Digital marketing is a constantly evolving field, with industry standards and best practices progressing on a regular basis. Thankfully, free, top-notch online resources abound for digital marketers to keep tabs on the latest. Below, our picks for 20 great go-to online resources for digital marketing:
Inbound marketing pioneer HubSpot has helped more than 10,000 companies in 56 countries attract leads and convert them into paying customers. HubSpot’s blog offers a payload of Internet marketing research organized into digestible articles like “8 Reasons You Gotta Stop Buying Email Lists” and “15 Free Content Creation Tools Marketers Shouldn’t Live Without.”
Marketing Profs offers a wealth of resources for modern marketers from training courses and virtual and live conferences to podcasts and free articles on everything from SEM to segmentation. Check out their SlideShare presentations for more great graphic marketing tips and tricks.
The leading Internet resource about the Internet, Mashable offers near-infinite ways to consume its real-time digital content, whether in text, video, photographic, infographic, or regular graphic form. You might find it helpful to get your marketing news in the context of the larger picture of what’s new across the digital world, but if you’re looking solely for updates on social media, the business of marketing, or tech, you can subscribe to just those channels via RSS or social networks.
eMarketer collects thousands of data points from global marketing studies to distill the most valuable insights into easy-to-read charts and reports on all things digital marketing. Subscribe to the free daily newsletter, or spring for a corporate or enterprise account for your business to get access to in-depth reports, searchable and filterable forecasts and more.
The B2C (no, not that kind of B2C) community of bloggers writes about social media, tech, branding, PR and marketing in relatable, insight-packed articles and webcasts.
HubSpot’s “social media scientist” has one of the most widely respected personal marketing blogs. He doesn’t publish new content that frequently, but when he does it’s indispensable. Example: “Tweets Between 100 and 115 Characters are More Likely to be ReTweeted.”
Moz founder Rand Fishkin’s 150,000 Twitter followers are treated to 50-75 tweets a week on marketing, SEO, startups and entrepreneurship. There’s a reason he’s listed on Twitter under headers like “Must Follow List”
Heidi Cohen’s “actionable marketing guide” offers useful and instructive columns on social media marketing, content marketing, mobile marketing, and branding. Every article leaves you with concrete takeaways adaptable to whatever you’re working on, and Heidi’s content is often great to bookmark for future reference (think “101 Social Media Resources” and “20 Security Tips to Keep Your Site Safe”).
Marketing software company Marketo runs a robust blog brimming with valuable marketing content ranging from email marketing best practices to marketing automation trends. If you’re strapped for time, you can navigate to Marketo’s most shared or most read articles, or else follow on Facebook, Twitter or Google+ for the cream of the crop of content.
The gorgeously designed ReadWrite (formerly ReadWriteWeb) is one of the most widely read tech news sites in the world. You can count on it for not just reliable news, but also analysis and conversation around that news. Browse at your leisure, or read specifically cloud, enterprise, hacking, mobile, games, small business, social media, or web news.
The indomitable marketing expert, speaker, and author Chris Brogan sends out a free, approachable, insight-packed Sunday newsletter written colloquially and with rich takeaways on everything from motivation to do great work to insights on business and marketing.
Pam Moore has more than 15 years of social media and marketing experience and has been named one of the Top 5 Women Influencers in Social Media by Forbes. Her website serves up free marketing content, from interesting and helpful blog posts like “22 Tips To Humanize Your Brand On Twitter” to products like an editorial calendar template and social media white papers.
Digital marketing strategist Jay Baer’s consulting company Convince & Convert has a daily “One Thing” newsletter that distills the chaotic marketing content of the day into one digestible story, alongside highlights from the company’s blog. The team’s Social Pros Podcast is also worth a listen.
SalesForce’s ExactTarget is a leading provider of cross-channel interactive marketing solutions. It follow that the company’s blog is a must-read for digital marketers, with articles ranging from poignant industry examples to cross-channel marketing strategy.
Online research institute MarketingSherpa is a trove of digital marketing data, packed with articles, videos, webinars, free reports, six (!) newsletters, and more. Head to the Sherpa Blog for observations and reporting on email marketing, B2B marketing, inbound marketing, copywriting, marketing law, entertainment and sports marketing, and much more.
Social Media Today is an independent, online community for professionals in PR, marketing, and advertising. If you believe the best knowledge comes from your industry peers, this is your go-to online marketing resource destination. The site is prolific, publishing upwards of 10 blog posts per day, seven days a week, in addition to running an inventive Social Business Book Club and webcasts. The comments on Social Media Today articles are often as interesting as the articles themselves.
The man who created the Periodic Table of Google Analytics is a valuable source for marketing knowledge that spans the alphabet: blogging and brand marketing to technology, training, and WordPress.
TrendSpottr is a predictive analytics service that identifies trending information from Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other data streams. It’s a great site to bookmark if you’re in search of timely blog topics, tweets, or IRL discussion points. You can search for any content bucket to see what’s trending in that realm, and then read and share directly from TrendSpottr or click over to the original source.
The author of seminal works like Linchpin, Permission Marketing, and Purple Cow lets readers inside his head for free on his blog. Godin’s blog posts are succinct, always good for an “aha!” moment, and often inspiring.
Business analytics platform KISSMetrics has a great online marketing blog heavy on the helpful how-to’s (“How to Get Your Keyword Data from Google Analytics,” “How to Make Your Website More Click-Worthy.”).
Any resources you’d add to this list?