If the words "digital marketing," "SEO" and "social media marketing" make your eyes glaze over and your hearing go fuzzy, you are not alone.
Digital marketing seems to have grown overnight, changing the marketing landscape and adding a ton of new words to the marketing lexicon. Just when you were starting to learn the game, it changed — and continues to change as digital marketing evolves much quicker than traditional marketing ever did.
But digital marketing is essential for any business to be competitive today, so if you're hoping this will all go away or you refuse to spend a whole weekend learned marketing strategies and terms, then you'll let your competition get ahead a without a fight.
Luckily, there are a ton of resources to help you learn digital marketing at your own pace. Whether you can commit five minutes or a full hour, these four easy ways to learn digital marketing will help you no matter what time constraints you have.
Add SEO publications to your news diet
You may not get the local newspaper delivered to your door every day (or maybe you do), but at the very least, you probably scroll through your Facebook newsfeed or receive push notifications on your phone from The Wall Street Journal, NPR or other news outlets.
However you consume news, add a few more publications to your consumption. There are a ton of websites solely devoted to SEO and all things digital marketing, and most if not all of their content is free. Online publications like Search Engine Land and Search Engine Journal publish all types of articles from industry news to digital marketing how-tos.
Even if you're very new to SEO, reading about it daily can help you learn the lingo faster.
Subscribe to SEO blogs
In addition to publications that focus on SEO and digital marketing, you should also be following digital marketing blogs to get the latest news, updates and useful tutorials. The most helpful blogs come from digital marketing agencies and specialists, but you don't have to sign up with them in order to read their free content.
Both Hubspot and Hootsuite publish blogs weekly — sometimes more than once a week — and they're written for business owners at all skill levels. Their pieces have a ton of backlinks to other articles on the blog, so if you're unclear about a term, chances are there's a link in the text to another article which will explain that term.
Many social media specialists also run their own blogs to help keep their clients informed. Social media specialists Crystal Vilkaitis at Social Edge and Linley Paske and Lauren Pasqualone of LP2 Boutique Agency all run their own blogs so you can keep up with what's new in social media and what you should be watching.
Best of all? You can subscribe to blogs and have new content delivered straight to your inbox. Doesn't get much easier than that.
Attend seminars at market
Over the last few years, markets have amped up their education seminars to attract more buyers and give them an additional reason to attend. As a result, you can find great education seminars on digital marketing topics no matter which market you prefer to attend. All of them are free to attend, so if you're already planning your trip to High Point this spring, why not schedule a seminar or two?
You can also contact the market centers and make recommendations and requests for seminars. At High Point and Las Vegas Markets, the Home Furnishings Association asks buyers who attend seminars to fill out feedback forms, and they use them to improve seminars for the next market. If you want to know more about a certain aspect of digital marketing, contact Director of Education Kaprice Crawford and let her know your thoughts.
Consider hiring a digital marketing agency
It's free to consider a digital marketing agency, right? Actually, taking the time to look at what digital marketing agencies — marketing companies that will help you develop a digital marketing strategy and implement it through your website, digital advertising and social media platforms in order to drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into buyers — can help you determine what you want to get out of digital marketing and how you should tackle your own SEO education.
A lot of digital marketing agencies will provide free consultations. That doesn't mean you should try to score free services, but going through a free consultation can help you learn where your digital weak spots are and what you should be focusing on.
You may decide to hire a digital marketing agency in the future or you may not, but getting a little advice may help you understand how digital marketing can grow your business.
Of course, you can always check out our Digital Bulletin each month in Lighting & Decor, where we tackle and unpack a digital topic each month. Be sure to follow us on social media where we will always post our digital marketing web stories and check back with us for helpful tutorials and digital marketing news.
What tools are you using to learn digital marketing? Share with us in the comments.
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