My go-to learning resources for new marketers
Marketing is a massive field that looks different everywhere you go, and it feels like the rules and tools are constantly changing.
So it’s no surprise that I frequently get asked “Hey, I want to get into marketing. Where do I start learning?” Unfortunately, because marketing is so big and there are lots of bad marketers trying to make a quick buck, there’s a lot of crap out there.
The good news is: there are some incredible people and companies building extremely useful educational marketing content that is free and will quickly build you a solid set of foundations.
This list is a round-up of my favourite beginner marketing resources that I recommend to marketing students or professionals looking to learn marketing to level up their businesses.
Like most of my posts on this site, this list is somewhat living. I get asked for these resources frequently, so I want to try and maintain this post with fresh resources a few times a year so I have a handy reference to quickly give out.
This does mean that resources here might become broken or outdated over time, so if you’re an experienced marketer and you think something here is a waste of time and can be replaced with something better, let me know so I can review and update!
t-Shaped Marketer
While this resource is a bit dated, I really like sharing Buffer’s classic How to Become a T-Shaped Marketer blog post.
This resource provides a great overview of what a modern marketer does, and helps set expectations that you can’t (and shouldn’t!) dive deep on all the things.
A great marketer separates strategy from tactics and channels, and the T-Shape framework gives some words to fuzzy concepts they may or may not heard of, like Positioning and Funnel Marketing, while giving space for the obvious things like Social Media and SEO.
Read this post, get a sense of what you’re already skilled at and interested in, and focus your future learning in those spaces. Buffer even links out to resources for many of the items in their framework to get you started.
HubSpot Academy
Simply put, HubSpot Academy is the definitive learning hub for digital marketing. There just isn’t another place that has as wide of a variety of high-quality marketing courses, industry-recognized certifications—all free, to boot.
Really you can pick-and-choose what is the most relevant or interesting to you, but I recommend the Digital Marketing and/or Inbound certification courses for most marketers as a starting point. They’re great overview courses that you can bang out in a weekend, and they finish with a proper certification that you can add to your LinkedIn profile and resume.
From there, dive into specialty courses and certifications that interest you. I’ve personally done their Email Marketing and Content Marketing certification courses in the past, and I’ve recently started their Sales Enablement certification.
They’ve even got a short Excel for Marketers course! Handling spreadsheets is a critical skill for marketers—for better or for worse—so I highly recommend taking a hands-on Excel or Google Sheets course somewhere if you’re not comfortable with it.
Google Analytics Academy
Regardless of what type of marketer you want to become, you can be guaranteed that you will work with Google Analytics at every organization for the rest of your career.
Google’s Analytics Academy has a beginner course for Google Analytics—start there, and for most, this will be all you need. They have an advanced course that I highly recommend coming back to after you’ve been working with the product for a year or two.
If you really like Google Analytics, and you end up being in more of a web management or marketing operations/technology role, you will eventually end up learning about Data Studio and Tag Manager. Google Analytics Academy has courses for these two products, and I cannot recommend them enough. Feel free to pass on these if you’re not into the technology-side of marketing.
When you’re ready, check out the requirements for the Google Analytics Individual Qualification exam. It’s free, and yet another extremely recognizable certification to add to your resume.
Google Ads Academy
Another one from the big G. Digital advertising in some form is pretty common in most marketing plans for most businesses, so I generally recommend doing a crash course on at least one advertising platform of interest, even if you don’t think you’ll directly be in a role creating and managing ads.
Search (search results) and Display (visual creative ads) are the broad two paths you can follow, but Google’s Advertising courses also cover adjacent topics like Google Shopping and advertising with video.
Search ads are clearly a great thing to learn if you plan on spending time doing organic growth and SEO work. Display ads can be relevant if you’re also interested in learning and flexing creative skills like graphic design and video production, since you’ll need those assets to run display ads.
Regardless of what you learn here, these courses end with even more free certifications.
Other learning resources
Here’s my grab bag of other places I currently like to recommend to new marketers:
Google’s Digital Garage has a variety of marketing-adjacent courses to dig into, like data basics
Buffer’s round-up of 37 Free Social Media and Marketing Courses
Ahrefs Academy, specifically if you care about search and blogging
Later’s courses and guides, especially if you care about learning the bleeding edge of content creation
Canva’s Design School to learn how to easily make graphics that don’t suck
Moz’s Beginner’s Guide to SEO is the bible on Search Engine Optimization
Zapier makes a killer product that glues marketing tools together, and their University is great at teaching you about it
Fellow.app has a bunch of great templates to help you run marketing meetings
Want some paid programs?
If you’re local to Ottawa, do yourself a favour and go take The DMC
Growclass also rules, focused on growth marketing
The Product Marketing Alliance and their respective Core Certification if you’re working with products, like in most tech/SaaS companies
