13 FREE Digital Marketing Courses in Singapore (Thanks, SkillsFuture!)

How Can Digital Marketing Help Your Freelance Business?

When it comes to building a business, “digital marketing” is one of those things you’ll hear being casually tossed about nowadays.

As fancy as it may sound, digital marketing simply means marketing your business on digital media – primarily via the Internet.

But it’s not just a fancy buzzword. Bizdev-ing with digital marketing can help you:

1. Gain exposure and be seen by potential clients. There’s no point having the best skills on the planet if no one knows that you exist and are available for hiring.
2. Get a convenient platform for featuring your expertise. Showing off your portfolio can be as simple as sending over a link to your site, or your Instagram handle.
3. Build your brand. The Internet is a really noisy place, with everyone trying to get everyone else’s attention. You’ll need to implement some strategies to stand out.
4. Save costs on being seen. Running ads online can be way cheaper than advertising yourself on physical media such as billboards, or in newspapers. You can also have greater control over who sees your ads, so you don’t waste money showing ads to people not interested in what you offer.

There’s a whole range of digital marketing courses available on the SkillsFuture website. I’ve chosen 13 courses that focus on:

• General digital marketing methods (so you get an overview of the whole field)
• Search engine marketing
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing

(In case you haven’t heard, SkillsFuture is an initiative by the Singapore government to help citizens continuously upgrade their skills.)

The courses I’ve picked out also cost less than $500 (excluding GST and any available subsidies), so they’ll be fully covered by your SkillsFuture credits. Check out this guide if you aren’t sure how to claim your SkillsFuture credits.

As of 1 Nov 2018, these courses are available for registration. Check the SkillsFuture website for the most updated list.

13 Digital Marketing Courses That are 100% SkillsFuture-Claimable (and Therefore, Free!!)

Contents menu

• General digital marketing methods courses
  1. Digital Marketing Strategy Course by Equinet Academy
  2. Essentials of Digital Marketing by Singapore Polytechnic
  3. Digital Marketing Strategy & Google Analytics for Beginners by Sky Digital Agency
  4. How to Build a Successful Business Through Digital Marketing and E-Commerce by Tertiary Infotech
• Search engine marketing courses
  5. Search Engine Optimisation and Google AdWords by VTeach
  6. SEO Marketing Course by Impossible Marketing Services
  7. Successful Web Writing by EON Consulting & Training
• Social media marketing courses
  8. Facebook Marketing Course by Impossible Marketing Services
  9. Instagram Marketing and Advertising for Beginners by Sky Digital Agency
  10. The Ultimate YouTube Course (YouTube Insider Tips) by Udemy
  11. LinkedIn for Business Essential Training by Tertiary Infotech
• Email marketing courses
  12. MailChimp Email Marketing for Beginners by Sky Digital Agency
• Bonus: Google Analytics course
  13. Full Google Analytics Training by Tertiary Infotech

General digital marketing methods courses

If you’re an absolute beginner to digital marketing, consider signing up for one of these.

These courses give a broad overview of the various digital marketing disciplines so you have a rough idea of what this whole thing is about.

After that, you’ll be able to decide which methods you’d like to use for your freelance business – be it search engine marketing, social media marketing and so on.

1. Digital Marketing Strategy Course by Equinet Academy

Equinet Academy specialises in courses on digital marketing and web design. It has taught over 3,000 people since it opened its doors in 2013, is good at what it does – and has the testimonials to prove it.

While Equinet Academy runs a whole range of digital marketing courses, its Digital Marketing Strategy Course is aimed at people completely new to digital marketing.

This course is neatly broken down into 7 different modules, with plenty of practical and group activities to get your brain juices flowing.

After completing the course, you’ll get:

• A certificate of completion
• Lifetime access to the updated online course materials
• After-training support so you can get help implementing what you’ve learnt to your business

Sign-ups for the course is capped at 20. It seems that this course is quite popular, because previous runs of it have been fully subscribed. But this course is frequently conducted at around once or twice each month, so not to worry if you’ve missed out on a particular run!

Check out Digital Marketing Strategy Course on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Equinet Academy’s website. (See e.g. their handy PDF brochure which you can download to read offline.

