If you don’t already have digital marketing skills, you need to get on that. Company managers and clients alike think digital marketing is a simple thing they expect everyone to know. The place to start is with this Digital Marketing Certified Associate Training Program (DMCA).
Many people claim they do marketing or social media, but when I try to pin them down on exactly what skills they have, often they are far too limited. They are unlikely to get hired or be able to keep a job long-term because of their limited expertise.
What It Means to Be Qualified to Do Digital Marketing
Digital marketing done well is complicated and takes years of experience to learn. But people doing the hiring often don’t seem to know that. They expect you to know about every type of digital marketing, analytics, and to be able to show results through measuring ROI (return-on-investment).
Marketing Specialist jobs to grow 41% this decade BLS Report 2010–2020Click To TweetSo whatever you know now is most likely not really enough. McKinley Marketing Partners’ 2016 study showed a huge demand for digital marketing skills. (See the graph below and click on it to see their comprehensive study.)
Demand is so strong that 70% of those doing the hiring are willing to hire people who work from home. What that means is there is huge opportunity, but only if you expand your skills.
CORE Digital Marketing Skills
Anyone working on any aspect of Digital Marketing should have a strong foundational understanding of at least these major components:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social media
- Pay-per-click (PPC)
- Conversion Optimization
- Web Analytics
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
Even if you specialize in one or more of these, it is important to have a working knowledge of other types of marketing your employer or client should be utilizing.
Fortunately, there is an efficient and affordable way to get this type of training online from anywhere you can get an internet connection: Simplilearn. They have courses covering every aspect of digital marketing.
How Simplilearn Online Training Works
Choose a completion date or the number of hours you want to study per week and the built-in scheduler will let you know how many hours per week would be optimum to finish at your desired time:
Connect to your LinkedIn profile or manually update your profile. Then jump right in by clicking “my courses” on the home page. You can easily move around within the courses and see the curriculum.
The place to start is with the Digital Marketing Certified Associate Training Program (DMCA). That page provides full details including one of the two reasons I can recommend this training.
Leading Digital Marketers Who Developed This Course:
Their course authors are major names in marketing including:
- Web analytics authority Avinash Kaushik
- Bryan Eisenberg, author of multiple conversion optimization books
- Danny Dover, former lead SEO at Moz
- Social media strategist Jennifer Evans Cario
- Brad Geddes, advanced Google AdWords expert
- Matt Bailey, author of “Internet Marketing An Hour A Day”
- YouTube and video marketer Greg Jarboe
- Mobile marketing author Jeff Hasen
The second reason is that I am going through the courses myself now. The foundation courses are easy for anyone to understand while quickly conveying the basics needed. Later courses get into more depth.
If you have advanced marketing skills, some of the training modules may be a review for you. If you are new to any part of digital marketing or are managing marketing personnel, these courses will provide the foundation you need to fully understand digital marketing.
Each lesson contains an introduction explaining what you will learn in that segment, a video training, and a test. Each segment has an estimated time so you know whether you can complete it in the time you have available or need to wait until later.
Digital Marketing Certifications
In addition to their own certification, this training provides sufficient information to prepare you to pass certification exams for these 5 certifications:
- OMCA
- Google Analytics
- Google AdWords
- YouTube
Any marketer trying to decide what they want to specialize in or wishing to increase their overall skill levels should start with this course. The screen capture below shows the dashboard and the large video format that makes it easy on the eyes.
Video Highlights: Note the statistics in this introductory video:
- 68% of companies have digital marketing budgets
- 51% plan to increase their budget (in 2015) – the statistics I quoted above show:
- Digital marketing budgets increased by 20% on average in 2015
Social Media Management Training
I really suspect that most social media managers I’ve met do not have a clear social media strategy. Even if you have been hired to manage social media for a company and have your own accounts, that does not necessarily mean what you are doing is working.
Do you know how to measure your results? Do you do both B2B lead generation and B2C relationship building? Click To TweetJust as important as what you do is how and what you measure. Are you targeting the right audience with the right message in the right place (where they are already active and most interested in hearing it)?
This course covers social media strategy, making your messages sticky and more viral, and social media channels beyond just the main social media networks.
What the Digital Marketing Certified Associate Training Program Covers
I like this graph because it makes it easy to understand the benefits of taking these courses:
As you can see from the synopsis below, each section shows the amount of time required and a breakdown of what that course covers. The major sections are:
- Introduction
- Digital Marketing Foundation
- Executing Digital Marketing
- Strategy and Management in Digital Marketing
This final image is what they referred to as “The Bottom Line”. It shows in one graphic what this digital marketing training covers, what you can learn, and especially note that they offer real-life experience through projects.
Having hands-on experience is far more valuable to gain confidence in your skills and ensure you will retain what you learned. Study on any device with internet access. Simplilearn offers IoS and Android apps (available in the App Store and on Google Play).
Who Should Take This Course?
- Business owners
- Freelance marketers
- Students looking for a career with high demand
- Anyone interested in increasing their incomes
Do you have questions you’ve never managed to get fully answered? For example, do you really know what duplicate content is and is not? Do you know how to do keyword research with user intent in mind? This course will answer these questions for you.
Are you an SEO who still measures success by where you rank in the SERPs? You definitely need this course, and in particular the SEO measurement module.
Wondering how Penguin and Panda affected sites you care about? Check out Lesson 9 on Algorithm Updates and SEO changes.
If you don’t know how to measure your results or keep current on your skills, have I got a deal for you. For a limited time, the first 25 people who sign up can take the Simplilearn SEO Foundation and/or Content Marketing Foundation courses totally free.
Although the end date is December 21, 2016, I don’t expect ANY spots to be left for very long. If you want to do this, you need to sign up RIGHT NOW before others take all the free spots.
SEO is becoming less of a job title and more of a general requirement or all within an organization.Click To TweetSEO Foundations
How much do you REALLY know about SEO? Are you sure you have all the knowledge you need? Go to this link to sign up for the Simplilearn SEO Foundations course. It includes:
- Self-Paced Learning
- 180 Days unlimited access
- 2+ hours of high-quality e-learning content
- Covers SEO measurement, design, and architecture
- Topics on algorithm updates and SEO changes
- Progress quizzes
- Simulation exam
- Course completion certificate
Content Marketing Foundations
I know most of my readers are heavily involved in content marketing, so this offer may go even faster than the SEO offer does. Go to this link to sign up for the Simplilearn Content Marketing Foundations course.
Learn all about Content Marketing Strategy, including:
- How to write effective articles
- Best practices for different types of content
- Create messaging and content guidelines
- Learn how to benefit from user-generated content
- Understand content tactics and challenges
- How to develop best practices for content across media types, including social media, images, etc.
Again, please note that the free spots are bound to go really fast, so if you’re interested, do not wait. This is NOT a marketing ploy. I really do know a lot of people who may want to do these courses.
We have 129 just in our Blogger Mastermind Skype group. I’ll let my subscribers and social media followers get a chance to see this before I share it there; however, I can’t keep someone else from sharing it.
Access to these modules is a part of the Digital Marketing Certified Associate Training Program (DMCA) I am taking now. So if you have questions, ask them in the comments.
