FAIRMONT– Visit Fairmont and the Fairmont Area Chamber of Commerce are teaming up to provide free digital marketing courses to interested businesses and organizations. The hope is that with these tools, more people will get to know what Fairmont all has to offer.

Visit Fairmont’s Director, Brittany Hartman, said she has been working with a company, 26 Digital, that offers a program called ‘Destination Uplift.’

“It’s for destination marketing organizations like us to provide to the community and local businesses and organizations to help them learn about digital marketing,” Hartman explained. “You get the whole community marketing Fairmont and trying to bring in more people to the town and to their businesses.”

She did a few sessions through Visit Fairmont to help with marketing efforts there and was impressed with what she learned.

“They really did help a lot so I want to bring it to the community and hopefully they have the same benefits that I did,” Hartman said.

The Chamber got involved because it already has relationships formed with established businesses in Fairmont and is helping to spread the word about the free offering.

Chamber President Kandi Menne said businesses will register to be a part of the 10 series webinar.

“We encourage them to start with the first one and do all 10 because of the different topics that are so important to promoting a business in today’s world of competitive marketing,” Menne said.

The first topic, offered at 11 a.m. on Jan. 22, is ’email marketing best practices.’ Other topics in the series include ‘how AI can help, not hinder your work’ and ‘optimizing your website for engaged users.’

“Through the graciousness of Visit Fairmont there’s no cost for the business to participate, which is a super bonus,” Menne said.

Hartman said that if someone signed up cannot make the webinar date and time, all the classes are recorded so that they can still benefit from them by watching them later. In addition to the webinars, Hartman said there’s a whole library of content and resources that participants will have access to.

“We hope businesses and organizations take advantage of this. It will just be offered for one year and I think it will be a game changer for Fairmont, help bring people in and get us on the map,” Hartman said.

Menne added, “allowing our business owners to learn more skills about promoting helps our community as a whole. It benefits everyone.”

Those interested in signing up for the webinar can contact Hartman at Director@VisitFairmont.com or Menne at president@fairmontchamber.org.