You can check out a sample of the courseware too – but only if you provide them with your email address. Yep, they clearly know their digital marketing stuff 😏)

2. Essentials of Digital Marketing by Singapore Polytechnic

Being the first polytechnic in Singapore, Singapore Polytechnic has been producing business graduates since its inception in 1954. So it’s no surprise they’ve got the expertise – and the connections – to impart digital marketing skillz to students of all ages.

Singapore Polytechnic’s SkillsFuture-approved digital marketing course, Essentials of Digital Marketing, is conducted over 1.5 days. The first day is a workshop, while the half-day is a seminar.

If you’re the kind who prefers to just sit back and listen to lectures on the subject material, this course may not be for you. Expect to exercise your brain through activities such as group discussions, brainstorming, problem-solving, and even role-play.

You will also get to hear from digital marketing practitioners and learn their secret sauce to running successful digital marketing campaigns.

After completing Essentials of Digital Marketing, you’ll get:

• A Certificate of Attendance
• A handy toolkit of templates, checklists and guides to help you build and run your own digital marketing strategies

Check out Essentials of Digital Marketing on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Singapore Polytechnic’s website.

3. Digital Marketing Strategy & Google Analytics for Beginners by Sky Digital Agency

Sky Digital Agency is an agency offering digital marketing services. However, they also conduct digital marketing courses to anyone who wants to DIY instead of outsourcing the work.

Compared to other general digital marketing courses, Sky Digital Agency’s Digital Marketing Strategy & Google Analytics for Beginners doesn’t go so much into the different digital marketing methods out there.

Instead, after covering general digital marketing strategy, this course then teaches participants how to use Google Analytics. (Google Analytics is a web analytics service by Google for tracking and analysing website traffic.)

Google Analytics can be really powerful when used properly, and going for Digital Marketing Strategy & Google Analytics for Beginners might be a good opportunity to get a crash course on this feature-packed tool.

To attend this course, you’ll need to bring your own laptop. To get the most out of this course, you should also already have a website installed with Google Analytics.

Check out Digital Marketing Strategy & Google Analytics for Beginners on SkillsFuture here. You may also view Sky Digital Agency’s course offerings here.

(If you’re keen to take a course on just Google Analytics, skip to #13 in this guide.)

4. How to Build a Successful Business Through Digital Marketing and E-Commerce by Tertiary Infotech

Tertiary Infotech conducts a whole range of IT courses for adults and children alike. If you’re looking to brush up your knowledge of machine learning, Raspberry Pi, Adobe CC or even business administration, Tertiary Infotech is the one-stop course provider that you should consider.

Their How to Build a Successful Business Through Digital Marketing and E-Commerce is a 1-day crash course on digital marketing and e-commerce strategies. You may find the e-commerce aspect of this workshop useful if you have products to sell online (e.g. prints), apart from your freelance services.

It doesn’t seem that this course covers search engine marketing in much detail. So if you want to learn more about that, you might have to look elsewhere.

But one topic which this course does cover (and which the other courses on this list don’t) is SMS marketing strategies. Yep, “SMS” as in that text message service you use when you don’t want to add someone’s phone number to your WhatsApp.

SMS marketing could be something worth looking into because it isn’t so widely used here anymore. As a result, you may be able to get people’s attention more easily by dropping them a quick text (or WhatsApp message).

Check out How to Build a Successful Business Through Digital Marketing and E-Commerce on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Tertiary Infotech’s website.

Search engine marketing courses

(This section uses quite a bit of jargon. Be warned!)

Search engine marketing (SEM) is my personal favourite digital marketing method.

In a nutshell, it’s all about making your webpages more visible in search engine result pages (SERPs).

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a big part of SEM. It involves structuring your webpage content in a way that helps search engine bots decide how high your webpages should be ranked in the SERPs.

You can also buy ads on certain keywords to get your webpages to the top of the SERPs.

Using SEM may help you get clients who don’t have any existing contacts for freelancers, and try to Google someone up. Because if they come across your website via a Google search, they may click through to check out your portfolio.

And if they like your work, they may request to book your services. BOOYAH!

If you’re looking to learn the tricks for “hacking” the search rankings, check out these search engine marketing courses.

5. Search Engine Optimisation and Google AdWords by VTeach

VTeach offers courses for working professionals looking to stay ahead of the game.

You can brush up your skills in Microsoft Office (3 levels of course difficulty available), or accounting software like Xero and MYOB. Or if you’re looking to improve your soft skills, VTeach also offers courses in leadership and resume writing.

