In B2B, what you know is what drives your business forward. If you’re in tech, it’s what you understand about tech; if you’re in medicine, it’s the latest in medicine.
If you’re in marketing, it’s what you know about marketing to businesses that sell to businesses.
And that’s information that changes quickly, changes dramatically, and changes without warning. It’s information that moves on social media and through networks.
That’s just the nature of B2B, of marketing in general, and of what happens when businesses grow the way they do. It’s exciting. It’s difficult to keep up with. It’s hard to know what you don’t know.
Fortunately, to learn what you don’t know there’s always courses.
And here are 12 of the best to get you started (and no: we’re not affiliated with these. We’re just a fan).
Are B2B Marketing courses still important in 2024?
Definitely.
Even if you’re prepared to put your money where your business is and attend every networking event, there’s going to be information you miss out on, or lessons learned that change as soon as you get the hang of it. A B2B marketing course fills in the gaps you don’t know of, letting you bridge the information barrier between what you understand and what you don’t.
Who are B2B marketing courses even for?
Everyone who wants to learn a little more about B2B.
Will they make you an expert in B2B communications? Sure, if you take enough of them – but if you don’t want to take too many courses, at least they can teach you what the best-in-class looks like across the industry.
I don’t have time to take courses, I just want better B2B for my business.
That’s fair. And to that, we say this:
B2B marketing is an industry that relies on personal connection. Our advice to you if you don’t want to do your own B2B – find a business you can have a conversation with, a business who’ll tell you the way it is, and a business who’ll push back against your ideas if they don’t agree that they’re the most effective.
You want better B2B. That means talking to people who understand your business, and want the best for you.
General B2B Marketing courses
1. LinkedIn B2B Marketing
Bite-sized lessons on everything from writing a B2B marketing plan to working out a pricing strategy, in LinkedIn’s clean-cut video format. Courses are led by experts in their field and can be accessed from anywhere, and on pretty much any device. If you’re already familiar with LinkedIn, this would be our bet to start off with.
2. Account-Based Marketing 2022
Udemy has a lot of B2B marketing courses, but this one is one of the best-reviewed and the most comprehensive. If you’re looking to refine your account-based marketing strategy and to learn how to apply it to real-life cases, this course can teach you the basics and the steps to take to keep building on what you’ve learned. Buying the course grants you lifetime access, and if you’re not sold on the content, you can get your money back in 30 days with no hassle.
3. International B2B Marketing
If you’re looking to take your business operations international, this course can definitely help put you on the right path to cross-country marketing. Taught by Dae Ryun Chang, a professor of Marketing at Yonsei University in Korea, it’s one of the highest-rated courses on Coursera for good reason: the information you can get from it is invaluable. It’s 100% online, and you can take your time to complete it, so if you’re worried about not having enough time to finish up your course: don’t be.
Inbound B2B Marketing courses
4. Inbound Marketing Certification
Hubspot is an unmatched resource for any marketer: not only do they have a finger on the pulse of what’s happening in marketing, they also provide some very valuable resources from all over the internet, all for marketers of varying experiences. Their Hubspot Academy has dozens of courses, certified and not, that are taught by experts in their field and can be taken over the course of a few lunchbreaks – and it’s free.
5. ImpactPlus Inbound Marketing Course
Run by inbound marketing experts Impact, what makes these courses unique is how easy it is to pick and choose which units you want to focus on: while they’re available as a complete learning experience, it’s up to you to decide if you want to undertake each and every lesson. There’s a lot of information packed into them, so you won’t be learning strictly inbound marketing, but that works out for the better: everything in marketing is interconnected, and the sooner you learn to see where they link, the easier it is to make connections that help your business grow.
Google Analytics B2B Marketing courses
6. Google Analytics Academy
The best way to learn about Google Analytics is from the experts: Google themselves. Their Analytics Academy course walks you through everything from the first steps to take to start measuring your results to how to use Google Tag Manager and Data Studio. At the moment, the courses they have available are still based on Universal Analytics, which will stop processing data on July 1, but there is an outbound link that can take you to their free courses on Google Analytics 4, the successor to Universal Analytics.
If you’re not sure why you need to know about Google Analytics, we’ve written a little about it here.
There are other Google Analytics courses: at Udemy, Coursera, and LinkedIn, all of which are great if you prefer to go outside of the Googlesphere. However, for the most detailed understanding of Google Analytics, it’s hard to triumph over the company that created it.
