Your top online marketing courses and training solutions of the year

With the launch of our brand new Learning Paths - offering practical, strategic marketing courses online - discover which marketing training solutions have been the most popular

Deciding on a marketing course to optimize your strategy in 2021 is tough. With so many marketing training options, you need a solution that's practical, data-driven, and proven to generate results, quickly. Read on to discover our Smart Insights members' top Learning Paths and resources in each membership tier.

Top Business Professional marketing course: Manage change for digital transformation

• Module from Digital Transformation Learning Path for Business Professional Members

Digital Transformation is the use of new, fast and frequently changing digital technology to solve problems. However, a Boston Consulting Group report found that only 33% of significant IT projects have been fully successful since the year 2000.

The danger is that the benefits of digital transformation are not being fully achieved as organizational barriers can hold back companies from fully benefiting from technological developments.

We've designed this marketing course to take you through every step of the Digital Transformation process, including this dedicated managing change module for marketing leaders, covering:

• Preparing for digital transformation and change
• Models for understanding and managing change
• Create a climate for digital transformation
• Engage and enable the change
• Implement and sustain the change
• Learning from digital transformation success and failure

As you can see in the diagram below, Kotler recommends 8 actions to prepare for a workplace change, such as Digital Transformation. You can put these actions into place and more with our dedicated Digital Transformation change management training.

Business Professional resource: Digital Transformation playbook

Digital Transformation projects are complex because there are so many marketing activities across different paid, owned and earned media and digital experiences.

This playbook for Business Professional Members will provide you and your business with a comprehensive structure to follow. It will help you plan and prioritize transformation activities across different marketing communications in the customer lifecycle using the Smart Insights RACE Framework.

This playbook is just one of many pratical resources that can be found in our Digital Transformation Learning Path. Working together as a suite of training modules and associated templates, our Learning Path will support you and your team to review the current contribution of digital marketing to your organization and then create a plan to improve that contribution by defining activities to plan, manage and optimize digital media, digital experiences and digital data.

What is Business Professional Membership?

Business Professional Membership supports you to create an integrated marketing strategy for your team, optimizing their performance across multiple marketing channels. This strategic membership level unlocks complete marketing training for you and your team, plus a named Customer Success Manager to support you with onboarding and reviews. You also get access to all the Learning Paths and resources at Business Starter and Learner membership levels.

 

Top Business Starter marketing course: Structure a plan using the RACE Framework

• Module from RACE Practical Digital Strategy Learning Path for Business Starter Members

RACE is a practical framework to help manage and improve results from your digital marketing. Ultimately, it’s about using a data-driven approach, applying web analytics and recommended best practices to get more commercial value from your investments in digital marketing.

We recommend the RACE Framework as a practical planning template that can be adapted for businesses of all shapes and sizes, that's why we've made this marketing course available for small companies with Business Starter Membership.

Why use the RACE Framework?

• RACE is practical and action-oriented: It focuses on tactics you can implement in your digital marketing communications and on your website and mobile apps.
• RACE is customer-centred: It follows the established customer marketing funnel by integrating all multi-channel marketing activities (including traditional offline marketing too).
• Marketers can use the RACE Framework to structure a data-driven marketing approach that defines KPIs for setting targets, reviewing results using analytics and summary dashboards and continuous optimization. So you can accelerate your ROI from marketing.

Business Starter resource: Digital Marketing Strategy Audit/Healthcheck

Preparing for a New Year with so much uncertainty, our digital marketing strategy audit/healthcheck tool can help Business Starter Members audit and plan for growth.

With so many great opportunities for deploying digital marketing, it can be difficult to know which to prioritize.  Start your journey to improve your digital marketing here by reviewing your activities against best practices defined in the Smart Insights RACE Framework of:

• Plan
• Reach
• Act
• Convert
• Engage

To use the spreadsheet, simply answer the questions about your digital marketing effectiveness or score your digital capability on a scale of 1 to 5 using the drop-down selection of options and a Radar diagram will be automatically created to summarise areas needing improvement.

Recommended Smart Insights templates that can be used to create the deliverables forming your strategy are highlighted throughout.

What is Business Starter Membership?

Business Starter offers an entry point to strategic marketing training for small businesses (including consultants and agencies), with access to all channel-specific training included in Learner Membership, but also access to the RACE Framework and our popular Campaign Planning and Digital Experience Learning Paths.

 

Top Learner marketing course: A planned approach to social media marketing

• Module from Social Media Marketing Learning Path for Learner Members.

A planned approach to social media marketing helps social media marketers define how social media can support marketing communications goals. In this marketing course, we recommend social media marketers review the following fice elements as part of a plan to define goals and strategies for how social media can support a business:

1. Listen and manage reputation
2. Transform the brand through social media
3. Acquire new customers
4. Increase sales to existing customers
5. Deliver customer service

Business Executives, stakeholders, and managers are involved in social media goal-setting. But the nature of the metrics they are interested in will vary according to their objectives, as can be seen in the ROI Pyramid below.

Learner resource: Social media report template

A popular resource amongst our Learner Members is this ready-made template for social media reporting. By reporting on your social media performance, you’ll be able to show how your brand (or your client) is generating conversation and interaction online through a variety of profiles.

Social media marketers/learners can also use this report to improve their own channel performance by tracking what kind of posts get people talking, and which profiles are leading to goal completions in analytics.

The social media report template, made in PowerPoint, walks you through each step of the reporting process. Once you have input your information in this template you will be ready to report detailed social campaign statistics and summarize any further actions that will ensure continued success.

What is Learner Membership?

Learner Membership is designed for individual marketers looking to improve their marketing and digital skills and advance their careers. With access to channel-based marketing training spanning Google Analytics, SEO, email marketing and automation, content marketing, and social media marketing.

 

Free Members' Top Resource

If you're not able to join as a premium member of Smart Insights just yet, all of our free members can access the free digital marketing plan template and a few other useful resources in the members' section.