Any Digital Marketing Course Recs? Getting back into ECom after 900K business

[RNoles19]

Any recommendations for digital marketing courses specifically for E-Commerce? Or ways to (re)learn digital marketing in 2021?
I grew a sports themed T-Shirt business to 30K customers / 900K in revenue primarily through Facebook ads, but that was in 2016/7 when I could get a click for 5 cents. The business cratered as ads cost skyrocketed. Control, control, control

 

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[David Fitz]

If you've spent money on ads then I think you know enough already. You learn the most about digital marketing when you spend your own money.

 

[The-J]

The fundamentals are still the same: the right audiences, good creative, a killer offer, and a strong back-end funnel (email/SMS) to keep them buying.

The biggest thing has been the iOS 14 updates which has made tracking pretty unreliable, however I haven't actually seen any problem with ad account performance as a result (it's just harder to diagnose issues and figure out what's truly bringing home the bacon without digging into other data sources)

Facebook's audience targeting has changed drastically. There's no more Audience Insights, so you can't use that to find new audiences (and even so, it was heavily nerfed back in 2019). But even back then, lookalikes were king and that's the same today. Super broad still works. Interest targeting still works but it's by group. But a lot of demographic stuff that some advertisers relied on is now gone. Page targeting is basically impossible now.

Honestly, things have changed so much that even the 2020 courses are kind of out of date, and advertisers are kind of scrambling right now since many big brands relied on pretty complex retargeting funnels that no longer work because of the iOS 14 update. Lookalikes have been affected too. This isn't just Facebook, either.

There are new platforms like Snapchat and TikTok but Facebook/IG is still where people go. Clicks are expensive now and the competition has gotten savvier. But a lot of us are still killing it on the platform.

Your T-shirt business, though? Probably not going to do very well anymore.