Google Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Certification is a complete package of courses in digital marketing made for entrepreneurs or marketers, from the point of how people can find the online opportunity, using Google marketing tools and media to increase online presence and reaching potential customers, collecting user data to track and measure their behaviour and characteristics, building online shop and selling oline, until ways to expand internationally. While it’s free and basic, this certification consists of 26 modules divided into 7 topics estimated to finish in 40 hours. Each module contains 2-5 lessons with a 3-5 minutes video-based learning and a knowledge check for each and a topic quiz at the end of each module. To get the certification, it is required to pass the final 40 multiple choice questions in 75 minutes with the score of 80% or higher.

The course starts by “Take a business Online” where the course initially tries opening our eyes that digital world is full of opportunities where we can possibly be visible when people, locally or globally, go online and search for a business like ours on the search engine. While the chance are big, the first part is to know the online environment. On the first topic, it mostly pointed out a summary of steps needed to carry out when doing business in the digital world and how to make it succeed. It needs to clearly define the online goals, choosing the right strategy for building and marketing the online presence, constantly analyzing  every results, and adapting to what changes needed in the future to make it better. To take note, this course is focusing more on websites and there are glimpse on how to plan online business strategy at the end of the lessons.

The next topic on “Make it Easy for People to Find A Business on The Web” is covering search as the key strategy for businesses to be reached out by more people. Here we are learning the basic of search engine and how does it works. Basically, we are learning two types of search engines strategy, which are the organic search called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the paid search called Search Engine Marketing (SEM). The course explained tips and tricks on how to improve search campaigns to win the bidding and be the one to shows up on the top of  the Google Search Results Pages (SERPs). In addition, Google Search Console is one tool recommended to measure and gives feedback to the search performance.

After enhancing the web presence through search, the next step learn is to “Reach More People Locally, on Social Media or on Mobile”. Even though digital world is big, full of global presence, it still much more important to get noticed locally, especially for local businesses.  One of the way is to get listed in local directories. Then to make it more visible, this course provided the lesson to plan the local strategy from digital advertising, making the most mobile features such as GPS or applications, to exploiting SEO or SEM for local search. Not only that, the topic also elaborated how to use social media advertising to increase the presence and ways to make our website mobile-friendly through a modification on the mobile search engines and the mobile campaigns. The lesson ends with helpful hints on content marketing to support all the strategy mentioned.

On the other hands, no one can denied that advertising still the most effective way to raise awareness even in the digital world and that is the lesson covered in “Reach More Customers with Advertising”. Here we are learning four strategy recommended to advertise the business online which are email, display, and video advertising, and each were comprehensively discussed on the course to get the essence on which one should be chosen and how it should be implemented to get the most effective results. The lesson then gets to the part where we should “Track and Measure Web Traffic” after implementing the chosen campaign strategy and that is through Google Analytics. Google Analytics will help on collecting data, processing it, and then generated a report that can turn data into insights to help us deciding on further campaign strategy.

Reaching out to the end, “Sell Products or Services Online” topic mostly discussed on how entrepreneur or marketer is able to use e-commerce to reach more customers and increase sales. This part taking discussion on how to use e-commerce to sell, taking payments and manage orders, creating a smooth e-commerce experience, product promotion and merchandising, and how to create product retargeting campaigns seamlessly. Lastly, the “Take a Business Global” is made after the local business starts to get saturated locally and need to expand internationally to grow the market. On this topic, we can learn how to validate the new market, being understood abroad, advertise across borders, identifying the support systems need to provide the realisation, how to help customers abroad buy the products, and how to deliver the products accurately and on time to global customers.

On a final note, this certification takes a lot of process to digest even though it was well delivered and quite easy to understood. The knowledge given is expensive and Google made it possible to raise the hopes for starters to start their business online. The lesson learned from the course is that business without planning and planning without goals will never generate a good results. It will just bring the chaosity on each process and confusing the next decision. That is why this course made a whole packaged so we can understand each process perfectly so we can do the right research,  make a suitable planning, and let Google implement and analyze the performance. Not to forget that many tools have been mentioned on the course and these are what we should make the most out of it. It was recommended to take this course while planning on the campaign strategy for the business to actually get the general idea of the entire course. (Created by: Amanda Puteri Rozyanti)