0297 - Growing Your Business with Digital Marketing

Description

Learn how you can successfully market your business on the internet and answer the question, "how to grow my business?" even if you have little or no money to spend! In this practical, hands-on course, you will develop a digital marketing plan for your business. You will start by exploring different kinds of business websites and determining your goals for your web presence. Then, you will learn about strategies for search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), social media, email marketing, and e-commerce. During your training, you will also understand how to use web analytics to track and improve the performance of your website, ads, and emails. By the end of the course, you will be ready to apply this knowledge to create a digital marketing plan to help you reach your goals.

This course is fully online, you require internet access and an email account. The course duration is 6 weeks, followed by a 2-week period to complete the final exam (online, open book). Lessons are released on Wednesdays and Fridays of each week, for a total of 12. You are not required to be online at any specific time. In addition to the specific lesson content, there is a discussion board with each lesson and often there is an optional assignment to apply the learning. Following each lesson, there is a short multiple choice quiz. Your score on these quizzes does not count towards the final mark but completing these helps solidify your learning as well as prepare you for the final exam. The final exam is an open-book, multiple choice exam and you need to achieve a minimum of 65% on the final exam to pass the course. There is only one opportunity to pass the exam. A certificate of completion from WatSPEED is available within four weeks of successful completion of each course and can be accessed in your student portal. Many of the Ed2Go courses are eligible towards the various online certificates offered by WatSPEED.

Hardware Requirements:

• This course can be taken on either a PC, Mac, or Chromebook.

Software Requirements:

• PC: Windows 10 or later.
• Mac: macOS 10.6 or later.
• Browser: The latest version of Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox are preferred. Microsoft Edge and Safari are also compatible.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader.
• Software must be installed and fully operational before the course begins.

Other:

• Email capabilities and access to a personal email account.

Lesson 1 - Understanding the Digital Ecosystem. There are millions of pages on the web, and more are added daily. With all these pages, how can you ensure that your website gets noticed? It isn't easy. To increase traffic to your site, you need to learn all you can about digital marketing strategies and when to use each. In this lesson, we'll start with a high-level view of these strategies with an introduction to the digital marketing ecosystem, several types of websites, and common business models.

Lesson 2 - Understanding Your Digital Footprint. To establish a web presence for your business, you'll need to understand your goals, your customers' needs, and your target audience. With this information, you can establish a market position that differentiates you from competitors and helps grow your digital footprint. We'll discuss these topics and more in this lesson.

Lesson 3 - The Digital Customer Journey. In this lesson, you'll learn about the phases of the digital customer journey and how to create content and develop strategies for users during each phase. It's essential to meet your prospective customers where they are, and this lesson will discuss ways to do just that.

Lesson 4 - Domain Names and Search Engines. In this lesson, you'll discover the importance of selecting your site's domain name. You'll also learn how search engines work. With this knowledge, you can make choices that help drive visitors to your website.

Lesson 5 - Website Optimization. In this lesson, you'll discover how to optimize your website so it ranks higher on search engine results pages. You'll learn about keywords and coding elements to improve your site's ranking and reach more visitors, as well as what backlinks are and how they can affect ranking.

Lesson 6 - Web Analytics. This lesson will explain how to find invaluable performance data about your website. The number of visitors, how long they stay, which pages they visit, and how they get to your site are just a few metrics you can evaluate to learn more about your audience and improve your site.

Lesson 7 - Paid Media. During this lesson, you'll learn how to develop ads that inspire your target audience to take the action you want. You'll understand how to advertise your website using search engine marketing (SEM), display advertising, video marketing, social media, and more.

Lesson 8 - Email Marketing. Despite the growing number of junk email messages filling inboxes, email is still a thriving medium. So, it's important to understand how to use email to keep current customers and acquire new ones. In this lesson, we'll examine how you can use email to promote your business.

Lesson 9 - Creating Engagement Through Content. If you want visitors to spend more than a few seconds on your website, you'll need to make it interesting, entertaining, and informative. Stickiness is the factor that causes visitors to spend more time at your site. In this lesson, you'll learn how to use content such as blogs and syndicated content to make your website more engaging and increase stickiness.

Lesson 10 - Creating Engagement Through Community. In the previous lesson, you learned to build site stickiness through content. In this lesson, you'll learn to build site stickiness through social media. You'll also become acquainted with synchronous and asynchronous tools you can use to develop a social media community experience for your visitors.

Lesson 11 - Selling Products Using E-Commerce. The last element you can use to build site stickiness is commerce, or, in this case, e-commerce. In this lesson, you'll learn how to use e-commerce to engage visitors on your site and encourage them to return more often. You'll become acquainted with technology you can use to create an online store, including shopping cart software and online payment systems.

Lesson 12 - Completing Your Digital Marketing Plan. In our final lesson, you'll have the opportunity to compile all the information you gathered during this course to create your digital marketing plan. To help with this effort, you will download a checklist, calendar, and budget worksheet to walk you through the process of completing and implementing your plan.

Applies Towards the Following Certificates

• Sales and Marketing Fundamentals : Mandatory