Marketing Training: 7 of the Best Resources to Educate Your Audience

Most organizations around the world recognize the value of organizing staff training, to help them acquire new skills that will enhance their productivity on the job.

To buttress this fact, in 2019 alone, data from Statista reveals that the North American training market was estimated at $169 billion!

However, as effective as training could be, it could be a complete waste of time and resources if not done right. This article will be discussing some of the best resources to assist you in training your marketing department effectively.

Let’s dive in already!

What is Marketing Training?

To put things in proper perspective, I will start by defining what Training refers to.

Within an organizational setting, Training can be described as the activities created to enhance the knowledge and skills of employees while providing information and instruction on how to better perform specific tasks. See https://www.talentlyft.com/en/resources/what-is-training-and-development, for more details.

From the above definition of Training, we can deduce that Marketing Training refers to activities created by an organization for her marketing department, to enhance the marketing skills of their employees so they can be more effective at their jobs and help the organization become more profitable.

As Marketing is a broad field, so is Marketing Training. It encapsulates training in all the branches or types of marketing and all the knowledge and skills needed to excel in each.

Benefits of Marketing Training

What are the benefits an organization would enjoy when she trains her marketing staff? We will be identifying a couple of them here.

Improvement in Employee Performance and Productivity

One of the natural effects of effective marketing training is that it equips employees to be more productive in their jobs. A more productive marketing team means more sales for the organization and higher profit margins for the organization. This is why top organizations spend millions of dollars on employee training every year.

It prepares them for higher tasks

As you will appreciate, most organization improve their organizational marketing goals yearly. Training the marketing staff will equip them with the needed knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve their organizationalmarketing goals.

Reduces the need for supervision

When an employee is adequately skilled and informed about what to do, it reduces the need to micro-manage such an employee. This is another benefit of Marketing Training.

Internal Promotion and Recruitment

When employees are given necessary training frequently, it improves their capabilities and makes them better suited to occupy higher positions within the organization.

Promoting staff to higher positions is always a motivator forother staff since they can see growth prospects within the organization.

Lower Turn-over rate

The turnover rate refers to the rate at which an organization loses employees over a specific period.Every great organization seeks to keep its best talents.

Research has proven that most employees will stay with an organization, that gives them opportunities to develop their skills. So training your marketing staff will alwayshelp you retainyour best talents.

The benefits of effective marketing training go on and on. So the next question is, which resources are most effective in training the marketing staff of an organization? We will be discussing that next.

The Best Marketing TrainingResources to Educate Your Audience

Content Marketing Training

What is content marketing?

According to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing can be defined as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. See https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-marketing/, for more details.

Simply put, content marketing involves the production and distribution of valuable content, to your target audience, for the purpose of influencing their buying decisions in favor of your business.

Although it may seem easy and straightforward from the definition, content marketing is one of the broadest and most technical areas in marketing. It requires skills such as Writing, Creativity, Analytic thinking, etc.

These skills require training to master them. The following are some of the best resources available online to train your audience on content marketing:

American Marketing Association (AMA): Certification in Content Market

The American Marketing Association has a series of approved LinkedIn learning courses to train professionals on Content Marketing. This course is targeted at equipping professionals with all relevant skills needed to excel in content marketing.

On completing this course, all participants are permitted to take the American Marketing Association’s certification exam, to become certified content marketers. Below are the cost details of the course and the certification examination:

Course Cost: $29.99 per month via membership of LinkedIn learning.

Certification Cost: $349 includes 3 attempts. However, for members of AMA, the cost is just $249.

See https://www.ama.org/events-training/Certification/Pages/content-marketing-certification-skillsets.aspx, for a view of these courses.

Udemy: Create Content that sells

Udemy is a popular American open online course provider, targeted at providing learning courses of all types for professionals and students.Their website contains quality videos and materials to train you on nearly every topic you can think of.

Udemy offers a content marketing course titled “Create Content That Sells”. This course is designed to helpprofessionals and students master the art of content marketing, and use this knowledge to drive growth in their business.

The Course costs ($199.99).

CoSchedule Academy

CoSchedule is an internet-based business that offers solutions on all things digital marketing. Their blog, CoSchedule.com/blog, is a renowned place to find resources on all types of digital marketing.

