Top 5 Free Courses For Small Business Owners To Grow Their Business

1. Branding yourself in the middle of the competition

When creating a brand or business that fills a hole in the market like your business, a challenge you could face is defining your initial customer and online persona. Understanding who your brand or business is will help you establish yourself, and if done correctly, it can make you stand out amongst all your possible competitors.

Branding in its beginning stage involves creating something as simple as a name and picking the correct font of the letters that match your idea and persona for the brand. The course that can help you make sure all the essential ideas are being put across properly is provided by Google’s Digital Garage. 

This short course brings forward the importance of storytelling in a business, by using simple yet effective tools and tips that help you maintain a consistent brand image. The course is taught via short, self-explanatory videos and then followed by short tests to make sure you are applying the knowledge currently.

2. How to market your business digitally

Marketing is a big part of all small businesses! A good marketing plan and strategy will help you stand out from your competitors. Luckily for you, there are a variety of free courses for digital marketing starting straight from the fundamentals and guiding you through a series of examples/videos and questionnaires so it can best teach you to take your business/career online!

Google is one of the platforms that have free digitally accessible courses. The one we will be talking about in particular is the “Fundamentals of Digital Marketing: Learn the fundamentals of digital marketing to help your business or career.”.

This specific course covers all essential aspects of taking your business online and helps bring to your attention all elements of an online business like add creation, web layout and SEO for your specific business. 

Once you cover 1 module, you will have a small quiz to make users understand all that was taught, and at the end of the course, you will have a new certificate to add to your portfolio if needed!

3. How to upgrade your digital content marketing skills

Content is an integral part of a small business. The fundamental drive for customers or consumers is how swiftly a company will steal and maintain their attention. Providing the correct content to communicate with your audience will better your chances of securing a successful transaction and having future recurring customers.

Creating the perfect brainstorming and layout plan of content should become a priority, so you do not miss any opportunity to divulge your product. To learn and help you with this aspect of your business, you can complete this free course provided by Hubspot!

Their modules are practical and do not take a long time out of your busy schedule since you could fit a couple of hours a day to complete it thoroughly.

In a nutshell, the course follows the same narrative as many other courses of having video explanation and analysis to put the information across and once all modules have been studied and you have quizzed yourself on each of them, your knowledge will be tested on a one-hour exam.

The course focuses on helping you prepare long term content all the way to promoting and analysing your content to ensure you are getting the full potential of your product across!

4. Discover ways to attract your consumer

Using surveys and questionnaires can sometimes help to understand how your consumer acts and how he thinks, but another approach could be to try and imagine your consumer or customer’s lifestyle, all the way to what food he would enjoy or what scent catches their attention.

Doing this will allow you to appeal best to them and create a good understanding of what future products would be best accepted!

Businesses may seem like mind readers at certain moments because they understand who they are persuading and know what their consumer wants before any other competitor. The digital provided course to help you build on that part of your business is available through HubSpot as well!

This particular free course is built around helping you improve your web search optimization and ensuring that your content is being correctly marketed to your intended consumers.

Between the course, we have talked about before this is turned to a more technical aspect of your business on how to ensure your product or service is being sold correctly and how correctly communicate with them.

Sales, the hardest element to achieve for many small businesses. 

All things take an initial investment which can sometimes be accessible until you have to study how to maintain the profit while not compromising your ideals and initial quality.

Some brands, as they grow, they have to re-evaluate their finances and then end up cutting back on quality which can be fatal to a business. During this last part of the blog, we will tackle the issue that causes this business downfall and help you so it doesn’t affect you! 

Here's the course that can help you with securing a good growth for your small business! The course, named “Build a sales strategy for your freelance business” is provided by Google in partnership with Openclassroom. It covers topics such as freelance business proposals and it focuses on how to master a sales cycle.

As seen before in other courses we can notice the abundance of information being delivered via short videos and examples regarding businesses. Your small business would benefit from this course since it really takes you to review how you are dealing with sales and how to structure your strategy to ensure your success.

Conclusion

After looking through these 5 courses for your small business, we hope you can grow and build your brand.

We recommend you put some time aside to go through these courses as in the long term they will prove to be useful for your brand’s growth!

In the meantime, make sure to drop by Rural Handmade to help you take the next step in your business!

We will provide you with handmade eco-friendly, sustainable products so that you can thrive without negatively affecting the environment around you!

Contact us to find out more!