10 Best Free Digital Marketing Courses Online (and more!) You can learn Digital Marketing for free. Yes, that's true! So many MBA students and aspiring marketers spend so much time looking for advice on what are the best resources to study digital marketing from. Therefore, in this article I share with you the 10 best free digital marketing courses online (and a few things more!)

Have you ever felt the need to learn about Digital Marketing during your MBA? Has it ever made you think that knowing it can significantly improve your chances of getting recruited?

Sure, I had the same feeling. And just like me you would have browsed through so many digital marketing courses’ pages but would have hesitated going for it looking at the price.

Therefore, in this article, I have gone ahead and shared with you an entire list of 10 best free digital marketing course online.

Yes! You can learn digital marketing for free. And I am sure this article will help you put a finger on where you should start from.

Now, I know MBA can be quite interesting and daunting at the same time. It can leave you tired yet wanting for more at the same time. I always felt the urge to learn more in marketing and also to hone my skill in this career field that I have chosen.

This was the drive that pushed me towards taking many courses online, including some free digital marketing courses online.

As an MBA student, I took a lot of courses online and some of my blog posts are dedicated to reviewing these courses.

Of course, I could afford some paid courses that weren’t too expensive which I did enrolled for. But, I came across some free digital marketing courses online curated by top-guns in the digital marketing industry.

You sure know what that means.

These are people who have accomplished some great feats as Digital Marketers and they decided to compile their knowledge as a course to be taught to people like you and I who are interested in learning.

Finding these free digital marketing courses online may prove difficult and time-consuming, this is why I have to put this piece together, so that you won’t waste your time on a course that won’t be worth it at the end.

Undoubtedly, taking any course on digital marketing will be beneficial to you as a MBA student on internship or if you are going to join the B-school soon.

Normally, these courses are standalone and can independently establish you as a professional in this field even without your MBA certificate. But, with your MBA certificate, you already have an upper edge when compared to people who don’t have it.

It is crucial for you to note that while you may be issued a certificate at the end of some of these courses, certificates shouldn’t actually be your priority.

Your goal should solely be anchored on the knowledge you will gain from these courses and how far it can help you build a great career revolving around digital marketing.

Here’s the thing that you need to know. Unless the certificate provider is a really reputed institution of that field, the certificate doesn’t matter.

So, if it is a Career Launcher’s Digital Marketing Strategist Certification which I have mentioned in this last part of this article, the certificate would matter because it comes from an extremely reputed institution like the University of California-Irvine.

But, if you have done the course and yet you don't have an understanding of the topic, again the certificate is of no value at all.

For each course featured here, you will get to know the topics covered and the names and qualifications of the tutors/instructors (in case the name are available).

This will ease your decision making process, at a glance, you will be able to decide on which of the courses to consider whenever you want to learn digital marketing.

Let’s check them out!

I have gone through a lot of courses while learning more about Digital Marketing. Frankly, I was quite surprised while coming across some of these free digital marketing courses online. 

That’s because these digital marketing courses are really good and provide decent amount of value for free.

Some of these courses are free online digital marketing courses with certificates. But as I mentioned, certificates don’t matter when it comes to these courses. Let me take you through some of these free digital marketing courses online.

Topic: Content Marketing
Resources: 32 videos
Duration: 4 hours 1 minute
Instructors: 9 Instructors (Each covering different topics of this course)
Certificate: Yes
Cost: FREE

The reason why I start by mentioning this course is that content is the backbone of digital marketing because you can hardly market anything without an accompanying content to communicate with the audience and what the audience can interact with.

The 3 pillars of this free digital marketing course online which collectively make up content marketing are:

1. Content creation
2. Content re-purposing
3. Content promotion

What you will learn

1. Effective and consistent content creation framework
2. Content re-purposing to add new value and meaning to your old content
3. Creating content that will be loved by, both, humans and search engines.
4. You will learn how storytelling, content creation, re-purposing, and promotion come together to build a content marketing machine that can grow your business, and your career.

Topic: Search Engine Marketing
Resources: 11+ Articles
Instructors: N/A
Certification: NO
Cost: FREE

Paid search marketing, unlike SEO, is very delicate and treated in a fragile manner. You know why? It requires you to part with your money and if proper care is not taken, everything can go down the drain with nothing to show for it.

PPC University is a partner with Google and also Facebook Marketing. It is an online advertisement agency that specializes in search marketing using its tools and software.

What you will learn

1. Finding relevant keywords with high search volume and low competition
2. How to calculate quality score for your ads
3. Setting up an Adwords (Ads) account and creating AdGroups.
4. Conversion rate optimization.
5. The basics of paid search as well as more advanced PPC strategies, all in an easy-to-follow format.

