10 Marketing Courses for Beginners
We’ve handpicked 10 marketing courses for beginners to give you the confidence to explore new marketing strategies, techniques, and methods with a lot of enthusiasm. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketing manager wanting to try a different approach, or a content creator trying to get their name out there, these courses are designed to give you a strong foundation and basic understanding of the fundamentals of marketing. Taking these courses will also give you enough general knowledge before undertaking more specific types within the field. Keep scrolling to find out how marketing can help you connect with your target audience and improve your customer experience, online and offline.
1. Knowing Your Market
This marketing course for beginners will help you understand your target market is an important step when marketing strategy. SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Knowing Your Market course will explore how market research will help you make the right decisions when it comes to marketing your products and services. It covers the fundamentals of market research so that you can get crucial customer insights. After finishing the 3 lessons this course has to offer, learners will be able to determine the right audience for them and ensure that their research is up to date and relevant to stay ahead of their competition.
As this course is offered by SC Training (formerly EdApp), you can also find other related free elearning resources in their comprehensive course library. With more than 1,000 courses that can be completed in minutes, you can have complete access to the same materials industry leaders use for their businesses.
- Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
- Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson
- Scope: Knowing your target market, fundamentals of market research, keeping your market research relevant
Created by SC Training (formerly EdApp)
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2. Social Media and Electronic Communication
Another marketing course for beginners from SC Training (formerly EdApp) is Social Media and Electronic Communication, a course that will guide you on how to navigate social media specifically social media in retail. This course will teach you more about the different platforms that are useful in retail social media marketing, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Not only that, but this course also offers lessons on social media engagement tactics and strategies, social customer care, and social media etiquette. You can take the course at the same time while using those social media apps since the course can be taken on your phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer.
With SC Training (formerly EdApp), you can take free online marketing classes. All of SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s courses are also housed in a mobile-friendly platform allowing learners to take the courses anywhere, whether it’s at your desk at work or a table in a coffee shop. This is certainly an advantage for those looking to take their lessons at their own time and place.
- Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
- Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson
- Scope: Social media in retail, strategies for effective social media engagement, social customer care, basics of social media etiquette
Created by SC Training (formerly EdApp)
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3. Marketing Strategy Specialization
If you want to specifically learn about effective marketing strategies and develop a marketing plan for your product or service, Coursera’s Marketing Strategy Specialization course is for you. In this course, you will learn about the concepts and tools that will help you successfully develop a marketing strategy for your business. It covers lessons on market research, consumer behavior, marketing mix fundamentals, and in the end, you can put all that you’ve learned into practice by making a marketing plan. The course is being taught by 5 different professors from IE Business School and even offers a certificate upon completion. However, this course will approximately take 6 months to complete if you choose to take all 5 courses, and approximately 4 weeks if you choose to take only 1 course.
- Cost: Free
- Length: Approximately 6 months for all 5 courses
- Scope: Market research and consumer behavior, marketing strategy, marketing mix fundamentals, marketing plans
Created by Coursera
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4. Getting Started with Email Marketing | Learn with Mailchimp
In this marketing training program offered by Skillshare, you will learn how an email marketing strategy can help small business owners, freelancers, and even startup teams accomplish their business goals. Getting Started with Email Marketing is taught by Allyson Van Houten, a senior marketing manager at Mailchimp, the world’s most powerful marketing platform for small businesses. In this 1 hour and 11 minutes course, you will receive an overview of email marketing, marketing campaign creation, subscriber lists, and common pitfalls that you can find with this type of marketing. Currently, the course is only offered in a video format, and can only be taken as a free class if you haven’t already signed up for Skillshare.
- Cost: Free first 7 days trial, paid membership
- Length: 1 hour 11 minutes for all 14 lessons
- Scope: Email Marketing Overview, Campaign Creation, Common Pitfalls
Created by SkillShare
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5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you have a website to promote your product or service, you might want to consider learning more about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO has led to increased leads and conversions by having a website’s content appear on organic searches on different search engines like Google. There are many SEO courses out there, but SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s SEO course is a good marketing course for beginners as you will get to know the essential basics of SEO, such as content quality, keyword research, technical optimization, and many more.
This course also uses SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s gamification feature which makes the learning experience interactive and engaging. It uses gaming elements like drag-and-drop, sequencing, matching, and many more to make your lesson feel more like a game rather than just a task.
- Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
- Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson
- Scope: Investing in SEO, defining your SEO goals, keyword research, planning for high-quality content, link building, technical optimization
Created by SC Training (formerly EdApp)
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6. Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
Learn about Digital Marketing from Google themselves with their Fundamentals of Digital Marketing course. Their free course is accredited by Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and The Open University. It features 26 modules that cover topics such as business strategy, performance metrics analysis, local marketing, email marketing, and are filled with real-world examples to help you improve your marketing efforts to increase ROI. This digital marketing course is offered in video format and will require you to pass a 40-item final exam before receiving certification. The course will also take you at least 40 hours to complete, which is something to consider if you’re looking for courses that can be completed in a shorter time frame.
- Cost: Free
- Length: 40 hours
- Scope: Build your web presence, plan your online business strategy, make search work for you
Created by Google Digital Garage
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7. Understanding Customer Motivations
SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Understanding Customer Motivations course will teach you the psychology of customers when it comes to their buying behavior, and how you can use that information to your advantage. By having a deep understanding of your customers’ motivations, you will enable yourself or your team members to develop different ways to approach their marketing strategy. The course is designed with questions and situational exercises to help prepare you for possible real-life discussions with customers as well.
As with most SC Training (formerly EdApp) courses, you are free to progress through the 4 lessons at your own pace.
- Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
- Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson
- Scope: Customer psychology, why do customers come to your store, how do customers differ, how do you keep your customers
Created by SC Training (formerly EdApp)
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8. Content Marketing
This next marketing course for beginners is perfect for inbound professionals and content producers alike looking to reinvent their current inbound marketing strategy. Content Marketing by HubSpot Academy focuses on building a content creation framework for branding, producing, developing, and repurposing effective content consistently and becoming a more strategic content marketer. Hubspot offers the course in Spanish and French, in case you would need another language option available aside from English. The course is made up of 12 lessons that consist of 54 videos and 11 quizzes that you will need to complete before getting certified.
- Cost: Free
- Length: 6 hours 12 minutes
- Scope: The power of storytelling, building a content creation framework, generating content ideas, how to effectively promote content, measuring and analyzing your content
Created by HubSpot Academy
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9. Marketing Foundations
Marketing Foundations by edX will give you an introductory understanding of traditional marketing functions within an organization. This course will prepare you to think and understand marketing as part of the overall business strategy through examining different components of a marketing plan. It will also cover the tools used in developing marketing efforts and strategies, the 4 Ps of marketing, consumer behavior, and marketing plan analysis. A free option for this course is always available, but if you want to get certified for this course, you’d have to catch the enrollment dates for the paid option of this course.
- Cost: Free, optional upgrade available
- Length: Estimated 4 weeks, 7-9 hours per week
- Scope: Summarize the strategic overview of marketing, Identify analytical tools used to assess marketing strategies, Identify the 4 Ps of Marketing, Discuss consumer behavior and positioning strategies
Created by edX
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10. Client Value Creation
You learned how to market your products or services, but now you’re wondering how you can convince potential customers that what you’re selling has value to them. With SC Training (formerly EdApp)’s Client Value Creation course, you will understand how creating value for your customers is pivotal to selling your product or service and reaching business goals. Learn how to best create value for your clients, analyze opportunities, build relationships, and execute your ideas successfully in as short as 5 minutes with this microlearning course.
With microlearning, you will be able to retain information better since the courses and lessons can be done in smaller chunks compared to other longer courses. SC Training (formerly EdApp) also allows you to retake the lessons with distributed practice with its Spaced Repetition feature (available upon request only). It repeats key learning concepts to enhance long-term memory retention and combat the forgetting curve, so you won’t have to fear forgetting anything that you’ve learned on SC Training (formerly EdApp).
- Cost: Free (up to 10 users)
- Length: 5-10 minutes per lesson
- Scope: Shape value-led opportunities, create win-win relationships, focus on excellent execution
Created by SC Training (formerly EdApp)
Explore the courseBuild your foundation with these marketing courses for beginners
Learning about the basics of marketing and establishing a strong foundation is pivotal to your business success. It can be challenging at first, but once you get a firm understanding of the marketing funnel and its fundamentals, you will have enough general knowledge to pursue more specific concepts more suited to your business and goals. Most importantly, you will be able to learn the techniques, skills, and concepts necessary to get your product or service known to your target market. Whether it’s content creation, market research & segmentation, strategy execution, or understanding your customers better, our list of 10 marketing courses for beginners, whether you work in a marketing agency or corporate marketing department, should help you get started.