Let 2024 be the year you ramp up your digital marketing game! There has never been a better time to brush up on your skills—digital marketers are in hot demand.
Concerned about the cost of education? Don’t be. There are plenty of top-quality free digital marketing courses to choose from that cover varied topics—and we’ve selected the best ones for you in this post. With subjects ranging from social media to content marketing, there’s bound to be one (or two) that will teach you something new.
Here’s a clickable menu, in case you’d like to go back and forth between sections:
- Our top free digital marketing courses
- CareerFoundry Digital Marketing Short Course
- Coursera Digital Marketing Specialization
- EdX Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
- Google Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
- Quickstarter by Constant Contact
- Meta Blueprint Facebook Digital Marketing Associate Certification
- Sendinblue Academy Email Marketing
- Ahrefs Blogging for Business
- Free digital marketing courses FAQ
- Key learnings and next steps
With that, let’s get started!
1. Our top free digital marketing courses
Let’s not beat around the bush. In no particular order, here are our top free digital marketing courses of 2024. Enjoy!
CareerFoundry Digital Marketing Short Course
CareerFoundry is known for its top-quality instructors and mentors, up-to-the-minute curriculums, and students who graduate with a rock-solid understanding of course concepts.
Created by the same experts who crafted our Intro to Digital Marketing course, this five-day, self-paced course is jam-packed with nuggets on conducting campaign research, fundamental marketing metrics to guide strategies, and hands-on exercises.
Aspiring digital marketers will get exposure to real topics that professionals deal with every day, helping them to decide if digital marketing is a career path that suits them. Beginners and newbies, this free digital marketing course is for you!
Coursera Digital Marketing Specialization
Coursera is well-known for a wealth of courses on a virtually unlimited number of subjects, which are often created in partnership with colleges and universities. Created by the University of Illinois, its Digital Marketing Specialization class offers students seven courses encompassing everything a digital marketing newbie would need to know.
The program even goes beyond digital marketing to cover pricing strategies, 3D printing, and data visualization.
Each course consists of several videos and complementary readings, and is taught by an expert in the field. Coursera suggests spending five hours per week; at that rate, it will take you an estimated eight months to complete.
It may seem like a big time investment, but it’s a great option if you’re keen to start a new career or break into the field of digital marketing. You also have the option of only engaging in the course topics that interest you the most.
While a paid option is available, you can audit the class for free.
EdX Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
If you’re eager to gain a holistic understanding of digital marketing, you can’t go wrong with EdX’s Fundamentals of Digital Marketing class. Part of the University of Maryland’s Digital Marketing Professional Certificate and taught by their esteemed marketing professors, this self-paced video course offers a high-level education on marketing principles, concepts, and strategies.
Course topics include omnichannel marketing, mobile marketing, the marketing mix, multi-sided platforms, attribution, and more. The Fundamentals of Digital Marketing course is the perfect class for beginners—even those with minimal marketing knowledge—and provides an excellent foundation for future learnings.
EdX estimates it will take students approximately four weeks (spending three to five hours per week) to complete the class, and you can audit it for free. (Note that if you choose to audit, you’ll only have access to the materials for a month—paid subscribers get unlimited access.)
Google Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
You can’t go wrong with a Google course! Its sprawling educational offerings cover the bread and butter (paid search, organic search, and analytics) but also go into other more general aspects of digital marketing.
The Fundamentals of Digital Marketing course is geared towards digital marketing newbies and consists of 26 modules that will take approximately 40 hours to complete in total. Each module includes videos, key knowledge highlights, and a quiz. Topics include planning an online business strategy, building a web presence, tracking and measuring web traffic, and more. (Naturally, there is a heavy emphasis on Google products.)
While beginners may benefit most from this class, more experienced marketers will be surprised at what new nuggets they can glean from it. It will trigger long-forgotten memories of concepts and principles that are still relevant and helpful.
Quickstarter by Constant Contact
Constant Contact is one of the oldest email service providers, dating back to the dark ages of the mid-nineties (yes, email existed back then!). While it may be best known for email marketing, its Social Media Quickstarter content hub delivers a great educational foundation and actionable tips for successful social media marketing.
Its comprehensive offering covers all the heavy hitters—Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, etc.—and provides step-by-step instructions for building a brand presence and engaging with potential and current customers. Each social media platform has a lengthy list of blog articles on topics that range from beginner-level (e.g., “How to Set up an Account”) to advanced.
