6 quick marketing lessons to boost your business growth

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Less travel, time for more skills

If like me you're saving a considerable amount of time not travelling, or business is a bit quieter than usual & you have a few 1/2 hour pockets, many of us are taking this opportunity to up-skill ourselves to be more effective in our business.

There are so many courses out there, it’s hard to know which are worth doing, so I thought I’d pull together the list of training courses I recommend to my team and small business that ask me. This article will include:

  1. Some courses you might learn at business school

  2. Great resources of free lessons

1. Inbound Marketing

You may not have heard the term "Inbound Content marketing", but this is all about developing content that means leads come to you & reduces your need to pay for online advertising like Google PPC and Facebook ads. Hubspot is one of the industry leaders & they have an academy. It step-by-step explains what it is, how to plan and write blogs - relevant to your business and sector. It is also the key to your social media posting... having articles to link them to your site. It's free, all you need to do is just create a login/account.

SEO must knows - explained simply by the CEO of MOZ search

SEO must knows - explained simply by the CEO of MOZ search

2. SEO & search - basic must knows

80% of brands budget is spent on paid ads, but only 18% of clicks come from that, whereas 82% of the clicks come from what’s called organic natural search - to rank organically, you NEED to know about SEO.

So it’s a MASSIVE source of customers. Following hand in hand with Inbound marketing. Getting a brief understanding of SEO is a must. It will help guide you as to worthwhile content to create (rather than waste your time writing a blog no-one is interested in). Rand Fishkin - CEO of MOZ (a search software) explains SEO in the simplest way I’ve heard. The BEST hour you can spend probably this year. It’s broken up into 5-10 minute sections, so you can dip in and out when you’re having a coffee break. He also has an SEO ranking report that’s worth reading.

3. Social Media explained on Skillshare.com

If you want someone to explain what social media is, how it's relevant to your business and how Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social channels differ and which are more relevant to which businesses, Skillshare have a great simple free course. This is a super quick course, 9x 5-7 minute short videos & downloadable worksheets to develop your social media strategy that you can use going forwards or articulate to an agency. PS. If American accents aren't for you, search social media strategy.

4. Google Analytics for beginners

You've may have never looked at the analytics of your website or may not have linked it yet. Knowing how many are visiting your website, what they're doing & where you're loosing them - we find is really important to guide us as to ... if we can only do 1 thing today or this week, where would have the biggest business impact. e.g. are you getting 100 visitors to your homepage and are they all leaving immediately (AKA bounce)? If so - are you advertising/driving traffic to your website & when they get there… there’s a mismatch? Are 100 starting the buy-now process, selecting a product and then not completing the shopping cart payment? Is that because you don’t accept certain forms of payment? Is your delivery charge too high?

Example of why it’s worth learning about this & inbound marketing - a client - turkey farmer created a blog - based on customer insights of questions he was always asked e.g. what is the biggest size turkey that will fit in my oven? Within 6 mths to a year this became the biggest attractor of natural organic.

Google offer a free course to help you get setup & using the basics.

5. General business skills on Lynda.com

One of our favourite learning sources is Lynda.com - it has everything from how to create a pivot table to coding HTML or using photoshop. It's recently been bought by LinkedIn & they're offering 1 month free subscription & access to all classes. 

Many are 10-30 minute courses, you download the worksheet & follow the video. Even if you only have 1/2 hour spare, head to the Excel section and by doing just 1 class on formulas may save you or your team 100's of hours in the future, I have.

A great short Instagram course - all you need is 1.5 hours start to finish (well worth it)

A great short Instagram course - all you need is 1.5 hours start to finish (well worth it)

6. Instagram - simple effective tips

We all know Instagram is a great channel for many types of businesses, but often it’s difficult to know where to start or followers and engagement is low & you feel like you’re wasting your time. Tyler McCall, an Instagram Marketing Strategist has a great free 1 hour lesson on skillshare, which is really clearly explained and has lots of REALLY simple and easy to implement tips - from what #hashtags to use, what type of images to post that will suite your target audience, to how to do less & be more effective.

7. More to come

These were just a few to start, I’ll add more as I think of them. If you found any of those useful. Let me know & if you want some more suggestions, feel free to email me or sign up to the newsletter.

Final note, Keep going– we will all get through this and come out better for it.

Further Reading

Sarah Joy