Analytics, Ads, SEO, Social Media Classes (2024)

Why Learn Digital Marketing?

Are you interested in learning digital marketing? Are you looking to start your own business and want to know if digital marketing skills will help you? In this article, we’re going to run through the key reasons why you should learn digital marketing skills.

In simple terms, digital marketing includes all marketing efforts online. While many people first think of social media when thinking about digital marketing, there is a lot more that goes into digital marketing, including search, email, site optimization, online reviews, and more. We’ll walk through the different types of digital marketing in a bit, but let’s first walk through some reasons to learn digital marketing.

Become a Digital Marketer

Digital marketing is a highly in-demand skill set and learning digital marketing skills could lead you to a career as a digital marketer. Companies from 1 to 1 million use digital marketing in some capacity, and they are looking for top digital marketing talent to grow their businesses. Start learning digital marketing skills and launch yourself into a career as a digital marketer.

Another piece of advice - start learning the full world of digital marketing to get your foundational skills, and then if one part of it seems particularly interesting, focus on that set of skills. If you are more creatively inclined, social media marketing might be more interesting. If you are more analytically inclined, something like Google Ads might be of interest. Digital marketing spans a variety of domains and can be a great career path for creative- and/or analytically-minded professionals.

Boost Your Entrepreneur Toolkit

If you’re looking to start a business, one of the biggest challenges is generally generating awareness, interest, and sales of your products. In the digital age we live in now, digital marketing skills can be the key enabler for entrepreneurs to get their products or service out there quickly. Having a mastery of digital marketing can tremendously increase the growth and the probability of success of your new venture.

While you can always hire a digital marketer, having those skills yourself will allow you to develop the strategy based on your own objectives and potentially lead the charge while you are still ramping up the venture. When you do decide to hire a marketer, you’ll be equipped to guide them with a strategy and oversee them appropriately given your digital marketing expertise. If you’re an entrepreneur and want to increase your chances of success, digital marketing skills can be extremely valuable to add to your toolkit.

Grow Your Business

If you’re a small business owner or manager and looking to grow your business, digital marketing skills could be your answer. Coming up with a full digital marketing strategy that works best for your business and target audience and being able to execute that strategy could be your key to growth. Whether you are in a product or service business and whether you have a physical or online presence, there is a digital marketing strategy that will help your business flourish. It is important to understand the full scope of digital marketing so you can devise the most suitable strategy for your business to succeed.

For example, a local business with a physical presence might benefit from using Google My Business and improving its local search listing. An online business might benefit from leveraging search ads and/or social media marketing. There are so many different ways to use digital marketing to grow your business, some requiring minimal cost and minimal time, while others may require a larger investment of time and/or money.

The Types of Digital Marketing

Now let’s jump into the various types of digital marketing. There are so many forms of digital marketing, and this is not an exhaustive list, but this should be enough to get you started and give you an overview of the digital marketing world.

Search Marketing

Search marketing includes both organic (SEO) and paid search (Google Ads). The goal of search marketing is to show up in search results for specific, relevant keywords. In the search results, there are paid results followed by organic results.

To show up in the organic results requires a good SEO strategy involving keyword research, content marketing, technical optimization of your site, backlinks, and more. In order to show up in the paid results, you'll need to set up a Google Ads account and bid on specific keywords and pay for each click that you get from that ad.

Search marketing is like a world of its own and requires a lot of knowledge and creativity to do it well, but if you execute it properly, it can result in a lot of growth for your business.

Social Media Marketing

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik Tok, and all social media platforms can be lumped into social media marketing. Within social media marketing, you can take both organic and paid strategies for your desired outcomes.

Building an organic following on one of these platforms will require you to produce content that engages your target audience and creative strategies to grow your following. Within each of these social media tools, there are also paid options that allow you to pay to show your ads to users on the platform.

Paid social media marketing can be a great way to find new customers (prospecting), but you'll need to make sure you are targeting the right audiences with the right messaging to do it efficiently and effectively.

Email Marketing

Although it is one of the older forms of marketing, it remains one of the most effective ways to market. Email marketing requires you to put in the effort and get creative in finding ways to build an email list. Once you have a strong email list in place and a good strategy to continue growing that list, you can leverage that list to sell your products or services, offer promotions, or engage with your customers.