CoSchedule Academy offers 25 top-of-the-range and on-demand marketing courses that cover tested and proven marketing techniques, guaranteed to produce great results.

Each of these courses contains step-by-step video tutorials and actionable advice that you can implement in your marketing for better results. Courses available in this Academy include Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, SEO, etc.

These courses are taught by the brilliant minds behind those amazing articles you read on CoSchedule’s blog. Of course, these persons are highly skilled and experienced in their area of specialization.

So you can be sure to find only the best resources in this Academy.

What’s more, CoSchedule offers free “limited access” to their Academy for those who wish to get a sneak peek into what is on offer at this Academy. So you can get a taste of what you will be learning before making any payments. Isn’t that perfect?

CoSchedule charges $250 per year for full access to the resources available in their academy. You can visit https://coschedule.com/academy/academy-pro, to get a view of CoSchedule’s Academy.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Training

Search Engine Optimization refers to the process of getting a web page to rank higher on search engines such as Google, Bing, etc. Getting a page to rank higher organically requires skill as certain things have to be put in place.

Among others, you have to use the right keywords in your website page URL and the content of your web page, write high-quality content, etc. All of these require skills and these skills can be acquired easily through training.

We will be discussing some effective SEO training options available on the internet for any person interested.

UC Davis: SEO Specialization Certification

The University of California offers a certification in SEO to train professionals on how to maximize SEO for better business returns.

This course will guide you on how to optimize websites for local and international audiences, and help your business blog or website become visible to your target audiences.

This training costs $49 per month. Not a big price really, considering how much you will get to learn from it. Visit https://www.coursera.org/specializations/seo, for details.

Yoast: SEO Training for Beginners

When it comes to SEO, Yoast easily stands out as one of the trailblazers in that field. Yoast is an SEO WordPress Pluginthat can be used to enhance the SEO friendliness of a website or blog.

With Yoast SEO, you can control titles and meta descriptions, set your targeted keywords, track how frequently they are used, manage sitemaps, etc.

Yoast offers amazing SEO training for newbies in SEO. It introduces professionals and students to topics like SEO for content creation, how search engines work, technical SEO, etc.

What’s more, Yoast offers this Free of Charge. Visit https://yoast.com/academy/free-seo-training-seo-for-beginners/, to register or review the course.

Social Media Marketing

When Facebook was established in the early 2000s, very few persons may have seen the emergence of social media as the beginning of a new channel for marketing.

However, today it is hardly possible to find an organization at the top of their game that does not have a sound social media marketing strategy. So what is Social Media Marketing all about?

Social Media Marketing refers to the use of Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. to connect with your audience, build your brand and boost sales of your goods and or services.

As you would appreciate, the world of Social Media Marketing is an evolving field and requires several competencies. We will be discussing a few training options available to equip your audience with all the needed skills to excel.

Digital Marketing Institute: Certified Digital Social Media Specialist

The Digital Marketing Institute is an online learning platform that offers training opportunities forprofessionals and students in all fields of Digital Marketing.

Among its course offerings, is Social Media Marketing. This course is designed toequip students with the knowledge and skills needed to create and implement strategic and effective social media marketing strategies.

On completing this course, you will be awarded a certificate in Social Media Marketing. This course is quite expensive, as it costs a total of $2, 920.

Visit https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/en-us/students/courses/professional-diploma-in-social-media-marketing-2, to preview the course.

Boston University: Strategic Social Media Marketing

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. Although the University was established by the United Baptist Church in 1839, it presently has no affiliation with any religious sect.

Among its numerous course offerings, Boston University offers a course on Strategic Social Media Marketing. This course covers all you need to know to be able to develop an effective Social Media Marketing Strategy.

What’s more, this course is free. Yes, you read that right!

However, you need to pay a token of $200, to be certified on completion of this course.

To preview the course, visit https://www.edx.org/course/strategic-social-media-marketing.

Summary

So here you go!

These are a few of the numerous amazing Marketing Training Resources available online. You can be sure that any of these resources will help your audience acquire or improve their skills in the niche of marketing that the course is directed.

Cheers to your success as you begin implementing any of these pieces of training!