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The Top Five Free Online Marketing Courses

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Are you an early stage marketer looking for courses to enhance your marketing skills? Are you looking for ways to keep up with the rapid advances in your industry? Then you might want to consider few courses to quickly upskill. Most of these courses are free, and online. There are plenty of websites that provide a detailed and comprehensive list of free / online courses, such as, Hubspot's list right here , but as a beginner, you might want just a few ready pointers to commence your learning journey. Worry not, this particular post covers most of the skills considered essential for beginners, and you can always supplement these courses with more advanced courses once you have accomplished a certain skill level. Course #1 Google Analytics for Beginners Analytics is an area in which a marketer needs to be thoroughly conversant. The Google Analytics for Beginners course equips learners with just the skills to kick-start their analytics journey. Right from how

Marketing Conference

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Happy to share that I was a jury at a marketing conference organized by a management institution. Great to hear and learn from the passionate pitches of management students.

Advice for Aspiring Marketers

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Are you an aspiring marketer? Do you want to know more about marketing as a career?  Recently one of my articles on this topic got published in a magazine - you may want to read further at  http://online.fliphtml5.com/odxsw/fdvp/#p=40

Five things to know before you hire an SEO agency

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Okay - your website is up, looking clean and inviting [to you], and you wait for customers to beat a path to your door [err, website]. But it doesn't happen. Nada . What to do? You go scrambling for a SEO agency. You hear pitches, sit through countless presentations, choose one, get the contractual documentation closed, and complete the knowledge transfer. Then you wait - for your website to get ranked on page #1 of SERPs. Then you wait - some more. Finally, you commence an analysis: Why is your website not ranked yet on page 1? What more do you need to do? Secretly goes in your mind "How do I now explain this to the CMO / CEO / Leadership"? All of this, amongst mounting budgetary pressures, and explanations to the CX suite about the RoI on your SEO investment. Only if we knew! Let's quickly check out some to-dos that can assist you before you sign on the dotted line with an agency. Having burnt my fingers myself once,

How can influencer marketing help your brand? Influencer Marketing Series

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Some people (like me) are born skeptics. Influencer marketing? Blah – why would that work? I know my audience – and I can reach them directly. I don’t need no influencer. But, think about this: In 2017, eMarketer reported that marketers spent $570 million on influencer marketing globally. In 2018, $1.6 billion was channeled into sponsored posts on Instagram alone. According to a report by Linqia , only 6% of brands said influencer content under-performed brand content. By 2020, more than 50% of ad content will be created outside of marketing . Marketing-inspired word-of-mouth makes 4x the impact on purchasing decisions [ McKinsey study ] Okay – so why should you think about influencer marketing? Maybe, you are in the B2B business and feel influencer marketing is not relevant for your segment, or maybe you feel your product doesn’t need influencers? Or it may be that you find your audience is not social media savvy – hence the need to obviate s

The Influencer Marketing Series

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Hey there! Are you looking to kick-start an influencer marketing program for your brand? I have put together a series of articles for you - right from what is influencer marketing, how it can help, types of influencers - the whole kit. Influencer marketing for beginners How can influencer marketing help your brand Types of influencers How to choose an influencer? How to measure the RoI of your influencer marketing program? Let me know what you think of the posts, and share your influencer marketing stories in the comments section below.

How to choose an influencer? Influencer Marketing Series

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How to choose an influencer? Amidst the roller coaster lives that we all have as marketers, there have always been situations when we have been tasked to get something done on a tight deadline. Well that works, mostly. (with lots of coffee, paranoia, & sleep deprived nights). But an influencer marketing campaign is a tough-do - where do you begin and how quickly can you put things together? Well for that, you can view this series right here, helping you build an influencer marketing campaign from scratch. But wait, for an influencer marketing campaign, you need to have influencers [duh!]. So how do you select influencers? Do you hand over the mandate to an agency? How many influencers do you engage with? What factors should you consider while shortlisting influencers. Some of the factors that you should be consider while selecting an influencer are values, congruence, authenticity, differentiation and engagement, something that I call the VE