Conversion/Site Optimization

Once we are driving a whole lot of traffic, we need to make sure we are providing a seamless experience for the users and optimizing our conversion funnel to maximize the value of our traffic. Say we are driving 100 visitors per day to our site and only converting one into a sale. If we wanted to get two conversions per day, we could go out and try to get another 100 visitors (at our 1% conversion rate) or find a way to increase our conversion rate to 2% to get our two conversions. There is a lot that goes into conversion rate optimization, and there are a handful of strategies that may help, like clear call-to-actions, improved page speed, testimonials, and limited-time offers.

Content Marketing

While content marketing can sometimes be lumped in with SEO, it can also be a marketing strategy of its own. When it comes to SEO, having lots of relevant and high-quality content on your site can take your site’s SEO to the next level through a couple of mechanisms.

More high-quality content generally boosts SEO, the content can also drive traffic on its own by ranking, and it may even pull some backlinks for you. Outside of just boosting SEO, content marketing can be a strategy of its own. Whether it's written, video, or audio content, you can use content marketing to grow your business.

You can use content marketing to educate consumers about your product or industry and eventually convert them into customers. For example, Drift coined the term “conversational marketing” and gained lots of traction, educating consumers about its value, eventually driving some into paying customers for their product - a conversational marketing tool. That’s a perfect segue to our next topic, conversational marketing.

Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is a one-to-one approach to marketing where businesses directly interact with their customers. While this may sound extremely time-intensive at first, there are countless benefits to doing so.

By interacting with your customers directly, not only will you improve the conversion flow and drive more conversions, but you will create more outstanding experiences for your customers and you will learn from customers to be able to improve your product or service. By speaking to customers you’ll learn what their pain points are and how you might modify your product or services to meet those better.

You might find that customers are asking about something you are not currently offering, which could be a new source of revenue for you. You might find that your price is too high, pushing customers away. And sometimes, you might even find that people can’t figure out how to make a purchase on your site which is a solvable problem.

While the above cover some of the most popular forms of digital marketing, there are lots of other ways to go about digital marketing and growing your business digitally

Prospecting vs Remarketing

Another key distinction to consider when thinking about which tools to learn and use is to understand the different objectives of prospecting and remarketing.

We can generally categorize our digital marketing efforts into 2 buckets: driving new customers to the site and converting customers once they have interacted with us in some way. Driving new customers to the site is what we’d call prospecting and converting customers who have already interacted with us would be considered remarketing.

Driving Traffic

If we are newer to business or just want to drive more traffic to our site then we can look at a variety of prospecting strategies, ways to drive new users to the site.

SEO

Search engine optimization can pay off big if done well and can drive sustainable traffic to our site. Google is, by a wide margin, the most visited webpage in the world and if we are able to get to the top of the search results for the relevant keywords to our site then we will consistently be found on the search engines and generate traffic. SEO is the process of building web content that is designed to work well within search engine algorithms and convince those programs to prioritize your content when generating a results page for use queries. Doing SEO well is no easy task and requires a full-on SEO strategy. Some of the core elements of SEO include:

Content marketing: writing high-quality content for your audience

Backlinks: getting links from other reputable and relevant sites

Pages/Tags: making the relevant pages to match different search intent

Site Speed: ensuring a speedy site and experience

Google Ads

As mentioned above, Google Ads is the paid “brother” of SEO as it also gets you into the search results. Getting into the search results with Google Ads is generally easier than with SEO but it is more costly. As it is commonly referred to as pay-per-click, you need to pay for each click that you get through Google Ads. Google Ads can be a great way to get started in search marketing to drive new traffic to your site. One of the key sticking points of search marketing is that you are meeting users while they are looking for a specific product or service.

Social Media

Leveraging social media platforms, both organically and inorganically, can be another great way to drive new prospects to your site. With paid social media, you can show ads for your product or service to people within the social media experience. Social media marketing is generally less costly than something like Google Ads but because they are not “in search” of the product at the moment they will generally convert at a lower rate. Social media can be a great way to quickly and cost-efficiently drive a lot of traffic to your site. In order to increase efficiency and effectiveness, make sure to find the right audiences to target and deliver engaging marketing copy.

There are lots of ways to drive traffic to your site and generate buzz for your product or service, but these are a couple to get started.

Remarketing

Now, let’s say we are continually getting lots of traffic to our site but we aren’t converting as many people as we’d like. This is where remarketing comes into play. Generally, users will not convert the first time they visit your site so it is your job to remind them to come back with remarketing.