You can choose which social media platforms and content you’d like to educate yourself on, or go whole hog and gorge on all the amazing content.
Meta Blueprint Facebook Digital Marketing Associate Certification
You’ll want to include Facebook in your strategy if you’re looking to increase your brand presence on social media. Its nearly three billion users (a whopping one-third of the earth’s population) spend almost four hours per week on average scrolling through the Feed, watching videos, chatting, and shopping on the addictive platform.
The Facebook Certified Digital Marketing Associate program is a series of videos covering the basics and nitty-gritty of crafting a presence and advertising on Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram (Meta also owns the latter two). You’ll also learn how to analyze the results of your campaigns using analytics tools native to the platform.
If you’re keen to show the world that you’re a social media marketing guru, you can even take the exam to earn a certificate that you can add to your resume or digital profile.
Sendinblue Academy Email Marketing
Email has been around for 50 years—though it was only really adopted en masse in the 1990s. Its indispensable functionality helps explain why it remains one of the most powerful marketing channels today, delivering an ROI of $36 for every $1 spent.
Its ubiquity means that savvy digital marketers need to have a handle on how to run effective email marketing campaigns—and Sendinblue Academy’s email marketing course will help you do just that! To earn the official certification, students must complete an eight-module course consisting of 63 videos, 62 questions to test their grasp of the concepts and terms, and four e-books to help round out their knowledge.
This crash course on email marketing will teach you about A/B testing, email deliverability, segmentation, even GDPR. It even goes into strategies for building a subscriber list and how to optimize key performance indicators, like open rate and click-through rate.
For a free course on email marketing, it simply can’t be beat.
Ahrefs Blogging for Business
If you weren’t already aware, “Content is king.” Bill Gates published a blog post with that title on the Microsoft website in 1996, and the pithy statement is as relevant now as it was back then. In his post, Gates theorized that: “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting.” As it turns out, it was a prescient prediction.
Today, blogging can be a multi-million dollar business. Just ask Matt Marshall, whose blog Venture Beat nets him over $100,000 per month. And it’s not just helpful for individual entrepreneurs: businesses can capitalize on this strategy as well. In fact, Hubspot built its reputation and has acquired thousands of customers thanks to its sprawling content repository.
Ahrefs’ Blogging for Business course will teach you to leverage the same tactics used by Hubspot and Matt Marshall to increase brand awareness, credibility, and ultimately, sales for your company. While at a hair under five hours, it’s relatively short compared to some of the other courses on this list, Ahrefs manages to pack substantial content into the 40 lessons.
Its 11 modules cover strategies for growing a blog, analyzing traffic potential and the difficulty of ranking for a particular keyword, maximizing search traffic for your top keywords and phrases, promoting your content, and more. It’s pretty much your one-stop-shop for building a top-notch blog filled with high-quality content that will educate consumers and hopefully convert them into paying customers at some point during the customer journey. Ahrefs even includes interviews with content experts to inspire you as an added bonus.
2. Free digital marketing courses FAQ
Who will benefit from a free digital marketing course?
If you’re new to digital marketing, it’s a great idea to educate yourself on fundamentals before digging into specific channels. Taking a free digital marketing course or two will upgrade your knowledge or refresh your memory (if it’s been a while since you engaged with any one platform) without straining your finances. And you never know—an unfamiliar channel could capture your interest and lead to a new career path.
What will you learn from a free digital marketing course?
With the many free digital marketing courses available (literally) at your fingertips, it’s almost impossible to find a topic that’s not covered. You can learn everything: from fundamental marketing principles to crafting an omnichannel strategy, and everything in between.
And don’t think that because you’ve been in the field for several years that you “know everything”—the only constant in digital marketing trends is change! You can find courses geared to all levels of experience.
Whether you’re new to the field or are interested in becoming an expert on a particular channel, you’ll definitely acquire some great knowledge that you can use in your day-to-day job or even apply towards building your personal brand online. Just take some time to identify your goals before selecting a course and choose the ones that will help you reach them.
3. Key learnings and next steps
Maybe this article has convinced you to enroll in a free digital marketing course (perhaps one of our recommendations!). It may have even made you realize that you’re ready to take the next step in your career by attending a digital marketing boot camp or digital marketing certification program.
Regardless of your next steps, digital marketing courses are a great way to stay up-to-date on changing trends and ensure your knowledge is on point.
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