How do Beginners Learn Digital Marketing?

Successful digital marketing can make or break a small business. If you want to learn what digital marketing is all about and how to plan and carry out a successful campaign, here are some ideas for learning digital marketing as a complete beginner.

Getting Started with Digital Marketing

If you want to learn digital marketing to promote your own business or to explore a new career, it's a good idea to sign up for a bootcamp class or certificate course. This is the fastest, most efficient way to learn the new skills you will need.

If you want to explore digital marketing before your class starts, you can get started for free on your own. You can join social media platforms for free and experiment with building a following. Posting content regularly will attract attention and you can use the data analytics tools provided for free by the platform to study your target audience. If you have a side hustle, you can also start a website and build an email list. Not only will this give you an idea of how digital marketing works, it will give you something to work with when you take a class.

The First Steps to Learning Digital Marketing

When you sign up for a digital marketing course, there are basic skills that you’ll learn as a beginner. These are strategies to drive website traffic, increase search rankings, and build a following on social media.

Website Optimization

Website optimization is a collection of techniques and tools to drive traffic to a website, improve performance, and increase sales, known as conversions. These strategies help get a product or service in front of interested eyeballs. Some website optimization techniques include making sure images are clear and high quality, text employs headlines and subheads to help users find information easily, links lead to a landing page, and the page loads quickly. 

Search Engine Optimization

SEO improves search engine success in three crucial ways: technical SEO, on-page SEO, and off-page SEO. Technical SEO looks at a website's technical features and how they affect search engine rankings. The primary goal of on-page optimization is to provide the searcher/user with high-quality content. On-page content is essential and refers to everything that appears on a website, including text, keywords, images, tags, and internal links. Researching and choosing the best SEO keywords shows that the website has authority and is trustworthy. Off-page SEO involves building links and strengthening social media engagement. Backlinks and social media help build authority and trust with search engines. The more references to your content on other reliable sites, the better. Additionally, building out social media presence across various channels will further establish your internet presence and boost your SEO. You can use different analytical tools to track SEO and conversion rates.

Analytics Tools

Analytics tools offer insights to help your business thrive. One of the most common tools for digital marketing is Google Analytics. This is a free tool that collects, stores, and analyzes data on user behavior to help marketers learn what strategies are working and what aren’t. It can measure marketing efforts, both on and offline, and help you make better, more savvy business decisions. The different social media platforms, like Facebook and YouTube, also have analytics tools to help marketers collect and use data on their audiences.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing uses platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to get the word out about a product or message. It doesn’t cost anything to open accounts on different social media platforms, and many of the digital marketing tools you need are free to use or have a free version. Data analytics tools allow you to research the market, identify a target audience, and tailor your message directly to them. Engagement tools let you interact with potential customers, get important feedback, see what your competitors are doing, and change your campaign as needed. Social media marketing creates and maintains a community through regularly posted, high-quality content. It can take a bit of time to see organic results, but you can use paid advertising to speed things up. Advertising increases engagement and is a good investment. Social media marketing tools allow you to pinpoint your audience and advertise just to them.

Content Marketing

Content marketing helps you connect with your audience, improve brand loyalty, generate leads, and increase sales. Unlike traditional marketing, which makes a direct pitch for products, content marketing is based on storytelling and rarely mentions a brand or sales. The content appeals to readers by helping them with a problem or issue. Although content rarely mentions the brand or product, relevant content tells a story that consumers can relate to. A connection develops through storytelling that resonates with followers. 

Paid vs. Organic Advertising

Digital Marketers use both paid and organic advertising in their campaigns. Paid advertising with tools like Google Ads can help you get a digital marketing campaign off the ground quickly. You set your goals, decide what kind of ad you want, and how much you want to spend. As your campaign grows, you can increase your budget, change the parameters of your ad, or add something like a retargeting ad designed to reach people who have already bought from you. Organic advertising is based on SEO and social media marketing. It can take several months to see results, but it is free.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an effective way to reach customers and build a business. It can help you reach the right person at the right time and build relationships with your customers. The first step in creating an email marketing campaign is to build an email list. Once you have a list of customer emails, you can begin to send out links to content that will be interesting to your target audience. This helps to build a connection with your customers. Email Service Providers allow you to schedule your emails and provide analytics that tell you when users open the emails and when they don’t. This lets you time your emails to have the most impact and tweak the message if it isn’t attracting attention. 

Free Digital Marketing Tools for Beginners

Data is the backbone of digital marketing and tools are the way Digital Marketers collect, analyze, and gain insights from that data. Many of these tools are free to use making it easy for beginners to get a start in the field. Here are some popular free digital marketing tools available to beginners.