Google Ads

We discussed Google Ads as a prospecting tool but it also serves as a remarketing tool. You can create audiences of site visitors and deliver display ads to those visitors across the web. In order to do this effectively, make sure to segment your visitors into the right groups, and deliver tailored and compelling ads. For example, if you sell office supplies and someone was on your pages for pens, you’ll probably want to serve them an ad for pens with some sort of special offer.

Social Media

Similar to the way Google Ads remarketing works, you can also use social media platforms to retarget website visitors. The same principles will apply as the above - make sure to segment your audiences and tailor your messaging.

Email Marketing

Another time-tested way to retarget site visitors is to leverage an email marketing strategy. One of the biggest challenges with email marketing for retargeting is actually getting people’s email addresses, but if set up a good system for email capture, then email marketing can be a big source for targeting.

Email marketing is relatively inexpensive and can convert pretty well since these are already people who expressed interest by giving you their email addresses. You’ll need to get creative about email capture, and you may want to offer something free to get the email.

Digital Marketing Careers

As companies pay more and more attention to how their online presence is viewed, they are beginning to hire specialists who can plan and execute digital marketing campaigns. Some of these professionals are Digital Marketers, who will oversee all of the major aspects of an online advertising campaign, while others are more specialized in the aspects of digital marketing they work on. Digital Marketers will handle everything from planning an online advertising campaign to working with teams of designers, developers, and advertisers to working with data analytics teams to gauge the efficiency of various aspects of the marketing process. In the US, they earn an average salary of about $60,000 annually.

Social Media Strategists are specialists who assist companies in designing and running social media marketing campaigns. They will need an in-depth understanding of the significant social media platforms and how they differ. Knowing this, they will be in charge of planning how a company will utilize social media accounts and platforms to extend its reach and build its audience. Individual responsibilities will likely vary depending on the ad campaign in question, but Social Media Strategists may need to run social media accounts, work with content creators, and work with platform services to increase engagement. Social Media Strategists make an average of $60,000 annually in the US.

Web Optimization Specialists and Paid Search Managers are both tasked with ensuring that your business's content or material is readily accessible via search engines. These marketing specialists will need to know SEO strategies, and they will need to understand how to use paid search tools such as Google Ads. Their work is vital to ensuring that a company’s web presence is easy to find and readily accessible to anyone using common search engines and techniques. Web Optimization Specialists are also likely to need data science training so that they can analyze things like web traffic and user behavior to optimize their client's web presence. In the US, a Web Optimization Specialist earns about $68,000 a year, while a Paid Search Manager earns about $75,000 a year.

Learn More & Build your Digital Marketing Skills

Noble Desktop offers a wide range of digital marketing courses that are designed to fit the needs of a variety of different students. Whether you are a novice hoping to start a new career in digital marketing, an advertising professional looking to add a new skill or two to your repertoire, or an entrepreneur looking to advertise your start-up, Noble has a class that can help you accomplish your goals.

Students looking for a career-focused training program can enroll in Noble Desktop’s Digital Marketing Certificate program and learn all of the major components that go into a successful digital marketing campaign. In this class, students will learn how to advertise on social media platforms, how to utilize paid search advertising, how to design webapges with SEO in mind and how to use important web analytics tools like Google Analytics and SemRush. This course is aimed at preparing students with no marketing experience to become professional Digital Marketers.

Noble offers a similar program for students looking to learn social media marketing. In Noble Desktop’s Social Media Marketing Certificate program, students will learn how to design broad social media marketing campaigns and how to tailor those campaigns to the affordances and audiences of different social media platforms. Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram all reward different kinds of engagement, and this course will teach students how to shift their efforts on any platform to maximize engagement. Students will work on building real-world examples of social media marketing campaigns that they can add to their job materials once they complete the course.

Noble also offers courses designed to provide students with supplemental training for their existing skills or focused training if they want to learn specific digital marketing techniques. For example, Noble offers an SEO Bootcamp and a Google Analytics Bootcamp for students looking to learn the basics of search engine optimization and web traffic analysis. In these classes, students will receive accelerated training in important web marketing tools that they can use to improve the efficiency of their other digital marketing efforts. Noble also offers a collection of targeted social media marketing courses for all major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and LinkedIn. These classes won't be enough to jumpstart a new career, but they are great places to learn essential skills and lay the groundwork for future training.

No matter what kind of digital marketing training you hope to receive, Noble Desktop will likely have a class that fits your needs. We hope to see you soon at one of our digital marketing classes so we can help you master digital marketing and bring the tools and strategies back to your business to drive results.