Social Media B2B Marketing courses
Caveat: social media marketing for B2B can tend to be a lot more trial and error than the previous categories we’ve spoken about. If you know your audience, you know what your audience wants to see, and you know how to talk to them, chances are that these courses can only really help you with understanding how to best leverage the platform you’re using. This doesn’t mean that you’re wasting your time; far from it. Understanding the platform can go a long way to making sure your message gets through.
7. LinkedIn Marketing, Lead Generation & B2B Sales for LinkedIn
This is one of the most subscribed courses at Udemy, and with good reason: LinkedIn is a booming platform for B2B marketing, and can really help you connect with your audience, if your audience is primarily on LinkedIn. For B2B marketing agencies specifically: your audience is on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is also an underrated platform, especially for B2B, which gives you a little bit of an advantage when it comes to connecting with the kind of people who can bring in new business for your company.
8. Grow and Convert’s Content Marketing Course
Social media is content. Good content on social media travels. Content that travels brings business back to you.
The trick, then, is to make sure that all your content is good content – and to do that, you need to know what to talk about. Grow and Convert’s marketing course walks you through it all: from topics to choose to how to write your content in a way that reads well and ranks even better, and how to plan out your content to make sure that you’re never caught without something to talk about.
9. Ahref’s Blogging for Business
A blog can do a lot for you – but it’s true that you can have a hard road ahead of you to get that blog off the ground. Ahrefs has a free course that can simplify the road for you.
In 40 lessons, Ahrefs goes through the fundamentals of a blog, the way you can grow your blog, and how to then maintain and boost that growth. It’s one of the best resources online for blogging that demystifies and debunks old blogging practices that no longer work, such as keyword stuffing and writing blogs intended for machines instead of human readers, and it’s a course anyone struggling with their content should keep on the backburner for when they have the time to take it.
SEO B2B Marketing courses
10. SEO for beginners
Even if you’re not a beginner, you can benefit from refreshing your memory with Yoast’s SEO course. SEO can be confusing, and it definitely impacts a lot of the way we form content today, so understanding it is a must for any business regardless of whether they’re B2B or B2C. Yoast’s free course goes through the technicalities of SEO with a fine-toothed comb and explains the concepts using easy to understand language and ideas – and they build on it in follow up courses that delve deeper into how to apply SEO for different purposes.
Additionally, the Yoast SEO academy, of which this course forms a part, also has a practical element and templates that are free to use for all students.
11. On-Page and Technical SEO Course
Semrush is a world-class authority on SEO, and any SEO course in their academy is worth taking – however, if you’re specifically interested in how to boost your website and optimise your business online, their on-page and technical SEO course will teach you everything you need to know. It’s free to enroll, and relatively ‘short’, so it does need a basic understanding of SEO, but if you’re a content creator or an SEO specialist, this course can definitely go a long way towards helping you refine your SEO skills.
And you can even get certified by Semrush.
12. SEO Training Masterclass: Beginner SEO to Advanced SEO
With over 70,000 students enrolled, this SEO training course consistently rates as one of the best SEO resources available on the internet – and while it is a paid course, it covers a lot of information all in one place. From WordPress SEO to link building SEO, if you’re truly a beginner and you want to get better faster, and learn how to take your SEO to the next level, this is the course we’d recommend. It evolves with the best-practice SEO methods, so even if you might have finished it already, we recommend keeping an eye on future updates.
Are B2B marketing courses worth it?
Absolutely.
B2B marketing courses aren’t going to make you a good B2B marketer – that’s going to be up to you. What these courses do provide is knowledge, and lots of it: knowledge about how to generate leads, knowledge about which social media platforms to pay attention to, knowledge about content, knowledge about SEO, knowledge about growth. What you choose to do with the information afterwards will determine if it’s worth it for you.
We think they are.
B2B marketing is a dense field, and it keeps growing. Having a little help along the way to understand the trickier parts of an industry that keeps changing faster than most can keep up with is an excellent way to make sure you’re not left behind, and that you know what’s going on. Information, especially in B2B, is powerful – and it can make a business.
That said, you don’t need to take the courses if you don’t have the time or you don’t want to.
If all you’re looking for is a B2B marketing agency to do the hard parts for you, that works too.