Topic: Digital Marketing
Resources: 10 eBooks
Instructors: N/A
Certification: Yes
Cost: FREE

This free digital marketing course online encompasses 10 segments of digital marketing in the form of eBooks. The good thing is that it is quite comprehensive despite it being a beginner course.

Each eBook has an exam attached to it. Once you pass the exam you will be awarded a certificate for that particular topic in digital marketing. If you take this course, it is enough for you to get acquainted with everything you need to about online marketing.

The segments of digital marketing that are covered are as follows:

1. Affiliate Marketing Course and Certification
2. Blogging Course and Certification
3. Content Marketing Course and Certification
4. E-commerce Course and Certification
5. Email Marketing Course and Certification
6. Online Marketing Course and Certification
7. Search Engine Marketing Course and Certification
8. Search Engine Optimization Course and Certification
9. Social Media Marketing Course and Certification
10. Web Analytics Course and Certification

E-books are available for each segment and you can take the 50 questions test once you are done reading.

This course is a free online digital marketing courses with certificates which is issued in your name if you score minimum of 50% in the test.

Moreover, this certificate can be added to your LinkedIn profile, further establishing you as a professional.

Topic: Digital Marketing
Lessons: 26 Modules
Duration: 40 hours
Certification: Yes
Cost: FREE

This Google digital marketing course is one of the few digital marketing courses available at Google Digital Garage (Google free courses). 

It is another self-paced learning course for beginners and newbies to initiate their Digital Marketing journey. Coming from Google, you can be sure that the course will provide you with the in-depth knowledge of the Google tools.

 There is a dashboard where you can monitor your learning progress and for every module completed, a badge is given to you.

Also, this is a free online digital marketing course with a certificate which issued at the end of this course, and can be used on your LinkedIn profile too. The course has been created in conjunction with “Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)” and The Open University.

What you will learn

1. How to build your presence on the web
2. Planning an online business strategy
3. Using search engines for local marketing
4. Tracking and measuring web traffic
5. Scaling your business and taking it global

Topic: Search Engine Optimization
Resources: 42 videos
Duration: 9+ hours
Certification: Yes
Cost: FREE

This SEO course is not focused on blogs alone, it also teaches how to optimize and increase the search rank of social media pages and even your LinkedIn profile.

The tutor preaches that, “before you invest heavily in social media marketing, make sure you're effectively search engine optimized”. In fact, this is a philosophy that would resonate with a lot of you.

That’s because I have interacted with quite a few B-school students off late who have asked me for free digital marketing courses. They wish to start off with something that is free, try it out and then invest in a formal course.

What you will learn

1. The vocabulary and basics of SEO
2. SEO strategies that are most effective
3. How to produce content for search engines
4. Using Google analytics to find business insights.
5. On-page and off-page optimization.
6. Local and mobile SEO

Topic: Social Media Marketing
Resources: 6 Chapters
Duration: 6 hours
Certification: NO (Certification is optional but not free and it goes for $199 or ~ INR 13,928)
Cost: FREE

This free digital marketing course online teaches the foundation social marketing skills. This basically includes how to grow followers, increase engagement level, and business results.

You will get practical skills that you can implement and start seeing results right away. It could be a college fest that you want to promote or the page of your college club. This course can teach you the exact methods that will bring success to you.

What you will learn

1. How to optimize your social media profiles
2. Effective social media promotion strategies
3. Fundamentals of content marketing for social
4. Most popular social networks used by businesses and how businesses and professionals engage on these social networks to accomplish their objectives.
5. Setting Goals, Objectives, KPIs, and Tactics, laying out timing and key dates, budgeting
6. Defining brand persona and voice for social channels, incorporating content marketing into a social context, social media governance and crisis management, and measuring ROI.

Topic: Display and Search Ads
Resources: 8
Certification: Yes
Cost: FREE

This is another digital marketing course on Google Digital Garage available to everyone (Google free courses). As a beginner or a seasoned pro, no matter your level of expertise is, this free digital marketing course online will be beneficial to you.

You will learn how to create ads that will resonate well with your audience and drive conversions for your company. The interesting thing about this course is that it brings mobile marketing into the picture.

Learning the basics of it directly from Google is the highlight of this course.

