Top 5 certifications to help you get started with Digital Marketing for free!

A lot of people come to me these days to ask for advice about how to learn Digital Marketing. With a plethora of free as well as paid Digital Marketing training and courses available in the market, it is indeed very confusing as to how should one get started with learning Digital marketing which is one of the hottest skills to acquire in 2018. So here in this post, are the top 5 free Digital Marketing certifications you can go for if you want to get an introduction into Digital Marketing.

Remember, if you are looking for some free certifications, always look for the certifications which are offered by the industry stalwarts. They give you credibility which is un-paralleled even by some paid certifications. Good thing about these certifications is that they are completely free and teach you the basics of Digital Marketing in a very lucid and unentangled way. Google / FB and others themselves have a lot of self-paced learning material available online which is self-explanatory. You don’t need any tutor to learn this. This is exactly what I did before I landed up as a “Digital Marketing Manager”. So here’s what you do :

1. Google Adwords certification

The best certification which takes you through the world of Paid advertising and teaches you the basics of PPC and its application to Google Adwords. Paid advertising is an integral part of Digital Marketing and Google Adwords is the must learn tool for all the paid advertising you do. I would recommend to complete all 3 exams — Adwords Fundamentals, Search Advertising & Display Advertising. Google has a lot of learning material (articles as well as pre-recorded videos) which one can go through before attempting the exam for the certification. This learning material is lucid, easy to learn and understand.

2. Google Analytics certification

Web analytics would occupy the major part of your day once you enter the field of Digital Marketing. The best thing about Digital marketing is that you can immediately track the results of your actions, analyse them and then take corrective actions to improve on it further. Google Analytics is the basic tool which every Digital Marketer must learn and have expertise in. You can setup goals to see the number of leads / sales generated and track all your marketing metrics viz. traffic, bounce rate, new users, returning visitors and many more.

3. Facebook Blueprint certification

Another good certification to learn paid advertising using Facebook. This certification will make you an expert in managing your advertising on Facebook as well as Instagram. Would recommend to go through all the modules in this Facebook blueprint certification.

4. Hubspot Inbound Marketing Certification

One of the best certification to learn the basics of Inbound Marketing. It is highly recommended for understanding non-paid digital marketing. Though this certification is centered around Hubspot as a tool for Inbound marketing, it teaches you a lot about inbound marketing in general including email marketing, science behind landing pages, A/B testing, STP analysis and so on. I personally love this certification as it helps you learn a lot of marketing techniques which you can implement immediately in marketing your own startup without investing a lot of money beforehand.

5. SEO basics course certification

There are many Search Engine Optimization (SEO) courses which will teach you the basics completely free. If you go through those videos, you are more than covered with basic SEO tactics. You can learn Advanced SEO later on the job if required.

Once you have all the above certifications, you will be pretty much covered with the basics of Digital Marketing and will get the hang of it.

However, certifications alone don’t help you in a job. You got to have a good Digital Marketing experience. So what is it you need to do next? Nothing beats a practical experience in Digital Marketing. So here’s what you do :

• Pick up a topic you are passionate about and host your own blog on that topic (very cheap these days)
• Setup Google Analytics account for your blog to monitor and track marketing metrics
• Run Google & FB ads (this is where you should spend money to learn.. 3–4k spent here would do you a world of good instead of spending 30k in a Digital Marketing course)
• Implement a few SEO techniques for your blog and get your blog at the top of the search results. This is where you can show practical experience in your job interview and this is where you can differentiate yourself from the rest by showing your eagerness to learn and implement on your own
• Use Social media to promote your post organically. Cross-post your blog in relevant forums. Also embed social sharing buttons in your blog so that you get more and more eyeballs on it through organic shares.
• Use sign-ups and subscription for your blog and see how many subscribers are interested in the topics you want to blog about. Use e-mail marketing to keep your subscribers engaged.

Keep on doing the above activities for a window of 20–30 days and then you will get the hang of applying the concepts you learnt in your certifications. Only then can you really say that you know Digital Marketing.

So what are you waiting for! Get started right away! A digital marketing career awaits you! Do comment below if you hit any roadblocks or need any help with this!

PS: A few people personally messaged me and asked about some paid courses and hence adding it here. There are many institutes which teach you Digital Marketing and give you practical exposure to it via live projects! If you are short on time or you want 1 solution which teaches you all, I would highly recommend edureka’s Digital Marketing course which is one of the best courses out there for Digital Marketing! Here’s the link to it — http://goo.gl/8OFhoZ