How Long is a Digital Marketing Course?

If you are thinking of enrolling in a digital marketing course in the Philippines, one of your concerns is probably the digital marketing course duration. There are online-only courses, which vary widely in terms of length. To compare similar digital marketing courses, let’s take a look only at those that have a live training component to them.

How long will it take to learn digital marketing?

Digital marketing is a very broad topic and encompasses several areas, including:

• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Pay per click (PPC) or paid search
• Display advertising
• Video marketing
• Email marketing
• Website optimization
• Web analytics
• Digital strategy

Each area requires hours of training just to get a strong foundation. As digital marketing is always evolving, you also need to update your knowledge and skills. In other words, you can never really stop learning digital marketing.

What’s the minimum digital marketing course duration?

However, to establish a strong foundation in digital marketing that enables you to plan, run, and optimize digital marketing campaigns, it should take at least 30 hours of training to cover all the basics, including setting up accounts and campaigns as well as best practices to consider.

Anything less than 30 hours is not enough to get the knowledge and skills you need to get started in digital marketing. Thirty hours is the bare minimum for a digital marketing course duration.

Now, you need to build on that by reading and watching your digital marketing training materials over and over, trying out digital marketing tools first-hand to get real-world experience, and reviewing for your certification exam, if there is one.

All the self-study and practice require many more hours, perhaps another 30 hours, at least. But this is the best way to learn digital marketing. You study the concepts, learn best practices, watch walkthrough videos, do hands-on exercises, take assessments, and work on actual campaigns.

How many months does it take to complete a digital marketing course?

There are currently no college courses in digital marketing available in the Philippines. There are only marketing courses that have a subject or elective in digital marketing. Obviously, this is not enough to learn digital marketing. A couple of colleges and a few business graduate schools offer a certificate program in digital marketing, not a college diploma or post-graduate diploma, as part of their continuing education program. And there are training providers that run live training programs in digital marketing.

Here’s a rundown on digital marketing training programs in the Philippines and their digital marketing course duration:

• DMHQ. The education partner of the Digital Marketing Institute in the Philippines, DMHQ runs the Certified Digital Marketing Professional (CDMP) program over 15 live training half-day sessions once a week for around 4 months (40+ hours). In addition, students have access to on-demand interactive videos for 6 months (30+ hours) and access to DMI’s continuing education program simultaneously for 6 months.
• CDM. This local training provider has several courses, including an Online Digital Marketing Fundamentals program, which runs for 4 full days, around 32 hours. You can enroll in individual courses or take packaged programs that bundle courses into tracks.
• Inventive Media. This training provider has a Digital Marketing Fundamentals class which runs for 2 days for a total of 20 hours.
• CIIT College of Arts and Technology. CIIT has a digital marketing specialist program that runs for around 2 months, presumably once a week, 4 hours each session.
• De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde. The college has a Diploma in Strategic Digital Marketing (technically a certificate program, not a college diploma) with 5 modules totaling 20 sessions of 4 hours each. This is around 5 months. You can also take the modules separately.
• Asian Institute of Management. AIM has a partnership with Emeritus for a Postgraduate Certificate (again, not a Diploma) in Digital Marketing. It runs for around 7 months. But it’s online recorded videos only.

Ateneo de Manila University Graduate School of Business has a short course in digital marketing but there’s no indication of the course duration.

Here’s a quick summary of the digital marketing course duration:

Digital marketing course duration is one indication of the quality of training you will get. But of course, it’s not just how long the course is. There are other factors to consider, including the relevance of the syllabus, the credentials of the trainers, and the credibility of the institution.

Learn more about the best digital marketing course in the Philippines.