VTeach’s Search Engine Optimisation and Google AdWords course is taught over 2 days, covering all the basics you’ll need to get started with SEO. Such as:

• Keyword research: researching what the common search queries are
• On-page SEO: SEO strategies carried out on your webpages themselves
• Off-page SEO: SEO strategies carried out outside of your webpages
• Tracking: Tracking how high your webpages rank for various keywords

You’ll also learn how to use Google AdWords to buy ads on Google’s SERPs. If you’re just starting out you may not want to pump money into ads at the moment, but it’s good knowledge for future reference.

Upon completion of the course, you’ll receive a Certificate of Completion. VTeach also offers a free one-time refresher, which will be useful if you need to clarify certain things that were covered later on.

Finally, group discounts for sign-ups are available. So if you can, grab a few friends to join you for the course!

Check out Search Engine Optimisation and Google AdWords on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on VTeach’s website.

6. SEO Marketing Course by Impossible Marketing Services

Impossible Marketing has an interesting backstory.

Once upon a time there was an entrepreneur, Alan Koh, whose previous 11 businesses failed due to difficulty in attracting customers. And so on his 12th try, Alan started Impossible Marketing to offer SEO and SEM services for businesses facing the same problem.

The business took off, and Impossible Marketing has since branched out into conducting digital marketing courses. Its introductory SEM course, SEO Marketing Course, promises participants (among other things):

• Hands-on training on SEO
• A step-by-step guide for optimising their websites
• 6-months post-course email support

And unlike VTeach’s SEO course (see #5 above), Impossible Marketing Services’ SEO course also covers:

• WordPress plugins for SEO. This will be useful if your website runs WordPress, one of the most popular content management systems for websites; and
• Google Search Console (previously known as Google Webmaster Tools). This service helps you check your website’s indexing status (i.e. how many of your webpages have been recorded in Google’s webpage directory).

Check out SEO Marketing Course on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Impossible Marketing’s website. (I’m resisting the urge to make a lame pun using the word “impossible” here)

7. Successful Web Writing by EON Consulting & Training

Before you check – yes, you’re still in the SEM courses section of this guide on SkillsFuture-claimable digital marketing courses. What does web writing (i.e. writing for the web) have to do with SEM?

Answer: a lot.

While you have to write content with search engines in mind, don’t forget that ultimately, you’re writing for people too.

If your visitors have a tough time reading and understanding what you’re trying to say, you won’t be providing much value to them.

Also, these visitors aren’t going to spend a lot of time on your webpage. From an SEO point of view, this sends a signal to Google that your content isn’t that useful.

As a result, your webpage’s SERP ranking takes a hit. That isn’t something you’ll want to happen.

So this is where being able to write clearly and effectively for the web is very important. If this is something you struggle with, consider Successful Web Writing by EON Consulting & Training.

EON Consulting & Training has had over 20 years of experience providing human capital consulting and training services to organisations in Singapore, so you know you’re in good hands.

Check out Successful Web Writing on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on EON Consulting & Training’s website.

Social media marketing courses

Social media. Love it or hate it, you can’t ignore it.

With so many people on at least one social media platform today, putting yourself out there on social media is a great way for people to discover you and your services.

Having a presence on social media will also invite people to interact with you. This can come in the form of commenting on your latest post, or sharing it on their feed.

Also, social media isn’t called “social” for nothing! This is your chance to engage with your audience in a convenient and casual manner.

Building relationships with your fans is always a good idea, even if they currently don’t need your services. Because if they do, and you have good rapport with them, you can bet that they’ll hit you up.

And on that topic – being on social media allows people to contact you easily. Nowadays if someone wants to book you, they don’t need to have your phone number. Or even your email address! They just need to open their social media app and shoot you a PM.

The courses I’ve chosen for this section each focus on marketing yourself in a specific social media platform. Choose the social media platform(s) that most of your target audience hangs out at.

8. Facebook Marketing Course by Impossible Marketing Services

Facebook isn’t as popular as it once was, but it’s still a behemoth in the social media world. If you only have the resources to focus on doing 1 social media platform well, Facebook is a safe bet.

But running a Facebook page for business isn’t as easy as how you would share that funniest meme video you just came across with your Facebook friends.

You’ll need to identify your target audience, and what Facebook content to create so your followers will remember you the next time they need your services.

