#TigerKing Not Your Thing? Courses and Certifications for Marketers.

For marketers quarantined at home and weather not yet being too favorable for opening the backyard BBQ season, now is the perfect time to refresh your skills or learn something new. So, if you want to spend your evenings doing something other than binge watching TV, here are some recommendations to get started with free and useful marketing courses and resources:

Growth Hacking with Digital Marketing – Want to learn about Growth Hacking / Growth Marketing? This course in Udemy is actually the only one on my list that isn’t free. Nevertheless, it proved well worth the money. The course offers 8+ hours of detailed and practical knowledge while still nicely structuring the bigger picture.

Google Academy – Advanced Google Analytics Certificate. No need to stress the importance of good analytics, and even if you use GA daily, it’s good to revisit the configuration and customization possibilities every now and then.

Google Ads Certification – Don’t (try to) do paid search or Google Display advertising without this. Seriously.

Facebook Blueprint –Most of us use FB and Instagram for marketing, so you should definitely spend some time here.

Hubspot Inbound and Hubspot Marketing Software Certificate are easy-to-follow and useful for anyone (no need to be a Hubspot client) who wants to learn about Marketing Automation. Many of Hubspot’s competitors offer free training and courses too, but in my opinion, Hubspot does a nice job in combining MarTech and product training with the conceptual / softer side of marketing.

Hubspot Content Marketing – This course takes a deeper dive into successful content development. Whether you’re involved in content strategy, develop content occasionally or full-time, there’s a lot of good learning here.

WordStream University – Well-prepared, free courses to improve your PPC and Social Ads skills.

Digital Summit Resources – The DS conference series offers good materials around different subject areas from branding to social marketing that I consider worth the while.

Quick Sprout – Simple, quick-reading, and useful tips especially for optimizing your website.

Gary Vaynerchuk - Some priceless stuff here. Learn and be entertained at the same time.

Smart Insights - The e-learning requires subscription but there's still a lot of good resources and templates for free. Their blog is also worth following.

This is by no means any kind of “Must Have,” “Top10” or “Best Resources” list, simply something I’ve gone through in the past weeks or have found useful. For the upcoming weeks (weather not-permitting), my list of the next subject areas to explore include courses on Cognitive marketing, Agile project management, Marketing AI, and Social Media campaigns.

There’s a lot of interesting stuff for beginners as well as seasoned marketing professionals that provide real value in terms of skills, tools, and ideas. The main challenge is to find useful and detailed enough content amidst the myriad of courses and materials; most of them being over-generic overviews, desperate product pitches, self-evident & endless “Basics of blah blah”, and “sell-your-soul-to-the-devil” type of subscriptions/freemiums.

I hope you’ve found the list useful! If you have come across something interesting for digital marketers, I would greatly appreciate it if you would add your ideas in the comments to keep the discussion growing.

Stay safe,

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