Canva

Canva is an easy-to-use graphic design platform for creating and sharing images and videos on social media and websites. There is a professional version and a free version.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is a highly customizable, free tool that collects user data, compiles helpful reports, and provides valuable insights to enhance a website or app's performance.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a free email service provider that allows you to automate your emails and keep in touch with customers. Email is one of the most effective ways to stay connect with customers and share content.

HubSpot

Hubspot is a customer relationship management system for managing inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. You can find marketing, sales, content, and organization tools to use for free.

Buffer

Buffer is a free social media marketing tool to manage multiple accounts and schedule posts.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a conversion optimization tool to help you track the actions of visitors to your site through heatmaps synced with video recordings of visitors' journeys to show you what needs to be tweaked.

Grammarly

Grammarly provides suggestions on grammar, spelling, punctuation, and usage to help you create the highest quality content possible. Error-free content increases your authority and trustworthiness with your audience.

SEMRush

SEMRush is an SEO and digital marketing tool that helps you research and choose the most effective keywords to increase the online visibility of your business. It has both paid and free versions.

Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO offers a free version of its WordPress plugin to optimize SEO on blogs, which will make your blog rank better on search engines. It also provides tools to help improve readability.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey lets you create and run surveys with your audience. It includes templates, themes, and analytics tools to help you analyze results.

Live Digital Marketing Training for Beginners

Many people find live classes to be the quickest and most efficient way to learn skills like digital marketing. Professional training centers offer bootcamp and certificate-granting programs for people who want to build technical skills. Classes meet in person or live online, on a part-time or full-time schedule. 

Bootcamp classes are perfect for beginners because they are geared toward entrepreneurs who want to promote their own businesses or people who are starting new careers as Digital Marketers. Digital marketing bootcamp classes last one to three days and focus on a single topic like digital marketing tools, social media platforms, content management, website optimization, or SEO. These intensive classes begin with the basics and move through more advanced material.

The Next Step

After a bootcamp class or two, you may be interested in signing up for a certification course. These are usually made up of a series of bootcamp classes around a topic like digital marketing or social media marketing. Certification courses are a good way to get a thorough education in marketing techniques. Some training programs offer courses to help you put together a digital portfolio to prepare for a job search

You might also want to pursue a certification from Google. You can earn certifications in Google Ads, Google Analytics, or Google Garage. Hootsuite offers a Social Media Marketing Certification and the American Marketing Association offers a Certified Digital Marketing Professional credential. In order to earn these certificates, you need to pass an exam.

Learn Digital Marketing Skills With Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop offers both bootcamp classes and certificate programs on digital marketing topics. The Digital Marketing Certificate offers 120 hours of hands-on instruction on digital marketing strategy and web fundamentals, SEO, content marketing, email marketing, Google Analytics, Google Ads, and bootcamps on individual platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok. The certificate includes additional courses in social media content marketing, streaming for social media, and a portfolio course.

If you are looking for a course that focuses on social media platforms, Noble's Social Media Marketing Certificate will boost your skills. This course includes 72 hours of instruction on different platforms and how to choose the ones that are right for your campaign. You will also learn about creating content for social media and how to use the analytics tools offered by the platforms. The course concludes with a class on the social media industry and portfolio preparation.

Noble's Google Analytics Bootcamp provides a deep dive into this important marketing tool. Understand key terms, find out what to track, how to understand reports, and how to assess the success of a campaign. The 6-hour course will also look at the differences between GA4 and the new Universal Analytics.

Learn all about keywords and searching with SEO Bootcamp from Noble Desktop. This 12-hour class introduces search engine optimization and how search rankings work. You will learn how to use keyword research tools, techniques for writing SEO content, link building strategies, and optimization techniques.

Google Ads Bootcamp will teach you how to plan a paid advertising campaign for Google searches. This 12-hour class from Noble will teach you how to set up an account, how auctions work, and how to create ads that convert. The course will also cover best practices for landing pages, how to set up call and conversion tracking, how display ads work, and automating your campaign. 

Noble's Digital Marketing Strategy & Web Fundamentals is an introductory class for anyone who wants to find out what digital marketing is all about. This 6-hour class covers the key skills you need to increase traffic to a website, generate leads, and close sales. You will learn how to develop a digital marketing strategy and analyze your campaign to improve your return on investment. The course also covers techniques for optimizing your website to increase conversions.

High-quality content is the best way to market a product or service and Noble's Content Marketing Bootcamp will teach you how to do it. Learn about strategies and solutions for content marketing, develop an understanding of content creation and best practices, and create a plan to promote, track, and optimize your content in this 6-hour course.

Learn how to build an effective email list, create compelling emails, and optimize your campaign for success in Noble's Email Marketing Bootcamp. This 6-hour course covers the important role of email in a marketing strategy, the qualities of a successful campaign, and how to get the most out of your email marketing.