October 2, 2020
Unlike my man Post Malone, I haven’t spent my COVID quarantine getting face tattoos.
Instead, I’ve spent part of that time learning and looking ahead. You could also attribute this to fewer meetings occurring overall (and I will virtually “cheers” to that!). This served as an opportunity to look for something to help me continue to hone my skills and learn new ones by taking several online marketing certification courses. If you’re looking to sharpen your own skills, or even just get some inspiration, here are the top three courses I recommend:
01 // HubSpot – Email Marketing
Whether you are in the B2B or B2C space, email is something you see almost every day, but is rarely done well because of how nuanced it can be. This course serves either as a primer or great refresher to make sure you’re asking the right questions when looking at email campaigns.
Course Highlights:
• Are we sending the right email, at the right time, to the right people? If you asked 100 people if they get too many emails, everyone would answer yes. Another irrelevant email into their inboxes is not going to be impactful. Take the extra time to make sure you are saying the right thing, at the right time, to the right person to build trust and keep them interested in your content.
• Test, test, test. But what can you test? You have plenty of things you can test in emails – subject lines, CTA verbiage, different imagery – but one of my favorite things to test is placement of the CTA button. Should the CTA button be around the fold in the hero section of your email or should your audience scroll to their first CTA?
02 // Google Analytics Academy
Virtually raise your hand if Google Analytics is like a foreign language to you… I was right there with you. Google Analytics to me is like driving a stick-shift car. You practice every day, and every day you stall out, bouncing back and forth, and get a headache. Until one day you hop in the driver’s seat and you turned into a pro driver overnight. With Google Analytics, you log in to your account every day, look at all of the different charts – probably get overwhelmed – and you end up more confused and with a headache. From the beginner course, to advanced, all the way to the Power Users course – there is a course for you.
Course Highlights:
• Instills a feeling of confidence in your ability to analyze reports.
• Helps you set up the right goals for your campaigns, but more importantly, know how you are tracking towards those goals so you can optimize as needed.
• Get to know your audience better and better because of the audience reports that can be generated through Google Analytics.
03 // HubSpot – Inbound
It doesn’t matter if you spend most of your time in the B2C world, B2B world, or both – you should take this course. So many times, people talk about “the funnel,” and buyer personas are usually involved in that conversation. Take this course and you will be thinking about inbound differently.
Course Highlights:
• Ditch the funnel and think of it like a flywheel. The rotation of the flywheel represents the growth of your business, and happy customers are what fuel the rotation.
• Take your buyer personas one step further and create your buyers’ journey. We aren’t just working with a persona; we are working with an entire buyer’s journey – from start to finish. It is our job to know that journey and empathize with our prospects and clients.
04 // Honorable Mentions
I don’t want it to stop here. At ChappellRoberts, we always have people looking for opportunities to learn new things. I was able to pick a few coworkers’ brains on some certifications they were excited to get, and ones they are looking forward to:
• Twitter Flight School – With loads of different courses related to your job function, Twitter Flight School was created to help master advertising on Twitter. Who better to learn from than the creators themselves?
• 2020 Adobe CC Certification – Our Associate Creative Director attended Adobe Max last year and I don’t think our agency has stopped talking about all of the things he learned while he was there. When talking with the creative team, everyone is excited to continue to expand our capabilities with all of the Adobe products.
• Instagram Advertising Course – Specifically focused on Instagram Buying Objectives. With so many people on Instagram and so many different capabilities, where do you start? Deepen your knowledge of what’s possible with IG.