What you will learn

1. Setting up and analyzing Google Ads
2. How to activate customer-centric marketing (placing the individual customer at the center of marketing design and delivery).
3. How to measure you customer-centric marketing
4. Preparing for a programmatic world and programmable marketing statistics

Topic: Business Website Optimization
Resources: 15 Modules
Duration: 6-10 hours
Certification: Yes
Cost: FREE

The first thing this free digital marketing course will teach you is, how to build an online marketing plan for an e-business. Further you are likely to understand from it about how to improve the landing page of your website for higher customer conversion rate.

Also, when you finish the course, you will have a strong understanding of key digital measurement concepts and analysis techniques.

What you will learn

1. How to use Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Adsense, and Google Sitemap to implement your online marketing strategy.
2. How to monitor the key performance indicators (KPI) of your website effectively.
3. How to analyze revenue metrics and build custom reporting.
4. How the internet will help your business to attract customers and encourage growth.

Topic: Introduction to Marketing
Resources: 5 Modules
Duration: 2-3 hours
Certification: Yes
Cost: FREE

The essence of this free digital marketing course is to teach you the basics of Marketing. This is done keeping online businesses in perspective.

Further, you will learn about how to create an effective marketing strategy that carefully features your game plan for finding customers. This is important to help you create relationships with customers that lead to continuous customer satisfaction.

What you will learn

1. Role of marketing in the modern business world
2. Putting together an effective marketing strategy
3. Use of marketing mix and how to successfully implement its strategic components into an effective marketing strategy.
4. The crucial importance and the effect that a business’ location can have on a marketing organization.

Topic: Inbound Marketing
Resources: 7 Modules
Certification: Yes
Cost: FREE

‘Inbound marketing’ is actually a term coined by HubSpot. It is a term used to describe a funnel design to attract potential customers into your business rather than pushing out a brand, product or service to the prospects in the hope of generating leads or customers.

Inbound Marketing is all about content. And therefore, this free digital marketing course online will teach you how to design content that is capable of attracting qualified prospects that will become new leads.

What you will learn

1. The inbound methodology and the flywheel as a core part of any inbound business
2. Creating buyer persona’s and understanding buyer’s journey
3. Setting business goals of content marketing
4. How to run a successful inbound marketing initiative and how to drive sales through that

While we are at it, I would also like to mention certain courses that are not free but cost a little to get them. The free digital marketing courses online will give you the benefit of learning from more comprehensive courses.

Therefore, let’s look at some courses which are priced really low and, therefore, are (almost) free.

Topic: Conversion Tracking
Resources: 7 Modules
Duration: 3.5 Hours
Certification: Yes
Cost: INR 1150

Conversion tracking might not be known to all of you. That is because it is not something you would learn from your projects at the B-school.

But that is where this course comes in. Any job that involves digital marketing include goal tracking and conversion tracking. A conversion for a campaign could be a lead or a purchase.

This course will teach you how to correctly implement tracking and analytics for all of your digital marketing campaigns. During this course, you will be made to setup your own tracking according to the industry best practices.

Hence the course will give you thorough understanding of different tracking techniques and available options.

What you will learn

1. Setting up and tracking landing pages
2. Google Tag Manager and how to use it for better pixel tracking and event tracking setup.
3. Thorough understanding of Google Analytics specifically geared towards tracking marketing campaigns.
4. How to track specific events like button clicks on your site rather than just page views and destination URLs.

Topic: Digital Marketing
Resources: 17 Modules
Duration: 26.5 hours
Certification: Yes
Cost: INR 1,280

The best thing about this course is that it sets a benchmark of the results and suggest you Digital Marketing strategies to get those results.

If you have a blog or are an entrepreneur then this course is really direct in terms of its promise. How to acquire your first 1000 customers using social media, Content & Video Marketing, PR, SEO, SEM, FB, Instagram, etc.? This is what Evan Kimbrell, he instructor, will teach you in this course. It’s as a simple as that.

What you will learn

1. How to drill down on customer pain points and build user personas
2. Using 5 different techniques for coming up with blog & content ideas
3. Best way to conduct keyword research for SEO opportunities
4. Successfully drive sales through posting & commenting on Reddit, ProductHunt, & HackerNews
5. Use 5 different techniques for coming up with blog & content ideas

Topic: Digital Advertising and Marketing
Resources: 72 Modules
Duration: 41 hours
Certification: Yes
Cost: INR 1280

In this course, you’ll learn the tested, proven, and unbeatable ways to win with your SEO, Social Media & the overall Digital Marketing strategies. The best part about this course is its comprehensiveness in the Digital Marketing topics that it covers

What you will learn

1. How to create responsive websites on WordPress (no coding required!)
2. Local Search Engine Optimization & Google my business (Google Maps)
3. How to apply powerful strategies to get High Quality backlinks
4. How to get new clients & boost profits through awarded social media strategies

Finally, I will share with you some of the higher priced paid course that are, probably, the best digital marketing courses available online. I have tried a few of these courses myself and therefore I can tell you that they can make a ready-to-go-to-work kind of a Digital Marketer.

