Google Marketing Courses are available through what Google calls their “Digital Garage.” These courses offer information on a variety of different Internet marketing subjects like basic business strategy, Google Analytics, content marketing, display advertising, e-commerce, email marketing, local marketing, mobile, SEM, SEO, social media, video, and web optimization. Additionally, they offer certifications in these course studies. Listing some impressive success stories, it would appear that Google’s in-house courses could be one of the best ways to learn how to grow traffic, leads, and orders for your business online. Certainly, Google puts a lot of effort into convincing you of this. They’ve built a sleek website, attempted to answer any reservations a visitor could have, and made it extremely simple to sign up. They take every best effort, with their billion dollar budgets, to make people think there’s no better place to learn how to promote their business on the Internet. After lifting some of the fog here, though, you may be in for some surprises. While there’s value in Google’s courses, in this blog post we’ll also outline some of the places where Google’s own training falls short in providing the full breadth of skills for someone that wants to learn, and successfully apply, these strategies in order to drive return on investment. Our hope is that you’ll come away from this post with a comprehensive list of pros and cons that help you have the peace of mind to know that you’ve made an educated decision when you start your learning, with or without Google.
There are a lot of advantages to choosing Google’s courses to learn digital marketing and advertising. For one, they effectively cover some of the core fundamentals of marketing theory and Internet marketing. This is a required essential subject to master— if you don’t understand the basic mechanics of marketing your success will only be accidental, and you won’t have a way to direct your efforts. Taking you from these fundamental courses, Google marketing courses offer a breadth of subjects for the beginner, with names like “Get a business online” and “Make sure customers find you online.” These courses offer a path to getting started by making a complex process simple, and giving people a basic step-by-step todo list to follow to build digital marketing skills. After learning foundational principles and taking some easy introductory courses, one could argue Google is the best place to continue learning web marketing and advertising. They are Google after all; through their networks you’re able to access an incredible amount of people across the globe, an amount that grows every day. Google knows their own platform, arguably better than anyone else in the world, and so the logic follows that they have the greatest authority to teach people how to market with it. They understand the inner workings of their system, from algorithms to competitors, and the effect of product changes over time. They are the source of new product developments coming down the pipeline, and so they can update their courses with the most accurate and relevant content to help business owners and marketers stay ahead of the curve. Finally, one also can’t ignore budget alone… Google is one of the richest companies in the world. With all this wealth, and a growing audience, it appears that they’d have everything they need to make the best courses on the market. Resources have a strong influence over the quality of education. With manpower and research they can establish the most effective strategies for diverse companies in different industries, with different goals, and different needs, and ways of doing business to gain new customers. While reading this we want to be completely clear that for some purposes this may be true. If your business reaches its target market exclusively on Google’s networks, while aiming for objectives that perfectly match with Google’s needs as an advertising business, Google’s courses may effectively serve as the best place to start, the most comprehensive source of information, the best quality training, and all at the best price anyone can think of (free). There are many types of businesses that Googles courses are the best option for, and after a thorough period of due diligence we think it’s a perfectly valid choice to engage their free training to build web marketing organizations in a business. We also think it’s important to mention that we don’t think this applies to most businesses, even by the widest stretch of imagination. In our next paragraph we’ll detail some of the disadvantages of relying on Google marketing courses for most of your interactive strategy, as well as some different approaches that we’d favor and have been effective in our professional study.
We feel there are ample reasons to use other methods to learn to promote your business online than Google’s marketing courses. Starting this section may be easiest by addressing the elephant in the room; to rely on Google to learn interactive marketing is to ignore obvious conflicts of interest. At the end of the day Google is a search engine and advertising network, and their primary objective is to maximize customer lifetime value. Much of the time that probably means maximizing ad spend… they have an interest in trying to help you be successful, certainly, but only while spending as much money as possible… Google has no interest in helping you decide when to improve ROI and cut costs unless you’re an account that’s likely to spend dramatically more money because of it. This is clear when you take their courses because it’s the fundamental belief of the company— subjects are painted with rosy glasses, providing just enough information to convince you to spend more money but never enough spend less. While this is probably the most important disadvantage to their training, there are many other reasons to choose a different way to learn. Google is motivated to push you into Google’s stack, so any other places to advertise your business are effectively blacklisted in their courses. They scratch the surface of some subjects, with courses like “What is social?” listed on the website because nobody could take them seriously if they didn’t, but any mention of ways you can advertise outside of the Google series of platforms is conspicuously missing. In the professional community these channels are viewed as an equal tool to keep in your marketing tool kit, or at times even preferable if your business is in certain industries or reaches certain types of people. But another major hole also exists here, as it does in most other courses. At their core the vast majority of professional education programs speak in matters of theory and principles, but don’t take much effort to address practical application. Of course they’ll show you how to launch a campaign, but that’s really one of the easiest objectives to achieve. It’s not particularly hard just to launch a mediocre campaign, and you don’t even need much training to do this with the new launch wizards that most ad networks like Google’s has. These topics are essential, please don’t misunderstand, but the real learning is what happens after a campaign launches. It’s really easy to get lost when a campaign is running but hasn’t gotten any conversions yet, and solutions aren’t clear because real consumers make confusing buying decisions. The most important thing to know is how to optimize a campaign, in terms of identifying when an element (like your ad creatives) is failing to allow you to cut your losses or when an element is working to allow you to multiply your success. It’s easy to get the gist of what you need to do, but the part you need to master is what to do when your battle plan encounters the real world and fails. A good strategy rolls with the punches and wins the fight, but few schools teach this.
Honesty is the best policy, so we want you to understand something; there’s no replacement for putting the work in, building an expertise, running through a few years of trial and error cycles, and truly mastering the craft. It doesn’t take any course, or certainly any paid course, to achieve this, but it takes tons of time. The topic here is how to jump the line and get the core skills needed to succeed and drive return on ad spend as quickly as possible. Courses are a great option for this, but when using them you need to play a balancing act. On one side, money is no object and the most effective training is the best. On the other side, money is everything and you need to spend as little as possible to open digital channels up to start driving orders. No decision is wrong in that balancing act, but clinging to one or the other isn’t the way to win. You need to find the effective and proper balance for your business. This may mean personal study, Google’s free courses, paid courses, or even hiring an expensive consultant on retainer to teach you the ropes. Much like the real task in advertising is in optimizing campaigns, the real decision for business owners and new marketers is where the right balance for them lies.