Career advancement in the digital age has drastically changed the way brilliant employees are described in the workplace. Today, to become globally competitive means having multiple skill sets that are profitable not just in the physical world, but more importantly, in the virtual space. Enter digital marketing – a marketing skill you can’t do without.
Advancing your career means arming yourself with the necessary knowledge and skills that are beyond relevant to the current industry you are in. To keep yourself relevant, you need to have the initiative to sharpen your overall performance by acquiring more innovative skills.
Generally, a key driver in achieving a successful career journey is education. Fortunately, learning no longer just takes place in the four walls of a classroom. With the birth of sophisticated channels of virtual academies, you can now earn new industry-recognized badges to cap your professional profile in no time.
That said, here are the top 3 digital marketing courses you need to tick off your career bucket-list today:
At the top of the list are HubSpot Academy Courses. Dedicated to their “always be learning” attitude, Hubspot boasts of constant development of their educational content across the digital marketing spectrum in the year 2018. In their year-end review, Hubspot enumerates the many courses launched to help marketers sharpen their skills, such as:
- Marketing Education
It emphasizes how Marketing remains as the cornerstone of one’s inbound strategy.
- Sales Education
It prioritizes the need for sales and marketing alignment through the Sales Manager Course and Sales Hub Enterprise Education
- Service Education
It trains marketers to brush up on their customer service strategy by understanding the importance of customer assistance, conversations, etc.
- Partner Education
This includes a HubSpot Agency Partner Certification, a course that teaches you the four pillars of the agency partner framework of marketing, selling, delivering, and growing agencies.
- Business Education
In this course, you get to learn the shift from the Marketing Funnel to Flywheel. Here, you will learn how the flywheel model views customers as an integral component of a business’ growth. Also, it is believed to generate more long-term customers by means of meaningful experiences, as opposed to the funnel model, which puts emphasis on merely acquiring one-time customers.
One of the promising features of a digital marketing platform is that it enables business owners and marketing professionals to understand customers better. Through the power of Google’s Analytic Tools, you can easily monitor data about your website. This feature allows you to learn more about the performance of your marketing, content, products and more. Moreover, insights acquired from these analyses are instrumental for you to reach the right target market. Essentially, Google Analytics empowers you to find solutions that matches your business needs.
If you want to learn more about how you can maximize this very useful marketing tool, then sign up for Google Analytics Academy. Packed with free online courses, the Analytics Academy will guide you through Google’s measurement tools using data collection and analysis. Among the core topics covered in this course are the following:
- Reading of basic analytic reports
- Setting up of dashboards
- Tracking of online conversions
- Performing basic analyses
Once you’ve signed up, you will be given access to a Google Analytics demo account. Course examples will focus on an e-commerce website designed to expose you to different kinds of businesses.
Google Analytic Academy’s courses are further divided into the following course sections:
- Google Analytics for Beginnerscovers basic principles and features.
- Advanced Google Analyticsincludes more complex analysis and data collection plus processing.
- Google Analytics for Power Users powers you up to apply features in tracking business performance.
- Getting Started with Google Analytics 360 and its powerful features that are not available in the standard version.
- Introduction to Data Studio teaches business owners and marketers to use online data to gather insights that are useful in collating impactful reports.
- Google Tag Manager Fundamentals teaches how you can streamline multiple analytics for your website to ensure data accuracy.
Another surefire way to cultivate an impressive professional profile is to earn Google’s Ads Certification, a form of professional accreditation extended to individuals with proven proficiency in Google Ads.
How to Get Certified
This certification can be earned through Google Academy for Ads. You need to undergo assessments, which are available in 19 different languages. The required assessments are the Google Ads Fundamental Assessments and one of the additional advertising product assessments below:
- Search Advertising
- Display Advertising
- Mobile Advertising
- Video Advertising
- Shopping Advertising.
Validity of Certification
The validity of your certification is dependent on the expiry of your product area assessment. Thus, once this assessment expires, you need to retake the Google Ads Fundamentals and Product Area Assessment again.
Why Get Certified
Getting certified allows your company to earn the Google Partner or Premier Google Partner badge. These two badges signify that a company is capable of “consistent product performance.” Thus, making them worthy to be called “Google’s Partner.”
At the same time, through this certification, you can showcase your expertise as an online advertising professional on your CV, LinkedIn, and other social networking site profiles.
In a Nutshell
As industries become more competitive, it’s crucial for you to learn unique skills and strategies that will open career opportunities outside your field. Strengthen your value as an employee or a business owner! The future does not give room to those who are complacent. Be a sponge and never stop exploring new avenues for learning.