To this end, Impossible Marketing Services’ Facebook Marketing Course walks you through the process of:

• Setting up your business Facebook page (do you know which page is right for your business?)
• Determining your target audience
• Creating content for your page (including where to get your images from), and
• Running Facebook ads to generate even more awareness of your services online

And of course, you’ll learn how to analyse the stats of your posts and ads to see how you can improve on these in the future.

Check out Facebook Marketing Course on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Impossible Marketing’s website.

9. Instagram Marketing and Advertising for Beginners by Sky Digital Agency

Instagram is the social media platform of choice for millennials. Its focus on story-telling through aesthetic photo and videos makes it ideal for showing off your brand in a visually-compelling way. How?

• You can post your work. If you’re a freelance photographer or videographer, you’ve probably taken many photos and/or videos ready to be Instagrammed (with your clients’ permission as required, of course).
• Alternatively, your content can be photos/videos of you at work. For example, freelance emcees can post photos themselves hosting an event.

And even if you don’t have such photos/videos, you can create eye-catching graphics (Photoshop/Illustrator expertise not required) to stop your followers mid-scroll and invite them to interact with your posts.

In Sky Digital Agency’s Instagram Marketing and Advertising for Beginners course, you’ll learn new skills in areas such as:

• Doing up your Instagram profile
• Designing graphics using free icons and images
• Producing videos with free video apps
• Using hashtags on your posts for better discoverability
• Advertising on Instagram

To attend the course, you’ll need to have a personal Instagram account, and be familiar with posting photos and videos on it.

If you don’t already have one, there’s no time better than now to join this hip and trendy platform!

Check out Instagram Marketing and Advertising for Beginners on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Sky Digital Agency’s website.

10. The Ultimate YouTube Course (YouTube Insider Tips) by Udemy

Bet you weren’t expecting to see YouTube in this list of social media marketing courses!

But yes, YouTube is a social media site. And if used properly, it can help you showcase your expertise to people hungry for information.

No, you don’t do this through uploading videos of your cat Sparky. I’m talking about tutorial and explainer videos.

People are increasingly turning to watching videos when they want to learn something. Why plough through paragraphs of text when you can have a real person explain or demo stuff to you? Videos can make the learning process so much faster.

At this point, you might be wondering:

“But how am I going to get clients if I’m teaching people how to do what I do?”

If so, you don’t need to worry about that.

People are busy. Not everyone is going to have the time to slowly figure out how to do something themselves. They may just pay money to get someone else (hopefully you) to do it for them.

So the videos you put out help to show that you know your stuff. And this will help convince potential clients to hire you.

And what better way to learn about YouTube marketing than through…a video course? 😉

In The Ultimate YouTube Course (YouTube Insider Tips) by online course provider Udemy (and taught by a US university media professor), you’ll learn how to build a YouTube audience, through:

• Getting traffic to your YouTube channel
• Helping people discover your channel more easily
• Increasing user engagement with your YouTube videos

Check out The Ultimate YouTube Course (YouTube Insider Tips) on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Udemy’s website.

11. LinkedIn for Business Essential Training by Tertiary Infotech

To round off the section on social media marketing, here’s LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is quite underrated. Many people dismiss it, thinking:

“Linkedin is for official business purposes. Boring”

But – isn’t it precisely because LinkedIn is a social media platform for business, that you should be using it to get, well…business?

With LinkedIn, you’ll be able to reach out to organisations and pitch for their business. And you’ll know whether the people you’re contacting are from the organisations you’re eyeing, because they’ll tell you themselves in their bio – “Marketing Director for Big Name Company” or “Producer at New Media Agency”.

If you aren’t already connected to the person you want to contact, you can find someone in your network who already is, and request for an introduction to them.

And after you’ve completed a project for a client, you can ask them to leave a testimonial on your LinkedIn profile. This will help increase the confidence of potential clients in your abilities and skills!

Tertiary Infotech is offering a LinkedIn for Business Essential Training course that will help you leverage on LinkedIn in areas such as:

• Building a great LinkedIn profile
• Improving your Social Selling Index score (a measurement of how well you’re selling yourself on LinkedIn)
• Deciding what content to post on LinkedIn, and how often
• Searching for potential clients to reach out to on LinkedIn

Check out LinkedIn for Business Essential Training on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Tertiary Infotech’s website.

