We are often asked to give recommendations on courses and educational programs: where better to go to study digital marketing. For this you need to answer two questions.What tasks will you solve with the help of new knowledge? The choice of the course and the program depends on the answer to this question.
What is your level of knowledge in traditional marketing? The fact is that the discipline “Internet marketing” should not exist. This is nothing more than a set of technologies and tools that allows you to solve the problems of traditional marketing using the Internet.
You can’t become a successful digital marketer if you don’t understand what segmentation is, if you don’t know how to identify the needs of your target audience, what positioning and USP are.
If you have sufficient knowledge in the field of traditional marketing and have already formulated the goals and objectives of future training, let’s define it.
Course specifics
General digital marketing course contain a large amount of knowledge in the field of marketing and briefly explain the specifics of the Internet tools themselves. Lecturers of specialized courses, as a rule, are guided by a prepared audience who already has practical skills in a particular area of digital marketing.
Suppose you are a professional marketer, you have eaten a dog in traditional communications, you know how to plan TV and radio, you know everything about research, and you have been through it all more than once. You need knowledge for normal work with contractors, competent hiring of employees and selection of digital tools freelancers.
In this case, we recommend “visionary” courses, where more information about the digital transformation, about how potential customers interact with our digital platforms. Of course, these are only general courses, and often foreign ones. They give a minimal understanding of the current situation in the online advertising market and increase your professional ability.
Form of study
The advantage of offline courses is that you can ask a teacher a question directly at a lecture, make friends with fellow students and discuss your successes and failures. It is important. I give lectures to students and in the audience, and often their questions reflect the real cases of someone’s business. Together we are looking for solutions and sometimes we find very interesting options.
Modern online schools also create a community, hold seminars, where in online chat rooms you can discuss accumulated issues and chat with teachers. The advantages of online schools also include the opportunity to review the lesson. The second and third review will fill the words of the lecturer, which for the first time seemed too abstract.
Payment
There is nothing free on the Internet – it has long been known to all. Any free educational programs are usually paid from the PR budgets of advertising systems, agencies or other market participants. The general essence of such programs is reduced to the description of the basic elements of Internet marketing with a clear bias in the use of the tool “customer”.
Geography
Absolute adaptation of tools for local realities, language of lecturers and English-speaking communities in online and offline schools speaks in favor of domestic courses. You need to make a choice depending on the tasks and the level of perception of English.
Details of training
First choose a school and only then a specific course. In my opinion, it is necessary to consider only professional participants of the education market in the field of digital marketing.
