Over the past few years, I’ve noticed an increasing number of people asking me for an opinion on digital marketing courses.

One of the first things I always do when I get asked a question for the second or third time is to take a look at how the number of other people who are asking the same question.

Sometimes, this can be a great way of spotting a trend. Unsurprisingly one of the easiest ways to do this is to run a series of keywords through Google Trends.

Quite A Few Folks Are Looking To Learn I like classes.

Online or offline, there’s just a ritual to them, you know?

You’ve got a new book, a list of conversations to have…a trajectory of learning. You’ve got introductions, you’ve got icebreakers, you’ve got facilitated discussions.

But the one thing you don’t always have is a realistic rate of learning. You’ve got quarters, you’ve got semesters. On a semester system, you might have courses that stretch longer than fifteen weeks.

In the span of time in the screenshot, I can’t find a single 15 week period where the digital marketing landscape didn’t see change in ways that would have required ‘figuring out.’

One of the first pieces of advice I offer to ad operations specialists is to invest a substantial amount of time in reading platform notes.

More mature teams like those behind Facebook or Twitter are investing tremendous amounts of resources in keeping the public up to date on the platform, yet every time I mention say, Instant Games, or Voice AI, I get blank stares. Yet something tells me six months from now, I’ll be on the receiving end of Gary Vee video shares and Ad Age articles all about how revolutionary they are.

I get the temptation of a digital marketing course, it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you can learn everything one time and have a solid foundation to get updates about.

I can still remember the first time I had a media budget. I spent hours making plans before spending any money. I had models of spending trends, I had projections, I had an idea of who I was targeting, I had a slate of different creative options — I had everything a good plan needed.

I remember queuing up my first batch. I remember coming up with different combinations of text inside of the character limit. I remember driving website clicks with images that had a handful of different colored borders.

And I remember running out of ideas to test within about three days.

Media dollars don’t go quite as far as they did on the mainstream platforms a few years ago, but as near as I’ve found, Facebook media isn’t priced consistently across state lines.

Because of that, there are still plenty of parts of the world where a 30$/month media budget can get you access to 60,000 eyeballs.

When I went to school, it wasn’t uncommon for people to run a blog no one knew about. By the end of college, micro-blogs were everywhere. It seemed like everyone was designing flyers for something.

If resume season is any indication, it gets easier and easier each year to run a side project that rivals the kind of reach regional brands got a few years ago.

It’s not always as straight forward as a digital marketing course online or in a classroom, but getting your hands dirty is one of the fastest ways to learn how this space works.

So, if you’re looking for the best digital marketing course out there, you might be able to get more mileage out of just rolling up your sleeves and start working on something.