Diving into digital marketing might feel daunting at first. As with anything new, there's a lot to learn. By doing your digital marketing research, and then taking action to put steps in place, you can readily source new clients and grow your business. That's because digital marketing works. Not to mention, staying on trend with developments in this area can help you stay on top of the future technology demands of your clients.
The good news is, you're not on your own when it comes to exploring digital marketing. There are plenty of available resources, both free and paid, that you can tap into and learn from before applying your newfound skills.
These are just some of the best resources for financial professionals to learn about digital marketing.
Digital marketing blogs
Blogs are a great, easily accessible way to delve deeper into all things digital marketing related. Here are some suggestions.
- Facebook's Newsroom: An interactive page run by Facebook sharing recent news and updates on what's happening behind the scenes.
- Facebook for Business: Facebook is a critical tool for a lot of business owners. This for-business resource helps you reach specific business goals with the help of the platform.
- Instagram for Business: Instagram's business page provides you with content based on your business goals, size and even worldwide location, all designed to help you grow your brand.
- LinkedIn's Blog: LinkedIn is a hugely popular social media and networking channel for business professionals. Their blog resource helps you navigate and leverage different features on LinkedIn and gives tips for using it to growing your business.
- Twitter's Blog: Get company updates, as well as new product information and insights with Twitter's blog pages. Knowing what's trending, and what future trends are, can help you stay focused on potential areas for growth.
- Social Media Today: This is one of the most popular social media-focused blogs out there, and for good reason. As the name suggests, you'll get all sorts of expert insights and knowledge on using digital to grow your brand.
- HootSuite's Blog: HootSuite is a popular tool for social media power users, allowing planning and deployment of social media campaigns on multiple platforms. The blog has great strategy tips for optimizing your social media approach.
- SEMrush's Blog: SEMrush is a top SEO tool for business owners and marketers. Their blog gives you all sorts of practical helpful advice from how to create a blog strategy to SEO optimization tips.
An easy way to stay on top of posts from your favorite blogs is to use a blog reader. Sign up, add your favorite blogs, and the reader simply updates with new content daily, all in one place.
Digital marketing podcasts
There's a lot you can learn listening to a few great podcasts, and luckily there are many out there that cover digital marketing.
- Social Pros with Jay Baer: Jay sits down with social media experts and pros from the business world while they share their insights and tips.
- Marketing Over Coffee: MOC is a weekly podcast that talks about the latest in marketing. The hosts also share the latest in tech and how it impacts business marketing.
- Social Media Marketing Podcast: This is a weekly 45-minute podcast run by Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner. It offers tips, advice and strategies from experts in the field.
- How I Built This: In this podcast, you'll hear how some of the world's most famous companies and entrepreneurs built and grew their brands.
- HBR Idea Cast: Run by Harvard Business Review, this weekly podcast interviews some of the best and most exciting thinkers in business, sharing their thoughts and ideas.
Use your favorite music app, such as Stitcher, Apple or Spotify to subscribe to podcasts. New episodes will automatically load for you, ready to play, wherever you are.
Digital marketing courses
If you want to dive deeper into digital marketing and learn more step-by-step, consider some of these courses.
- LinkedIn Learning: LinkedIn has a wide selection of free courses on digital marketing and live office hour events, most of them run around an hour.
- SEMrush's SEO Learning Path: These free courses run by a SEMrush SEO expert takes you from a newbie to someone with confidence in their SEO skills.
- Google's Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: If you want to go deep into everything digital marketing, Google offer a free course that's 40 hours long and comes with a certificate at the end.
- HubSpot Academy: HubSpot offers a suite of free courses, ranging in length, on tons of topics relating to digital marketing. They have a handful of more extensive courses offering certificates too.
Finding time to learn about digital marketing
Let's face it, running a successful business and helping clients is a round-the-clock job for many financial professionals. Finding the time to learn new skills is challenging.
Here are a few suggestions to help you balance your time management:
- Listen to podcasts during your commute: Fire up a podcast on your way to or from work, it's a great way of injecting some productive learning time into your day.
- Schedule in learning periods: Building skills is part of your professional development. If you can, schedule learning times into your week to go over podcasts and courses.
- Increase playback speed: With most podcasts and video courses you can increase the speed. Tip for the hyper-busy, if you crank up the playback speed to 1.5x, you can cut your listening time and cover more topics.
- Take it one step at a time: You don't have to try and get everything in at once. Try and set aside 15-20 minutes a day to go through courses. Even small learning blocks can add up.
When it comes to learning, it's not a race. Go slow and steady, study when you can and then work on putting what you've learned into practice.
Learn more about the benefits of digital marketing for financial professionals.
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