A strong online presence is more important now than ever before for startups or small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). And digital marketing is what builds that presence.
We all know that marketing can be a full-time job — and can be daunting — especially for new entrepreneurs. To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of six free digital marketing courses that are tailored to the unique needs of startups.
Whether you’re a beginner looking to build a solid foundation or an experienced marketer seeking to refine your skills, these courses offer valuable insights, practical strategies, and a few hands-on exercises to propel your startup to the next level.
What you’ll learn:
- Why startups need a digital marketing strategy
- The scope of digital marketing
- Top 20 digital marketing courses for startups
- These digital marketing courses will grow your startup
Why startups need a digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing is the practice of using online channels to promote your brand, products, and services to grow through strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), social media engagement, email marketing, and paid advertising. Unlike traditional marketing, which usually requires a bigger budget and more resources, digital marketing levels the playing field for startups by providing the same tools and visibility as enterprises. But that’s not the only reason for implementing digital marketing.
A whopping 63% of all shopping begins online, even if the purchase happens at an offline store. Digital marketing gives you a 360-degree view of how your startup or SMB is performing online. You can track how people find you, learn what’s influencing conversions, and discover what’s working and what’s not. It helps build credibility and allows you to flaunt your unique selling proposition (USP). In short, your startup’s success is directly related to your online visibility.
22% of startups that fail lack a sound marketing strategy, and it’s exactly why your startup needs a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Let’s review the benefits of digital marketing:
- Cost-effective visibility: Digital marketing lets you compete with the big leagues on a limited budget and offers measurable and insightful outcomes at a fraction of traditional marketing costs.
- More targeted reach: As it helps you understand customer behavior and preferences, you can better track audience engagement and refine your ideal customer demographics to ensure more conversions.
- Greater flexibility: Digital marketing supports agile business growth as it enables real-time performance tracking. You can seamlessly change your marketing strategy based on quick insights.
- Faster market penetration: Did you know marketers usually use eight different marketing tools and technologies? You can reach broader markets through multiple marketing channels and acquire customers rapidly.
Start with SMB Basics
The scope of digital marketing and its components
As the name suggests, digital marketing includes all marketing efforts that use the internet, social media, search engines, and digital platforms to help you connect with your target audience. You can execute digital marketing in different forms — social media, video content, advertisements, blog posts, and even influencer marketing.
A digital marketing strategy is flexible, and you can customize it to your business needs. For example, if your target audience uses channels like YouTube and Reddit, you can dedicate efforts toward those platforms in addition to a website and Google ads.
The 6 key components of digital marketing
With every solid growth plan, there are key components to learn. Here are the six components of digital marketing you’ll need before you dig into your courses:
- Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of increasing your startup’s visibility in search engine results. It involves optimizing your content, structure, and technical elements to rank for relevant keywords and attract traffic to your website.
- Content marketing: The process of creating and sharing relevant content, like blogs, videos, podcasts, and infographics, to attract and retain customers. It focuses on addressing customer problems with the goal of building trust.
- Social media marketing: The process of using social media to connect with your target audience and promote your business. The goal is to build a brand presence where your target audience hangs out online, and ultimately lead them to purchase either through the social platform or your website.
- Email marketing: The process of communicating with current and potential customers through email nurturing campaigns. You can send targeted, personalized messages to nurture leads, promote products, and foster stronger relationships with your audience.
- Paid advertising: The process of using paid advertising and optimization techniques to improve your website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERP). This can be done through paid advertising or pay-per-click (PPC) and it can complement your organic search results to get immediate traffic and visibility.
- Analytics and reporting: The process of tracking key metrics like conversion rates, customer acquisition costs (CAC), and engagement patterns across channels, to help you understand what’s working and what needs adjustment. This data-driven approach helps optimize strategies, allocate budgets more effectively, and show clear return on investment (ROI) to stakeholders.
Top 20 free digital marketing courses for startups
It’s time to dig into the best free digital marketing courses for your startup or SMB. Small business marketing requires constant learning and upskilling. Choose which free online courses on digital marketing work best for you — all from the comfort of your home, without spending a penny.
Here are the top free courses on the six key components of digital marketing:
Search engine optimization (SEO) courses
49% of marketers report that organic search brings in the highest ROI. These courses will help you understand the core concepts of SEO for your startup.
- “Explore Search Engine Optimization” on Trailhead: In this course, you’ll learn the benefits, tips, and elements of SEO for B2C Commerce, along with how to implement this strategy for your business.
- “Google SEO Fundamentals” on Coursera: This course will teach you various SEO concepts, including keyword research, audience analysis, site map creation, and building brand identity using social media.
- “SEO Course for Beginners” on Ahrefs: Learn about link-building strategies, search intent, and rank difficulty to enhance your startup’s online visibility. Plus, you’ll also get all the necessary SEO tips for small businesses.
