Useful learning with Hubspot

A few years ago (two decades to be exact - how time flies), I did a Masters in European Business Administration. The course comprised various subjects one of which was marketing. I remember I did my project and dissertation on setting up a UK food business in France. I was a tad early - there was academic interest but little hope of business success. Indeed, I"ve never bought Brit foods in a dedicated store because the prices have always been on the wrong side of my price/acceptability curve, even with high nostalgia peaks.

When I had finished my degree, I realised that it was totally inappropriate for small town Montpellier because it was aimed at large companies - the sort you find in London, Paris, Lyon... Oops. I got a job in admin instead, in a rush so I could repay the loan I'd taken out to pay for my "career-boosting" degree. Then I got pregnant and gave up the idea of a career in favour of keeping my job.

So I never got to use anything I had learned which is totally typical for me as I have never used my first degree either. I have a lot of talent in not terribly useful skills, like picking education I never get to use.

Still, it's all good intellectual effort, and I'm sure my life is the richer for  it...

However, I don't believe in giving up on education, and with the arrival of MOOCs (massive open online courses), there's a world of learning out there for the taking, and mostly for free. Maybe I could even dig up a talent for useful learning, that I could put to some use!

With that in mind, I recently signed up for Hubspot's Inbound Marketing certification. Here's the blurb:

The Inbound Course & Certification is a free marketing training course that covers the fundamentals of the Inbound Marketing Methodology. Learn how SEO, Landing Pages, Blogging, Conversion, Lead Nurturing, and Email marketing come together to form a modern inbound marketing strategy.

I thought it was excellent because it is customer-centric marketing rather than the marketer-centric. So it frowns upon invasive practices such as pop-ups, unwanted emails, in-your-face spam and so on - things I personally hate. Instead you have to attract people who have a problem they want answers to, help them to find a solution, convert them into customers, close the sale, and finally delight them with the way you do business afterwards.

The course is made up of twelve classes that cover all aspects of Inbound through videos where it's all clearly explained, and you can download both the videos and transcripts in order to revise for the test. In order to get certified, you have to pass the test. Sixty questions to be finished in 75 minutes that you can take a maximum of three times before being locked out for one month.

I'm proud to say I got it in one and am thus Inbound Certified, and here's my badge.

 

 If you want to update your marketing skills, I do recommend Inbound as good place to start, and you get a snazzy badge to boot.