How to Learn Digital Marketing Fast

You want to learn digital marketing and you want to learn it fast, but why?

What is the true problem you're trying to solve?

Do you simply want to learn?

Are you struggling to create demand?

Do you want to make more content?

Is your brand invisible?

What is the main reason you're looking to learn digital marketing fast?

It's important to take a moment and step back before diving in.

Throughout my career so far, I've met with hundreds of business owners and marketing teams, and one of the most common things I hear is:

"Sales are struggling"

Business owners will often tie this to being a digital marketing problem but that isn't always the case.

Some businesses don't have enough demand and others have plenty of leads but struggle to close them. Some businesses have a great product but poor positioning and others simply aren't really doing anything online.

That's why these questions come first to help us get specific.

Digital marketing is incredibly broad and it's constantly changing especially with AI. New platforms, new tools, and new strategies emerge pretty much every day. If you start learning without first understanding the problem then it's easy to waste time learning skills that won't move the needle.

Instead of asking, "How do I learn digital marketing as fast as possible?"

Start by asking:

"What problem am I trying to solve?"

Your answer will give you some clues for what you should learn, what you can ignore, and ultimately how quickly you can make progress.

It is hard to pin digital marketing down to being one thing.

Digital marketing was born alongside the personal computer and the internet, and it's still sort of in the wild west era today. New platforms and channels show up out of nowhere and steal attention away from whatever was popular last month. This rate of change is accelerating and it creates a lot of noise that can be hard to cut through.

At its core, digital marketing isn't some specific discipline, it's very broad. Digital marketing is really just regular marketing with more data and more tech behind it. Marketing is about getting the right people interested in what you offer. Digital marketing is doing that same thing through digital channels, with the advantage that almost everything can be measured to gauge performance.

That's also what makes it hard to learn fast. Digital marketing is really an umbrella over many different skills that don't behave the same way. SEO plays out over a longer time frame. A paid ad can show you results today. Email rewards and builds relationships with those who already trust you. Someone who's great at running ads might be lost the moment you hand them a content calendar. You don't have to be good at everything but you should know how they work together.

Let's look at Facebook ads specifically as one component to learn in the realm of digital marketing. If you want to learn that specifically, all you really have to do now is create and test ad creatives. Meta's platform handles much of the targeting, which wasn't really the case a few years back when you had to build audiences and manage bids yourself. The execution is getting easier and less demanding for technical skills.

Traditional marketing and digital marketing are running on the same ideas, just wearing different clothes. Companies used to name themselves ABC Roofing, AAA Towing, or Apple to land at the top of the phonebook. That's an old-school version of search engine optimization. Being "above the fold" hasn't gone anywhere, it just moved from the front page of a newspaper to the top of your website, landing page, or search engine result page.

The really exciting part is that it doesn't require a massive budget to start and execute today. It used to take decent money to reach people, a TV spot, a print ad, a booth at a trade show. Now a lot of digital marketing costs more time than cash. What matters more than budget is knowing where the big opportunities are before you spend anything.

You can make money with a good digital marketing strategy, now so more than ever. It keeps getting easier for the average person to get in the game, which is great but with that comes more competition. More people competing for the same attention means you need to get a bit creative just to be seen at all. That's the wild west part. You kind of have to be scrappy and test ideas that might feel unconventional.

The space changes fast enough that what worked yesterday might not work today.

Imagine you are trying to learn how to surf for the first time but you're trying to learn without getting into the water. It's probably going to be difficult to become a good surfer.

It might be a silly analogy but stay with me.

Digital marketing requires testing and understanding changes in human behavior, similar to how surfers understand waves. The wave is the surfer's opportunity. Reading the ocean to identify a good wave is part of the skill of surfing, much like how you identify trends and opportunities in the ocean of "the internet." Some waves aren't that good, and you don't have to jump on every one you see because it might not be that good. Identifying a good opportunity is much of the battle.

Once you build the skill to recognize a good one, you still have to know what to do: how to position yourself, how to execute, how to move quickly.

Surfers build the muscle memory to stand up on the board and catch the wave. Falling isn't really on their mind anymore once they're good at it, but it probably was when they started. They had to understand the feeling of momentum behind pushing the board and learning the balance to ride the wave. Beginners will fall, but they should learn something each time. Maybe they weren't positioned correctly. Maybe they stood up too early. Maybe it just wasn't a good wave.

The idea is that "digital marketing" as a broad concept isn't something you can just learn quickly and master. It requires testing things out and failing a few times to build the skill of identifying opportunities for your brand. That said, some parts of it you can learn quickly, like working on your balance, or understanding what different size surfboards do. That's a lot like understanding the different types of digital marketing. Learning how paid ads work, or how to build an email campaign, are examples of the individual components that make up digital marketing as a whole.

Surfers don't always jump on the first wave that shows up. They sit, watch the water, and read what's coming before they commit. Good digital marketers do the same thing before they test anything.

For a beginner, that means watching what's already working before you try to build anything from scratch. Surfers have their "surf spots," or the places they go a lot because the waves are good. This can be compared to seeing what other people are doing. You can learn a lot by watching other people execute. Look at your competitors. Look at brands you admire, even outside your industry, if something sticks out to you then think about how you can imitate that for your brand. Notice what's working and get to the bottom of why it works. You can bring fresh ideas from other companies into yours and see how it goes.

Here are a few questions worth sitting with before you paddle out anywhere:

Who are you trying to reach?

What brands stand out to you right now and on what type of platform?

Where do your customers spend their time online?

What are your customers searching for, and where are they searching for it?

Once you've got a read on the movement, make a decision and run a test. That's catching the wave. Maybe you like a competitor's website, or you see them running ads, or you got jealous of an email they sent because you didn't think of it. Run a test for your own brand and see if it works for you too. Small enough that if you wipe out, it doesn't cost you much.

The most important part to learning digital marketing fast is by building the ability to make logically sound decisions based on data and past performance. You gather this by running tests and understanding what worked and what didn't. Maybe you were positioned wrong. Maybe it wasn't a good wave. Maybe your target audience isn't where you think they are. That's the whole game. Replicate what works, cut what doesn't, and get better at telling the difference each time you're back in the water. You can monitor other companies trying things out or run some tests for yourself but gather the insights and learn from them.

You came here looking to learn digital marketing but I challenge you to get more specific and figure out what problem you're trying to solve.

Once you know the answer, you don't need to learn digital marketing all at once. You need to get in the water. Pick the one channel where your audience lives. Run one small test this week, not a full campaign, just one ad, one post, one email. Then sit with what it tells you.

That's what has been working for me. If you need something a bit more tangible then do this next:

- Croy Seagren