10 free digital marketing courses to help your business

No matter how good your business' products or services are, you won't see any revenue unless you get the word out to your target customers. To do that, you need to learn to market your business.

While you should consider hiring a skilled marketing professional to help your business, there are courses that can help you get your head around the basics of digital marketing.

All of the courses below are free and offer certificates without requesting additional payments.

Used effectively, Google Ads can be a huge source of revenue for your business. Used ineffectively, it can be a huge waste of money.

This is required learning for any marketing manager who is in charge of PPC and search engine marketing. All the required learning materials can be found in Google’s Learning Center or on the Ads Help Center website. Accessible to all Google Partners. Becoming a Google Partner is free and it brings you a series of benefits such as access to exclusive training, marketing news, offers, etc.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools you can use to see how your site is performing, where visitors are coming from and what they're doing once they arrive. It's a snapshot of how people interact with your site.

Valid for 18 months, it's only mandatory that you pass one exam, but you have various stages that you have to go through in order to successfully obtain the certificate and the necessary web analytics knowledge: Google Analytics for Beginners, Advanced Google Analytics, E-commerce Analytics, and Google Tag Manager Fundamentals. Like for the Ads certification, you need to be part of the Google Partners community. All of your Google certifications will be shown on your Google Partners profile page.

Similar to Google, Bing also offers their own pay-per-click advertising service known as Bing Ads. Although you may be more familiar with the way Google Ads works, Bing Ads has many similar features which you can learn about through the Bing Ads Training Courses.

One of my personal favorites, HubSpot offers a wide variety of certificates you can earn. They're valid for a year, as courses slightly change periodically in order to keep up with digital marketing’s fast-moving trends.

You can opt for the general exam (the Inbound Certification) or for any of the other free certifications, such as Content Marketing Certification, Email Marketing, Inbound Sales, Growth-Driven Design, or courses which teach you how to use HubSpot’s own software.

I would recommend that you take the HubSpot Inbound Certification Exam as your first one as it can introduce the basic concepts of digital marketing to you.

The average Facebook user clicks on 11 adds per month. Now, multiply that by 2.45 billion monthly active users, and it's clear why Facebook is a valuable advertising channel for businesses.

Facebook Blueprint teaches all that you need to know about becoming a Facebook pro. There are some free courses and learning paths tailored to your professional profile, but the most valuable general Blueprint Certification (Facebook Certified Planning Professional and Facebook Certified Buying Professional) can be obtained only through an online proctored exam that costs up to $150 US.

It’s your most useful and up-to-date introduction to Twitter Ads and related products and strategies. There are two learning paths (known as Flight Paths) you can take. But, as always, I suggest that you pursue both: Marketing Leadership and Executive Leadership.

Vbout.com's Digital Marketing Course is similar to HubSpot’s Inbound Certification in the sense that it teaches the basics of each aspect of digital marketing. Like in HubSpot’s case, you’ll receive a certificate that is valid for 12 months and a badge to prove your knowledge at the end of the course.

Open2Study offers various free online courses among which I would recommend the following for a future digital marketer: Online Advertising, Writing for the Web, and User Experience for the Web.

This is one of the few courses which anyone, regardless of their job title, should take to brush up on their online advertising skills. It is perhaps one of the easiest and most commonly found certificates in a person’s resume. Be on the lookout for local Google Digital Garage events that you can physically attend to boost your online marketing knowledge and gain a secondary certificate.

The eMarketing Institute offers e-books instead of videos as training materials for their five courses: Online Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Web Analytics.

Be aware that except for the Google, Bing, Facebook, and HubSpot certifications, most of these certificates hold no official value to your resume. But if you're an entrepreneur, their value is in the marketing savvy they can add to your skill set and your business. 

Marketing your business is crucial to its success. If you want to be sure you have a successful marketing campaign, but can't afford to hire a full-time marketer, you could consider hiring a freelance internet marketer to help. But even if you do decide to hand your marketing to a skilled freelancer, having the background knowledge offered by these courses will give you even better context to understand the campaigns you run and how they'll impact your business.