Here are some of the paid digital marketing courses online.

Topic: Digital Marketing
Resources: 7 Sub-Courses
Assessment: Yes
Instructors: Kevin Hartman - Visiting Professor & Head of Analytics at Google, Aric Rindfleisch - John M. Jones Professor of Marketing, Mike Yao - Associate Professor of Digital Media, Vishal Sachdev - Clinical Assistant Professor, Director, Illinois Maker Lab
Certification: Yes
Cost: INR 5529.21 or $79 per month throughout the course duration

This course is a specialization course organized as a series to help you master a particular skill. This Specialization touches different aspects of the new digital marketing environment, including topics such as online marketing analytics, search engine optimization, and social media marketing.

When the Digital Marketing Specialization is completed, you are likely to end up with in-depth knowledge of the new digital marketing landscape.

There are 7 courses in this specialization:

1. Marketing in a Digital World
2. Digital Analytics for Marketing Professionals: Marketing Analytics in Theory
3. Digital Analytics for Marketing Professionals: Marketing Analytics in Practice
4. Digital Media and Marketing Principles
5. Digital Media and Marketing Strategies
6. Marketing in an Analog World
7. Digital Marketing Capstone

None of these courses have a review rating lower than 4.1. In fact, 4 of them have ratings between 4.5-4.7.

Topic: Digital Marketing Mastery Bundle
Resources: 11 Sub-course
Assessment: No
Instructors: Sanjay Shenoy & Deepak Kanakaraju - Co-Founders, PixelTrack Digital
Certification: Yes
Cost: INR 4999

Digital Deepak’s Digital Marketing Mastery course is one that was put together to teach you the 8 essential skills of digital marketing- one of the best place to learn digital marketing. It combines these different courses together as a bundle.

Of course, the instructor of this course is Digital Deepak himself and I don’t think he needs any introduction. In case you don’t know, Deepak is a successful digital marketer in India with vast knowledge on this subject matter.

The courses included in the bundle are:

1. SEO Mastery
2. Adwords Mastery
3. Facebook Ads Mastery
4. Email Marketing Mastery
5. Social Media Mastery
6. Affiliate Marketing Mastery
7. Analytics Mastery
8. Content Marketing Mastery
9. Zapier Mastery Program
10. 100 Day Blogging Course
11. The Product Launch Mastery

As you can see, this is an all-in-one package to get you started on your digital marketing career.

Topic: Digital Marketing
Resources: 18 Modules
Assessment: Yes
Certification: Yes
Cost: INR 12999

This course will teach you how to produce compelling and impressive marketing content, concentrating on the vital strategies, tactics, and best practices that a writer needs to create and enhance content marketing efforts.

It will also help you to learn various aspects of planning and executing digital marketing strategies with greater efficiency and impact, and to harness the power of words to disseminate information and create impressive marketing content.

What you will learn

1. Digital Marketing, from zero to one
2. Examples of case studies on both B2B and B2C.
3. The various aspects of planning and execution of content marketing strategies to create impressive content with greater efficiency and impact.
4. How to develop content and use it for B2B marketing

Topic: Digital Marketing
Resources: 7 Modules
Assessment: Yes
Instructors: Jeff Marcoux - Sr.PM, SaaS Growth & Viral Adoption, Mirna Bard - Instructor at UC Irvine since 2010
Certification: Yes
Cost: $3400

While you would be surprised looking at the price, you will be able to understand the value of the course when you look at its comprehensive coverage and its affiliation for University of California, Irvine.

Additionally, there are quite a good number of benefits attached to this course. Some are:

1. The certificate issued is internationally recognized since it will be issued by University of California-Irvine.
2. You are also helped with placement assistance. That is, you can easily land your first job after completing the course.
3. During the course, you will be have the opportunity to work on industry relevant project and also connect you to key stakeholders in the Digital Marketing Industry which will help you in terms of career networking and professional progress

Digital marketing is broad and dynamic - new changes occur in this field every now and then. Therefore, one must keep learning, daily, by taking courses like these to further get insights on a particular aspect of this field.

Free digital marketing courses online are as beneficial as the paid ones, and the only difference may be the depth reached on the subject matter and also the availability of the tutor to entertain any questions that you might have.

Freely select any of the courses listed here and commence learning immediately. MBA in Marketing is even more effective when mixed with Digital Marketing training.