Content marketing is a vast discipline under digital marketing that consists of strategizing, writing, storytelling, distributing content, analyzing results, and a little bit of search engine optimization (SEO) and design.
Content marketing courses and certifications help marketers keep themselves updated in these areas to cater to the dynamic digital landscape and changing consumer behavior. Considering the factors that demand a marketer’s attention, we’ve compiled a list of twenty online courses and certifications that cover various areas of content marketing to help you win at your content efforts in 2020.
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If you are a beginner, you can get yourself acquainted with content marketing by enrolling in HubSpot’s content marketing course. The course consists of twelve lessons and takes approximately six hours to complete.
The course curriculum covers the basics of blogging and storytelling. It helps you prepare a long-term content strategy, build a content creation framework, and generate content ideas. You’ll learn how to develop the pillar-cluster model, start guest blogging, repurpose and promote content, and analyze the results.
The course also offers a study guide to help you prepare for the test. The successful completion of the test qualifies you for a free certification that you can embed on your website and LinkedIn profile.
This course is a collaboration between Copyblogger, a renowned content marketing website, and UC Davis Extension. This is another primer for anyone looking to get started with content marketing. The course content is organized into five modules and takes approximately 17 hours to complete.
The course explains the content marketing ecosystem and how your personal brand impacts the company’s content strategy. You’ll learn about the strategic context/the 7A framework and how to apply it to your content. Next, you’ll learn how to map content to the different stages of the buyer’s journey. The last two modules cover the basics of content types and content management. While you can study the course for free, you need to pay to obtain a completion certificate.
This content marketing certification is a compilation of six courses that help you understand how to create different types of content. The first module in the series delves into the foundations of content marketing. There’s a dedicated module that focuses on how to write compelling marketing copies. This is followed by a module on viral marketing that shares a six-step framework to craft messages that get shared by people.
The remaining modules focus individually on blogging, podcasting, and creating newsletters.
While this course already covers some of the modules from Become a Content Marketer, it takes you to the next level of content marketing. Become a Content Strategist contains 13 modules to help you explore the composite aspects of content marketing.
The modules cover the fundamentals of online marketing, business storytelling, social media, SEO, and Google Analytics. Taking the responsibilities of a content strategist into consideration, the course also focuses on how to develop an editorial calendar and draft content guidelines from the user experience (UX) perspective for the organization’s digital properties.
Premium LinkedIn users have free access to both courses.
Learn More: 5 Pillars of Audience-Centric Content
If you’re looking for a brief refresher on blogging, this course will give you just that. This 90-minute course by Eric Siu provides a concise overview of the blogging process.
To begin with, the course offers three blogging styles and tips on brainstorming content ideas. Eric shares insights on how to outline your blog posts, add key information, and write great headlines that outperform your competition. You’ll also learn five tips to succeed in your blogging efforts.
The Writing With Flair course is taught by Shani Raja, who has written and edited for publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Economist. The course is more about developing the writer’s mindset than building writing chops.
The course shares tips and insights on how to keep your writing simple and clear, yet elegant and evocative. You’ll learn to avoid needless repetition and ambiguous writing and keep your writing clutter-free. The course runs for seven hours, at the end of which you’ll receive a completion certificate. While this is a paid course, before enrolling in this course, you can check out Secret Sauce of Great Writing, a free course that provides a glimpse of Writing With Flair.
This is another course by Shani Raja for anyone wanting to improve their writing.
The course is broken down into four levels, viz. the narrative, paragraphs, sentences, and words. The course provides solid advice on how to structure the narrative, write attention-grabbing intros, give sentences a rhythm, and use precise words.
Shani Raja also offers the following courses that complement Writing With Flair and Ninja Writing:
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Besides being a staff writer for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell is also known for distilling complex concepts such as behavioral economics and performance prediction into simple words.
The course teaches you to structure the narrative, research and develop the story, use data to engage your readers, build characters, use tone and voice, and write captivating headlines. Malcolm shares examples and case studies from his books and articles along with key concepts to strengthen the learning.
You can buy the standalone course for 90 USD or become a member for 180 USD that provides access to all courses covering a wide spectrum of topics.
Learn More: What Content Marketing Tactics to Use in 2020
Copywriting is a form of writing to persuade the audience. The Modern Copywriting course covers various aspects of copywriting right from the basics. The first module covers the importance of understanding the product, ideal buyers, and competition. You’ll learn the art of persuasion, how to structure the copy, and copywriting styles.
The course shares the difference between writing for B2C and B2B brands, with formulas to write compelling copy. It also teaches you how to write headlines, emails, landing page content, and social media content.
The course runs for over seven hours and provides 94 downloadable resources.
Conversion Copywriting 101 aims to get you acquainted with the fundamentals of writing high-converting web copy. The course begins by laying out the key distinctions between traditional and conversion copywriting.
As the course progresses, it covers topics such as how to write memorable messages that target the different stages of the funnel. It teaches how to write great headlines and body copy and explains when you should focus on features and benefits.
From a design perspective, you will learn the anatomy of a high-converting page and how to structure landing pages for maximum conversions.
You can sign-up for the course for free.
Persuasive Copywriting 101 by Sonia Simone and Chris Garrett is available in both – audio, video formats along with transcripts.
In the first module, the course dispels some myths of traditional sales and how you can use content to make the first sale. Next, the course shares three, most-fundamental copywriting formulas and how to use them without making your copy sound boring and repetitive. You’ll also learn how you can write your own copywriting formulas that drive the audience to act.
The course also focuses on how to convey the product value through your copy and tweak the campaign that isn’t working.
The course is priced at 397 USD or three monthly installations of 147 USD each.
Shane Snow explains how storytelling is a compelling technique to persuade your audience. You’ll discover the science behind how effective stories build relationships with people.
Shane shares the four elements of effective storytelling, viz. relatability, novelty, tension, and fluency. You’ll learn how to make the audience care for you through the story matrix and the story-relationship funnel.
The course also teaches you to cultivate your storytelling chops using universal storytelling frameworks and the Ben Franklin method.
Learn More: Marketing Storytelling for 2020: Woo Customers With Age Old and Cutting Edge Techniques
Transmedia storytelling is the practice of delivering a coherent story experience across different marketing channels. With omnichannel marketing becoming a widely adopted marketing approach, transmedia storytelling is gaining massive importance to keep the audience engaged.
The course begins with the explanation of transmedia storytelling, along with the anatomy of a story and examples of transmedia storytelling. The course delves into creative thinking techniques to build a narrative and help you understand the transmedia audience. The course also focuses on the importance of transmedia UX to keep the audience glued to the story and the use of creative technologies to deliver that.
The course content is spread across a six-week duration and you can enroll for free.
Brands are prioritizing video content, but producing it on an ongoing basis is a challenge. In this course, Roberto Blake helps you create an end-to-end video marketing strategy.
The course shares technicalities of video content creation such as the video creation process, pre-production, recording equipment, video editing, etc. and explains the difference between social networks and content platforms, and live and recorded videos.
You’ll learn how to understand the audience for video, create a video content strategy, and optimize your videos for SEO and social media. Considering how saturated the online space has become, the course also shares tips on how to build an audience from scratch.
If starting a podcast is in your 2020 content marketing plan, check out this course. Producing Podcasts is taught by Danny Ozment who has produced over 20 podcasts.
Similar to the above video production course, Producing Podcasts explains the podcast planning process that includes ideating a show, creating SEO-friendly titles, choosing a content format, and so on.
You’ll learn how to record, mix, and master podcast episodes, and the tools and applications you should use. The course will also guide you to pick podcast hosting services, directories, RSS feeds, and measure the results.
This four-week, self-paced course is offered by The University of Pennsylvania and shares key insights on what makes ideas go viral and the six factors to make your message sticky.
You’ll discover how social influence drives people to stick to societal norms. The course further delves into word of mouth marketing and provides a six-step framework that drives people to share content.
Lastly, the course focuses on how information spreads on social media and what type of content gets shared. Jonah Berger teaches the course and many of the concepts are from his book – Contagious: Why Things Catch On.
Learn More: 5 Steps to Generating ROI With B2B Content in 2020
The course by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, teaches you how to create an influencer marketing strategy for your organization, whether you’re a B2B, B2C, or non-profit organization.
The six-week course covers the importance of content marketing in the success of influencer marketing. You will learn how to find influencers in your niche using three different tools. The instructor, Greg Jarboe, shares schmooze optimization, a process to initiate conversations and engage with influencers. You will also learn how to identify the right key performance indicators (KPIs) for the influencer marketing campaigns and how to measure them. The final project will help you create a social media influencer strategy pitch deck.
SEO is an essential aspect of content marketing that deserves special attention due to the constant changes in search engine ranking algorithms. This specialization is a compilation of five courses that teach website optimization techniques to rank well in search engines.
The first two courses cover SEO fundamentals, while the third and fourth courses focus on keyword research techniques, optimizing content for local search, and how to use content, influencer, and social media marketing to turbocharge SEO activities and boost the website’s credibility.
The fifth course helps you apply the tactical aspects of SEO; you get to pick a website, choose optimization opportunities, and develop a customized SEO solution for it.
The success of your social media strategy largely depends on the content you produce. The Social Media Certification will help you build an effective social media strategy for your organization.
The course has a dedicated module on how to create content for social media that builds customer loyalty and drives sales. To supplement the learning, you can also check out HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification.
Tracking the effectiveness of your content efforts allows you to tweak the content strategy. Google Analytics for Beginners helps you get acquainted with the most basic functions of Google Analytics.
Along with understanding the audience, acquisition, and behavior reports, this course will teach you how to measure custom campaigns. With the help of the URL builder, you’ll be able to assess the impact of your content across different distribution channels.
Learn More: Five Ways of Presenting Great Content
Closing Thoughts
Whether you’re a seasoned content marketer or a marketing generalist, we hope this comprehensive list of content marketing courses and certifications will help you grow in your career. The courses cover a wide spectrum of topics in content marketing, so pick the ones you find most interesting and build from there.
Do have any other content marketing courses to add to this list? Tell us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.