It’s only been about ten years since businesses started investing in eLearning, but the industry is well on its way to transforming education. Growing at an annual rate of 7.5%, the eLearning market is expected to reach $275 billion by 2020.
Thanks to the flexibility, accessibility, and effectiveness of their courses and programs, eLearning platforms are attracting more users than ever before. Udemy has 25 million paying students and over 80,000 courses, while Skillshare boasts 4 million paying students and 22,000 courses. New eLearning platforms are cropping up all the time, including LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda), Udacity, and Coursera, all of which have a B2B focus.
Digital Marketing Skills on Demand
Most companies are well aware that in order to build strong teams and retain top talent, continuing education is vital. At the same time, their employees are eager to remain competent in core skills, and compete with peers by acquiring new ones.
But in the digital marketing space, many key skills aren’t offered by traditional universities. That leaves marketing professionals to seek out alternatives that provide quality content and an engaging experience while also fitting into their busy working lives.
These kinds of courses range from MediaMath’s New Marketing Institute (NMI), which now uses eLearning platform Grovo, to certifications like Google’s IT Support Professional Certificate offered through Coursera, and the IAB Digital Media Planning and Buying Certification. Recently, GroundTruth’s Mobile Certification Program, which trains marketers in the art and science of mobile location targeting, was included in IAB’s recertification program. In an industry like digital advertising, which evolves at an incredibly rapid pace, recertification is critical to ensuring a company’s employees are familiar with the latest best practices and aware of up-and-coming industry trends.
In an industry like digital advertising, which evolves at an incredibly rapid pace, recertification is critical to ensuring a company’s employees are familiar with the latest best practices and aware of up-and-coming industry trends.
Broadcast Publishers Value eLearning Tools
It isn’t just digital agencies and tech companies that are investing in this form of education, though; traditional broadcast media companies are transitioning to eLearning as well. According to the Executive Director, Sales Development at one leading media publishing company, it’s become an important part of the training process.
“We have many customers who want us to manage both their traditional media and their digital media investments,” the media exec explained, “therefore it is imperative that our account managers be comfortable with every element of the solutions that they propose, and also cognizant of how they best work together. eLearning helps us achieve this at scale.” Certification, meanwhile, serves as “third-party confirmation that our salespeople and managers have invested the time and made the effort to become industry-standard digital media experts.”
Media attribution and analytics are currently among this company’s most popular eLearning topics, and the training resources offered by their company’s partners — which include GroundTruth — are a “time-saving complement to our internal efforts.”
Another advantage of eLearning is that the content is always fresh. Updates to digital products and services are so common that by the time traditional digital media training content makes it to users it’s often out of date. When that content is delivered through an online training platform, companies can easily make the necessary updates to ensure training modules are always relevant, making partner offerings much more valuable to publishers.
Given the importance of digital media education, it makes sense to leverage the power and convenience of eLearning to enhance the talent on your digital marketing team. Here’s a closer look at how GroundTruth can help your account managers hone their mobile and location targeting skills.
