
University of St. Thomas instructor Jeff Sauer was an early beta-tester of Google Analytics, and has been teaching marketers how to use Google Ads since 2010.
Jeff now offers a free week-long PPC course — an abbreviated version of his more intensive month-long offering, including video lessons, downloads, and extensive preparation help for Google certification testing.
Course 9: Lynda.com’s Marketing Courses
Lynda.com offers an impressive selection of digital marketing courses, and with a free one-month trial period, the LinkedIn-owned service can be a goldmine of online learning.
Here are several recent additions to Lynda.com’s online marketing course lineup:
- B2B Marketing on LinkedIn, by Viveka von Rosen
- Data Visualization for Marketers, by Ian Lurie
- Learning Conversion Rate Optimization, by Chris Goward
- B2B Foundations: Social Media Marketing, by Luan Wise
Course 10: Udemy
With more and 100,000 courses and over 22 million minutes of video, Udemy also offers a wide variety of helpful online courses available during a 30-day subscription trial period.
Here are some of Udemy’s recent online courses of interest to digital marketers:
- Facebook Marketing & Facebook Ads Masterclass 2019, with 14 hours of video and 16 resource downloads
- LinkedIn Marketing, Lead Generation & B2B Sales for LinkedIn, including two hours of video and 14 downloads
- Instagram Influencer Marketing for Business in 2019, with one and a half hours of video and three text resources
Grow Your Marketing Repertoire With Free Online Courses
Growing your existing skills and expanding your marketing repertoire with new knowledge are rewarding endeavors whether you’re a chief executive or CMO, or just starting out in the marketing industry.
We hope the knowledge you gain from taking any of these 10 online course offerings will help to make your 2019 a landmark year for your campaigns.
As a parting bonus list, here are several additional resources to help you expand your marketing knowledge:
