It’s the age of self-development and there have never been more tools and services out there that can set you up for success in a variety of professional fields, including digital marketing.

When it comes to professional disciplines, digital marketing is amongst one of the youngest. As a result, many seasoned professionals working in this field gained their foundational knowledge on the job rather than through tertiary education. With that in mind, it can be a confusing and daunting task to identify which tools, platforms, and skill sets are going to offer the most value to a professional working in an industry as diverse as this one.

So where do you begin? Let’s get to know what digital marketing courses and skills you can learn from the comfort of your own home.

Social media marketing

If you think that social media marketing is easy and straightforward, think again. Don’t let our overuse of these platforms fool you into thinking that anyone can master these skills. Social media marketing is definitely an art form as much as a technical skill and as such, it requires creativity and strategy in equal measures. But with the right support and information at your disposal, social media marketing is actually a skill that you can hone right from your living room.

If you want to start testing your newfound skills, we recommend creating business accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or TikTok so that you can start experimenting with static image posts, video posting and engaging with your audience by adding thoughtful and purposeful captions. You may also wish to keep an eye on your competitors or other businesses or figures that have an active presence on social media, just to see what they’re doing, and how they’re doing it.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a practice that’s often discussed, but few actually know how to apply this complex and nuanced discipline in a manner that actually delivers the strongest possible results. SEO is one of those tasks that seems so simple in theory, but when put into practice can deliver a wealth of unforeseen obstacles. Some of these include the introduction of new parameters for keyword rankings due to Google updates, and diagnosing the cause behind websites or web pages that aren’t ranking as strong as they should be on SERPs (or ‘search engine results pages’).

Thankfully, there are an abundance of SEO learning resources available online to SEO specialists and students. You can learn SEO from home by reading articles, watching YouTube tutorials, and getting hands-on with SEO and rank tracking software like Moz or SEMrush.

When you start to learn how Google reads and ranks content on SERPs, you can then begin to create digital marketing materials that have been developed using SEO best practices. In only just a few short months of conscientious work, you should be able to develop a pretty impressive SEO portfolio that you can then use to present yourself as a bona fide SEO specialist.

Email marketing

Don’t believe anyone who says that email campaigns are dead. Email marketing campaigns are still one of the most effective ways to directly reach your audience on a frequent basis and assess how effective your content and marketing materials are in an almost perfect vacuum. By this we mean that email marketing campaigns allow you to organise direct communications with your prospective client base and track engagement across all the separate communications and offers provided over the course of that campaign.

Don’t get me wrong, reaching your audience on social media is effective, but in that environment, you just don’t have your target user’s full attention. Think of your email newsletters as a private viewing party of the many amazing things that your company is doing or offering.

You can also get very strategic with measuring how your audience interacts with your communications, with eye tracking and other clever tools that can tell you where they click and what information attracts them.

---

---

Content marketing

Content marketing specialists usually work closely with both social media and SEO teams, as this profession is all about curating information in a way that provides value to your audience or even acts as a call to action. The ability to put words on a page is often overlooked as a digital marketing skill, but with what we know about Google’s algorithm and its most recent updates, producing optimised content that still reads as natural plays a vital role in SERP and digital marketing campaigns as a whole.

And content marketing specialists don’t necessarily just have to produce long-form content like news media articles. Content marketing can include producing content for anything, ranging from short blog posts, long-form guides, video tutorials and virtually any other format that showcases your services and products through value rather than just pushing a sale.

Although content development is undoubtedly a creative role, the cross-sections that this particular discipline shares with SEO and social media management means that you’ll always have plenty of ideas, briefs, and general directions to follow as a content specialist. You can easily learn this skill from home through formal or informal courses, as well as by seeking out opportunities for freelance content writing.

Digital design

While graphic design focuses on developing static images like logos or illustrations, digital design incorporates creating movement through animation, 3D modelling and interactive UI (or ‘user interfaces’). Demand for this design-oriented digital marketing skill is growing substantially, with businesses and brands expanding their team to include these creative professionals.

A digital designer will work closely with a web developer and content specialist to create digital experiences, which might take the shape of static graphics or video assets. While you can technically learn digital design from home, this is definitely a specialist role so if you are planning on landing a job in this particular industry, be sure to get familiar with looking at typical digital design briefs so you can test your skills as you go and see how you would fair in an agency setting.

---

Learning new skills at home can advance your career and open you up to new disciplines with new opportunities. When preparing to learn any of the disciplines outlined above, however, it’s essential that you do some independent research into these fields and see which skills are going to best serve you and your needs.

If you are already working in the digital field, chat to your peers and managers about what professions and skills they think are most needed, as these insights might influence your career decision.

---