Content marketing courses
70% of B2C marketers say content marketing is gaining more importance with every passing year. Think of it as a cost-effective strategy to build your brand awareness, establish thought leadership, and attract potential customers. These free courses will teach you all this and more.
4. “Content Strategy Development” on Trailhead: You’ll learn about setting up a strategy and conducting content audits, audience segmentation, and content evaluation.
5. “Storytelling for Content Marketing” on Trailhead: Learn how to find your angle and use different storytelling tools and techniques to share your authentic story.
6. “The Strategy of Content Marketing” on Coursera: This course teaches you how to create customer journeys and content for each stage of your customers’ journeys. You’ll also gain working knowledge of various strategies through hands-on assignments, peer reviews, and group discussions.
7. “Lead Generation for Marketers” on Trailhead: This course teaches you all about inbound marketing, lead nurturing campaigns, and how to generate leads using different content formats.
Social media marketing courses
93% of marketers use social media to engage with their customers and target audience. Learning to use social media can help you reap many benefits and reach a wider and diverse audience. The following courses are a great starting point.
8. “Introduction to Social Media Marketing” on Coursera: You’ll identify various opportunities that social media offers and how to use them to scale your startup. Learn to create and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) and specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for your social media campaigns.
9. “Social selling” on Trailhead: In this short course, you’ll learn how to implement social selling tools, reach your customers and target audience using social media, and turn clicks into conversions.
10. “Social Media Marketing Crash Course” on Semrush: This course offers hands-on learning in concepts like social media algorithms, influencer marketing, audience analysis, competitor tracking, and social media analytics.
Email marketing courses
90% of marketers state email marketing is an effective digital marketing channel. With these free courses, you’ll discover how to implement email marketing for your startup.
11. “Personalized email marketing” on Trailhead: This course provides a step-by-step guide to understanding your customer preferences, creating great emailer content, and designing and testing your emails. Plus, it offers many examples on how to add emotion and make your emails mobile-responsive.
12. “Email Marketing Strategies” on Trailhead: This course teaches you how to craft email marketing campaigns that are legally compliant, drive more subscriptions, and improve deliverability and engagement.
13. “Think Outside the Inbox: Email Marketing” on Coursera: This beginner-friendly course will help you tackle the ABCs of email marketing. You’ll learn to write effective subject lines, set SMART goals for your campaigns, and execute them with ease.
Paid advertising courses
Research shows that supplementing organic marketing with remarketing campaigns boosts conversions by 40%. Strategic paid marketing offers immediate visibility with your target audience and helps you measure results more effectively. The following courses will help you get the hang of paid advertising.
14. “Campaign Optimization for Marketers” on Trailhead: Discover how to create and optimize campaigns as your customers’ needs and preferences evolve. You’ll also learn how to plan your campaign budgets and set ad preferences.
15. “Artificial Intelligence for Marketing” on Trailhead: This course will teach you how artificial intelligence (AI) can help you execute multiple campaigns, personalize your marketing campaigns, and win customer loyalty.
16. “Google Ads for Beginners” on Coursera: In this course, you’ll learn how to set up a Google Ads dashboard, conduct keyword research, and create campaign structures. Plus, you’ll put what you’ve learned into practice through hands-on assignments.
17. “Mastering Growth” on Velocity Growth: You’ll learn all about customer acquisition and retention along with the best practices for Facebook and Google Ads. This course also features guest speakers so that you can maximize your learning.
Marketing made more impactful
Agentforce can run end-to-end marketing campaigns, and analyze vast amounts of data to do what’s best for your startup.
Analytics and reporting courses
76% of businesses state that their customer satisfaction has gone up after implementing marketing analytics. Analytics and reporting tools can help you make smarter and well-informed decisions by showing you what’s working and what’s not. It also lets you track your ROI, understand customer behavior, and optimize strategies for desired results. Check out these courses to find out how analytics can help you.
18. “Measure Your Marketing Impact” on Trailhead: This all-encompassing course covers everything you should know about marketing analytics, understand what to measure and set benchmarks, and how you can take appropriate actions based on those insights.
19. “Understand Your Web Users with Google Analytics” on Trailhead: You’ll develop the necessary skills to set up Google Analytics and Adwords accounts and efficiently use audience reports and acquisition and behavior reports to generate more visitors.
20. “AI-Powered Performance Ads Certification” on Google: This course teaches you how to use AI for running and optimizing ads. You’ll learn how AI automation can analyze Google Ads and align your ad strategy with business goals.
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Just get started.
No matter where you are on your journey as a small business owner, you can get started with Starter Suite — the all-in-one AI CRM your SMB needs.
These digital marketing courses will grow your startup
Running a startup requires constant learning and upskilling. Whether it’s digital marketing or other skills for growth, Trailhead offers free, short courses that you can learn on the go. Its gamified format makes learning all the more exciting and rewarding.
