Google’s fundamentals of digital marketing course
Lee Payne CMgr MBA (Open)
Poly nimbus cloud engineering professional and experienced leader.
What is it?
I’ve just completed and passed this course and there doesn’t seem to be much information out there about it so I thought I’d write up my thoughts on it from the perspective of someone not involved in marketing (at least in the traditional sense). This is a course provided in a collaboration between Google, the Open University and the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe which aims to bring an introduction to digital marketing to a wider audience, it comes under the Google digital garage brand which is a non profit with the goal of bringing digital skills to as wide an audience as it can by using their online learning platform, the course itself is available here: https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalgarage/course/digital-marketing
Who is it aimed at?
This course is labelled as a beginner course and should be judged/treated as such, you won’t find deep in-depth information on how to do a lot of the things mentioned in it, this course is designed to give you an overview of digital marketing as a whole and to provide jumping off points for further research or to provide ideas of future courses you may like to take. Having said all that this is ideally suited for someone without much marketing experience who wishes to take a business online or who wants to learn the general principals.
What does it consist of?
This course consists of 7 modules split up into 26 lessons each of which will take between 15-30 minutes to complete for a total of roughly 40 hours effort. Each lesson has a knowledge test afterwards to verify you’ve understood the material with an end of module test encompassing all the material, at the end of course you have an optional 40 question test to gain a certification. The topics covered are:
Take a business online
- The online opportunity
- Your first steps in online success
- Build your web presence
- Plan your online business strategy
Make it easy for people to find a business on the web
- Get started with search
- Get discovered with search
- Make search work for you
- Be noticed with search ads
- Improve your search campaigns
Reach more people locally, on social media or on mobile
- Get noticed locally
- Help people nearby find you online
- Get noticed with social media
- Deep dive into social media
- Discover the possibilities of mobile
- Make mobile work for you
- Get started with content marketing
Reach more customers with advertising
- Connect through email
- Advertise on other websites
- Deep dive into display advertising
- Make the most of video
Track and measure web traffic
- Get started with analytics
- Find success with analytics
- Turn data into insights
Sell products or services online
- Build your online shop
- Sell more online
Take a business global
- Expand internationally
How much does it cost?
This course is free and has open enrolment for everyone, the final test is also free which makes the only cost your investment of time and mental effort, if you do fail the final test there is a forced cool down period before you can take it again during which time you can cover the topics you didn't know so well.
Was it any good?
The course had some interesting aspects which stood above the others (at least for me), in particular there were three different topics I hadn’t covered in previous marketing courses.
1. Exploring the differences between search and display advertising along with how to efficiently use both types in your marketing strategy.
2. Looking at how you would expand a business internationally this includes common issues to think about such as localisation, looking at local laws & customs etc..
3. How to turn analytics data into actionable insights, using the data cycle and managing digital data.
Is it worth it?
As any economist will tell you value is subjective, if you don’t mind investing your time into a free certification that can provide you with a solid introduction to digital marketing then this is the course for you. If you already have a basis in digital marketing or have an understanding of the concepts listed above then this is probably not the course for you.
While most people aren’t in marketing in the traditional sense directly there are two reasons why learning marketing in general is useful.
1. The concept of personal branding where you need to sell yourself as a product for your next move regardless if that’s within or outside of your organisation, understanding how marketing works can provide ideas of how to do this.
2. Courses such as this can provide theoretical frameworks you can use to enhance general knowledge about other teams, having some knowledge and consideration of other business units whatever your profession is always useful as it helps you use the same language to converse with them.
While this course does not address them specifically, parts of it can be re-purposed to provide thinking points to apply them to your own situation as well as just being a fairly easy and fun course to do in order to try something different.
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