How To Cost Effectively Upskill Your Marketing
Your firm is full of legal experts. They’re continually improving their skills around the law. And you know how to boost those skills when necessary.
But what do you do if you want to enhance your digital marketing? Learning is the start – and these are a few good places to kick that off.
Free courses
The first place to look is online. There are a huge amount of free online courses based around the main principles of digital marketing. Some of the most valuable include:
Google’s Analytics Academy teaches you everything you need to know about the free traffic monitoring software. It has courses for beginners, for the more advanced users and those who really know what they’re doing.
For a basic understanding of digital marketing, you could do a lot worse than Google’s Digital Garage. One of the most relevant is the Fundamentals of Digital Marketing course. The course is accredited by the Open University and the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe, so it’s got some real academic heft behind it.
One of the giants of the digital marketing sector, HubSpot offers a huge amount of courses and tutorials for free as part of its Academy. You can view lessons on marketing or get help with sales or you can choose between a short course or one that comes with a certification – it’s up to you.
If you want to learn about SEO, PPC, content marketing or social media management, Semrush Academy has video courses that introduce you to these topics in an hour or so – perfect for bitesize learning sessions.
Conferences
Over the Covid-19 lockdown, conferences didn’t stop – they just went online. This opened them for everyone to access. But even before gatherings were restricted, many conferences would live stream their talks.
For example, the organisers of brightonSEO – one of the country’s biggest digital marketing events – has broadcast the main stage free online for years.
Many online conferences are hosted by marketing agencies, so keeping up to date with them is a good way to hear about anything going on. But if you’re not sure which agencies to follow and want to be there in person, Eventbrite can show you marketing conferences in your area.
Webinars and blogs
You’ll likely be familiar with webinars through your own legal work – including those hosted by us at First4Lawyers – but there are also plenty held in the marketing field. To find out about the webinars you might be interested in, following various agencies is again a good idea.
Meanwhile, vlogs and blogs can help you learn about a specific subject relatively quickly. Take a look at some of the following for breakdowns of topics and explainer guides:
Newsletters
If you’re too busy to peruse the various online publications for marketing news every day, subscribing to their newsletters means you can receive the headlines in an email.
You can get them sent from sites that focus on SEO, social media or more general marketing – whatever you’d like to keep tabs on.
Spend a little bit of time looking through the kinds of publications you’re interested in and then, when you’ve signed up, you don’t have to do anything else – apart from actually reading the newsletters.
Continual learning
When you want to learn more about marketing, it’s not difficult to do it in a cost effective way. The internet offers huge opportunities to upskill yourself and your team members – and you can always count the time spent towards your CPD.
Einstein was reported to have once said “Once you stop learning, you start dying”. Although we can’t verify the accuracy of the report, we can certainly agree with its message.
