Answers
I personally get a few sales from putting a link to a coupon in my description on YouTube and it keeps a slow stream coming in each month. If you have a free course, nothing faster than facebook although it's not the most effective student list. Either way, I think facebook works out more expensive than YouTube if you're paying for advertisement, as they also own Instagram and on adwords you could just have ads running on youtube rather than the entire network. Which makes the target audience more relevant. Every category is different though and if would largly depend on promo videos etc so for each case I'd suggest, running a small ad campaign and keeping an eye on the results.
Youtube works as it is based on videos... Facebook doesn't work at all... don't waste your money there... better to spend money to push a video on Youtube... once it has some views it keeps getting new views... so your money for the initial push keep giving you results in time...
Hi Luke. In my experience, and from reading about the experiences of other instructors over the years, is that paid ads that sell Udemy courses are a waste of money. The cost of making a sale through paid ads will be more than the $10-$15 that you make on a Udemy sale.
Instead, use coupon codes in the description of a YouTube video, or use paid ads to drive traffic to your own site, so you can collect emails in return for some kind of freebie, then market your Udemy courses to people on your email list.
As a marketer, here’s the best answer: Test both. The ultimate marketing is when you bring the right message to the right people at the right time. You can’t know that for your specific topic until you test. Everyone else will have wildly differing opinions and experiences because their topic, right people, right message, right time may be different from yours. So test both and see what happens for your own situation. Having said that, it’s also important to know that running paid ads to a Udemy course is often not profitable because of how little you receive per enrollee. The basic math of it is that you should be receiving more than your ads cost. Well, it can be really difficult (if not impossible) to run ads at effectively less than $2.50 - $5.00 per enrollment. It is actually more likely that it will cost you $10 - $20 in ads / clicks to get one enrollment and that’s if you’re good. The reason is that you’re dealing with “cold traffic” or people who don’t yet know you, don’t know if they trust you and don’t know if they like you yet. (“Know, like and trust” must be there before people do business with you) So, if you’re going to be doing any kind of paid advertising, I’d recommend a strategy that doesn’t immediately go for the enrollment but instead puts them into a follow up sequence (email or chat bot) to build up the trust first.
Based on my own experience on udemy, I would suggest upload 20% of your course on your own YouTube channel and optimize it for organic reach to your potential students.
This will be much better strategy to drive paid enrolments to your udemy courses.
I second Youtube promo vids. Personally I've not seen much action from FB ads, although GoogleAds can be excellent if you're diligent with very specific keyword targeting for your niche.
But overall, we've had great success with sales from weekly youtube videos which for our company are half educational and half marketing as a means of bringing even more value to my users.
I am embarassed to say that I have spent thousands of dollars buying ads on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Google AdWords over the past 3 years and it has been an awful investment. I realized that the power of selling courses on Udemy is that they are our sales distribution channel...they are a marketing machine and I am grateful to be a part of this community. Please don't spend money buying ads as I promise that you will lose a lot of money doing so, like I have. If you figure it out, please let me know as I would love to learn from your all.
My long term customer acquisition strategy is YouTube; I create a video every day on YouTube and I am starting to slowly see students buying courses on YouTube. The great thing about YouTube is that it's the only gold rush in history that costs you next to nothing to create the product and you have access to bilions of consumers.
Thanks : )
I’ve had mixed experiences on FB. Loss, break even, and double my money. Fine tuning demographics, easy to access purchase/landing page, and cool vid or image helps tons. Sadly, if I put boobs in the image, it’s guaranteed to double the views/reach.
Making the promo video in a way that you cover what is this video about & Instresting things about your course in first 5 seconds and then start explaining so that your ad is not skipped and interested people may click on the ad video and Join I prefer YouTube ads as well as will also do Facebook ads, both have it's own benefits
I have tested Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads. I will get into details below but in conclusion, if you are capable of creating some free content in Youtube, go down that route rather than paid advertisement. Produce free content in Youtube and direct your viewers to your course. Details below;
First of all, online education platforms will be able to beat your bidding in all platforms in terms of cost. So, you will have to pay almost the twice as these big platforms do. Just to explain what I mean online education platforms, Udemy is also one of them but of course we love Udemy The main reason is because they have re-marketing capability (with the help of scale) and they buy traffic in bulk which reduces the price.
Even if I will not use paid adverts at all, Google AdWords was the best among these. Facebook Ads didn't create much traffic, almost none. My personal Facebook post created more traffic
LinkedIn Ads are way too expensive for a course that you will earn £10 from. If you can sell your course for £100, then Linked Ads will work the best among these, but if not, you can forget it. The click cost of LinkedIn was 4 times more than Google AdWords.
I haven't tried Youtube Video Ads which might perform better.