Learn digital marketing to running a real campaign in three months
Three months of evenings — about 70 hours — takes you from "I know marketing exists" to someone who has run a real campaign on a real product, read the analytics, and can hold an intelligent conversation about SEO, paid search, social and email. This is a survey: you'll end a competent generalist, not a specialist. Specializing comes after, once you know which channel you actually like.
3 months · ~70 hours · two free certifications and one real campaign with measured results
1.Google's Fundamentals of Digital Marketing (free)
This is the canonical survey course — Google's free, 26-module "Fundamentals of Digital Marketing," roughly 40 hours, with a recognized certificate co-validated by the IAB. It gives you the whole map at a beginner level: how search works, what SEM and paid ads are, the role of social, email, content and analytics, and how the channels fit together. Note it currently lives on Google Skillshop (the older Digital Garage brand is being folded in); search there for "Fundamentals of Digital Marketing." Take the assessments seriously — they force the vocabulary to stick.
Free
Google Skillshop — Digital Garage →2.HubSpot Academy — go a level deeper, free
Google's course is broad but shallow; HubSpot Academy's free certifications add depth on the channels that matter most for actually getting customers. Do the Digital Marketing and Email Marketing certifications, and the SEO course. These are practical and software-grounded — you'll learn how a funnel works, how to write an email sequence, how to think about keywords and content. All free, all add a badge to your LinkedIn. Stop here on certifications; two or three is plenty, and more is just collecting badges instead of doing the work.
Free
HubSpot Academy →3.Run one real campaign on a real product
Pick something real: a friend's small business, an Etsy shop, your own side project, a local nonprofit. Define one goal (email signups, sales, bookings) and one channel to drive it. Set up free analytics (Google Analytics 4), publish the content or run a small ad budget, and watch the numbers for two to three weeks. Write down what you spent, what you got, and what you'd change. A campaign that "failed" but that you measured and understood teaches you more than any certificate. This is the artifact that gets you hired or gets you your first client.
Free; optional ad spend of $50–100 if you want to learn paid
Apply HubSpot's frameworks →If this doesn't fit you
The survey is the right start for most people, but if you already know which channel you want, skip ahead and go deep instead. If search and ranking is the draw, go straight to SEO. If you'd rather master the words that make campaigns convert — the highest-leverage skill in all of marketing — go to copywriting. A generalist who can also write persuasive copy or rank a page is worth far more than one who has watched ten survey courses.
Why this path
The bottleneck in digital marketing is that the field is enormous and beginners freeze trying to learn all of it before doing any of it. This path deliberately resists that: get the whole map fast and free from Google, add practical depth from HubSpot, then immediately run something real, because marketing is judged on results and you cannot fake having read an analytics dashboard. Skip the $2,000 "become a marketer" bootcamps — every channel's foundational training is already free from the companies that own the platforms. Spend the money you saved on a small ad budget for your real campaign instead.