✍️📖🤔Why Professional Digital Marketing Courses are the Future of Marketing Education
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With education becoming more and more of a premium commodity in this day and age, many families simply can not afford to provide their children with an education at top universities. Out of over 3 million students in the year 2019/2020, under 7% were enrolled in private universities. Having been provided with a (arguably) superior level of education, they tend to find it easier to get interviews, find jobs, and even climb up the ranks more quickly. For the other 93%, they may find the job market to be a more challenging place than their well-endowed counterparts. Or at least, this has been the case in the job market for the past few decades with recruiters putting a lot of emphasis on university degrees and on hiring graduates from prestigious universities, but that situation is now shifting for the better with more recruiters looking for certain digital marketing courses and certifications to fill key positions.
6 years ago, we started ripplemark with a vision to be a self-learning data-driven performance marketing agency. With so little knowledge available in the Egyptian digital marketing sphere at the time, as well as a lack of formal digital marketing education, it was imperative for us to look outwardly and to model our work after international sources and inspirations. We came across hundreds of courses, workshops, and certifications for digital marketers in all fields of the industry, and were able to educate ourselves on the subject through cooperation, teamwork, and most importantly resourcefulness. Professional digital marketing course providers such as HubSpot Academy, Google Analytics Academy and Udemy truly changed the game for us and taught us so much of what we know and apply now.
Today, we find that the paradigm is shifting. No longer do students have to depend on formal marketing degrees in order to understand key concepts and the basics of traditional and digital marketing. One shining example of this is the Egypt FWD initiative sponsored by the Egyptian Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Technology, which aims to provide students across Egypt with free digital marketing educational courses to help them further their careers and to teach them the basics and core concepts that they need to become a successful digital marketer.
Key differences between professional digital marketing courses and formal university degrees
At ripplemark, we’ve worked with dozens of marketers from all walks of life. We’re an eclectic group consisting of both self-taught marketers, who’ve taken multiple digital marketing courses and who understand the ins and outs of digital marketing tools and tactics, and marketers with traditional marketing or mass communications degrees, who are aware of more general business concepts such as logistics, supply chain management, and pricing simply due to having been exposed to a more diverse set of educational courses to attain their undergraduate degrees. Every person is unique, but each side of the spectrum tends to share certain characteristics.
In either case, as an agency we try to diversify our team’s base of knowledge by motivating the former to learn more about traditional marketing channels, overarching concepts in marketing strategy, and some in-depth knowledge of the logistics of how everything comes together, and the latter to learn the ins and outs of specific digital marketing tools and roles, building the sort of in-depth knowledge needed to succeed in today’s demanding market.
Why you should try to take as many digital marketing courses as humanly possible
No matter where you are in your career, there’s a digital marketing course out there that can help you improve your base of knowledge and enhance your understanding of different aspects of digital marketing.
While digital marketing courses are rarely ever comprehensive, they are often detailed enough, within a specific topic, to allow students who complete them to build an in-depth understanding of the topic. Moreover, they tend to show real world examples that can be extremely useful in understanding how to apply the course content to their work.
If you’re interested in a digital marketing career, you should try to take as many digital marketing courses, especially in diverse subjects, as you can to allow you to build a well-rounded understanding of digital marketing strategies, tools, channels and best practices, as well as their applications in practical situations. Doing this can lead some to find themselves becoming one of the fabled ‘T-Shaped Marketers’ that companies across the world search for and hire.
Great free digital marketing courses and resources to kickstart your digital marketing career
If you’re a novice digital marketer or would like to learn more about digital marketing and its different specializations, check out the below digital marketing courses and resources, which we’ve curated to take you through the fundamentals of digital marketing all the way to understanding how to use different channels and marketing tools to reach your target audience. The best part? They’re all ✨FREE✨
Fundamentals and General Courses:
- Digital Marketing Course provided by Udacity – Egypt FWD
- Fundamentals of Digital Marketing – Google
- Online Marketing Course – CopyBlogger
Facebook Ads and Optimization Courses:
Google Ads and Optimization Courses:
Google Analytics Courses:
TikTok Marketing:
Content Marketing Courses:
- Context is Key: Social Media Strategy in a Noisy Online World (free with a Skillshare free trial)
- Instagram for Business: Build an Engaged Community (free with a Skillshare free trial)
Useful resources with certification courses across a variety of subjects:
Watch our full webinar on the topic:
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