Digital Marketing Course: Should I Buy or Not?

Updated on: October 1, 2024

Many tutorial centers and online courses offer to teach digital marketing courses, only to simply go over the digital marketing terms and case studies.

To put it bluntly, Digital Marketing is nothing more but the promotion and selling of products or services on the internet using SEO, social media, and pay-per-click advertising, to name a few.

Honestly, anyone can learn these terms and concepts online for free.

But tell me this: if you want to hire a marketer, what would YOU look for, in him or her? And do you think, YOU have those skills that you’d expect from others?

Some of the skillsets needed include

• email marketing,
• content marketing,
• knowing how to use various digital marketing tools,
• be aware of the available different digital marketing jobs,
• social media marketing,
• search engine marketing,
• learn how links work,
• remarketing,
• buyer’s psychology,
• technical SEO concepts.

You only need to know what to type in that search box to find the gold nuggets from the heap of repetitive content scattered over all the places on the internet.

In this short guide, I just want to prove that one can learn digital marketing courses from a few simple but effective resources.

However, no matter how hard one learns the terms and reads the examples, he/she cannot master the concepts unless really applied through personal experience.

What to look out for

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not against paying for a digital marketing course. With the ongoing buzz around this, there are definitely some well-structured courses on the subject that are worth paying for.

When you really want to pay for a course, look for what they cover: fundamentals, learning format, hands-on projects, certificate and validity tenure, networking and community options, references to experts, over and above the core concepts.

Enrolling into a course, paying for it, gives a kind of kick especially if you are only after getting a digital marketing certificate, but unless these are applied, they are all in vain – except the seller would have profited from you.

List of Free Digital Marketing Courses

So, if you are a beginner in learning digital marketing, start with the free resources given below to get familiar with the concepts, mindsets, and strategies. These are more than enough, to begin with.

1. Fundamentals of Digital Marketing – from Google (Free)
2. Learn Google Analytics (Free)
3. An SEO starter guide from Google (Free)
4. How to Learn Digital Marketing at Home and For Free

Next, start your own websites and implement the strategies to conduct your own experiments and learn by doing it. This is where you gain mastery of these concepts.

If you already have a digital marketing job and if you are looking to upgrade your knowledge, then you must go beyond these basics – and that’s when the knowledge from the actual marketers and timeless books will help you.

Search for these books online, buy and read them (not an exhaustive list):

• David Ogilvy’s books,
• Seth Godin’s books,
• Philip Kotler’s books,
• Branding books by Marty Neumeier,
• Advertising basics by A K Varghese and J V Vilanilam.

People are seldom interested in investing the time necessary to take a deep dive into the already existing rich literature on the marketing concepts that hardly change with age and trends.

There are certain basic human traits that marketers tap-in, to cash-in. That’s the core! These are already available in the books.

Instead, if you fall into the numerous ads that float around your Facebook profile, and YouTube in-video ads, you may learn something but the content you gain from those, more often than not, in my humble opinion (and experience) falls flat on the ground without actually practicing it.

To conclude, whether you learn for free or through paid courses, if there is one takeaway from this blog post, remember to practice what you learn by experimenting with the concepts you learn.

All the best!