Email marketing courses

“Email? Who uses email nowadays?”

You’ll be surprised.

Email isn’t dead – in fact, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways of building a loyal audience of fans whom you can promote your products and services to.

Here’s how email marketing works, in a nutshell:

• You set up forms on your website to get visitors’ email addresses. Often, you’ll sweeten the deal by offering a freebie (e-book, checklist, video etc.) in exchange for their email address.
• As you grow your email list, you can segment subscribers based on their interests. So if for example someone signed up to get free greeting card templates, you know that they’re interested in greeting card designs and not, say, brochure designs.
• You then regularly send emails to your subscribers, offering them updates on your business, or promotions, or just tips and tricks which they might find useful.
• You can also track the performance of your emails – how many times they’ve been opened, by whom, and how many people clicked the links in your emails.
• And always, keep building a good relationship with your subscribers. So that when they need your services, you might just get an (what else?) email from them saying “Hey, I’m interested to have you shoot my wedding…”

While there are many email marketing apps out there, I’m only going to recommend one for people who are just starting out. Here it is + a corresponding course for it:

12. MailChimp Email Marketing for Beginners by Sky Digital Agency

Subscribe to enough email newsletters and you may start noticing a monkey logo at the bottom of some of them.

This monkey logo belongs to MailChimp, one of the most popular email marketing apps for businesses.

Its popularity is undoubtedly partly due to its free plan, making it ideal for businesses who want to keep costs low.

MailChimp’s clean interface also makes setting up and running email campaigns a breeze.

Sky Digital Agency’s MailChimp Email Marketing for Beginners course will help you get started on using MailChimp to grow your email subscriber base, through covering topics such as:

• Building forms in MailChimp
• Embedding your forms in your website
• Writing effective emails that your audience will read and take action on
• Scheduling and re-sending your emails

Check out MailChimp Email Marketing for Beginners on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Sky Digital Agency’s website.

Bonus: Google Analytics course

We’re not quite done yet! Here’s a bonus course for learning how to track and analyse your website traffic using Google Analytics.

This is an important step in digital marketing. After all, there isn’t much point trying to get more eyeballs on your website if you don’t know how effective your strategies have been afterwards:

13. Full Google Analytics Training by Tertiary Infotech

If you’re keen to learn how to use Google Analytics to:

• Keeping track of your website visits count,
• How you’ve been getting such traffic, and
• The profiles of your visitors,

then consider this 2-day Full Google Analytics Training Course by Tertiary Infotech.

This course first goes through the very basics, starting from installing Google Analytics on your website.

It then transitions to the more advanced stuff, such as segmenting and filtering your data to get more detailed insights on your website visitors.

You’ll also learn how to use Google Tag Manager to insert snippets of code into your website which activate only in certain situations (e.g. on certain pages, or when certain buttons are clicked) for even more advanced tracking.

Full Google Analytics Training appears to be catered slightly more to people with WordPress websites, as it covers how to use the Google Analytics WordPress plugin.

But regardless of whether you’re a WordPress user, this course on Google Analytics will be valuable for you if you want to work towards mastering this very powerful tool.

Check out Full Google Analytics Training on SkillsFuture here. More information on the course is also available on Tertiary Infotech’s website.

It’s Time to Level Up Your Digital Marketing Skills

So there you have it. 13 digital marketing courses in Singapore that are 100%-claimable from SkillsFuture.

These courses span across various disciplines in digital marketing:

• Search engine marketing
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing

I’ve also explained how each of these disciplines work and how they can help bring in more traffic (and accordingly, paid work) for your business.

You may have noticed that the digital marketing courses mentioned in this guide are relatively short, being just 1 or 2 days long.

If you’re keen to spend more time gaining deeper insights into a specific digital marketing method, there may be other courses (on SkillsFuture or otherwise) that cover the subject in greater detail.

Of course, you’ll have to be prepared to pay more for these courses – and possibly out of your own pocket too.

Here’s a tip: before you start reaching for your wallet for such course fees, try to find and tap on other funding sources.

For example if you’re a media freelancer, you may find my guide to skills upgrading subsidies for media freelancers handy.

But for now, it’s time to stop reading, and to start doing.

Go pick a digital marketing course and sign yourself up for it! Have fun!

Have you ever attended a digital marketing course? Would you recommend it? Leave a comment!