How to Allocate Your Marketing Budget for Online Courses That Actually Scale
Nov, 17 2025
Most online course creators burn through their marketing budget too fast-and still don’t see real growth. They spend on Facebook ads, run email sequences, and throw money at influencers. Then they wonder why their course stays stuck at 50 sales a month. The problem isn’t the course. It’s the budget. If you want your online course to scale, you need to spend smarter, not harder.
Start with your customer acquisition cost
Before you touch a single dollar of your marketing budget, you need to know one number: your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). That’s how much it costs you to get one paying student. If your course sells for $299 and you’re spending $350 to get each sale, you’re losing money. No matter how good your content is.Here’s how to calculate it: Add up all your marketing spend over the last 90 days-ads, tools, freelancers, software-and divide it by the number of students you enrolled in that time. If you spent $4,500 and got 30 students, your CAC is $150. Now compare that to your average revenue per student. If it’s $299, you’ve got a healthy margin. If it’s $180? You’re in trouble.
Most beginners think they need to spend more to grow. But scaling means lowering your CAC while increasing sales volume. That only happens when you stop guessing and start measuring.
Split your budget into three buckets
Forget the old way of throwing money at whatever looks shiny. A scalable course marketing budget follows a simple 3-bucket system:- 50% on proven channels-the ones that already bring you students. If your email list converts at 8%, keep feeding it. If your YouTube tutorials get 500 signups a month, double down.
- 30% on testing new channels-one new platform every quarter. Try LinkedIn ads, Pinterest pins, or podcast sponsorships. Test with $500-$1,000 per channel. Kill what doesn’t hit a 3:1 return in 60 days.
- 20% on retention and referrals-your best customers are already paying you. Give them a referral bonus. Offer a free bonus module to students who complete the course. Turn buyers into promoters.
This structure keeps you grounded. You’re not chasing trends. You’re growing from a solid base while quietly experimenting. The 50/30/20 split isn’t magic. It’s just the math that separates the courses that plateau from the ones that hit 1,000 students a month.
Stop wasting money on broad ads
You see those Instagram ads for "Learn Web Development in 30 Days"? They’re targeting everyone from 18-year-olds to 65-year-olds. That’s not marketing. That’s spraying paint on a wall and hoping some sticks.Scalable course marketers target tightly defined audiences. For example:
- "Women in tech who’ve been promoted to manager but don’t know how to lead teams"
- "Freelance designers in Canada who want to stop trading hours for dollars"
- "Parents over 40 who want to switch careers after their kids graduate"
These aren’t vague demographics. These are real people with real pain points. When you speak directly to their struggle, your ads don’t just get clicks-they get conversions. One course creator I know switched from targeting "entrepreneurs" to "solopreneurs in the wellness space who sell digital products". Her CAC dropped 62% in two months.
Use Facebook’s detailed targeting, LinkedIn’s job title filters, or Google’s in-market audiences. Don’t guess who your ideal student is. Find them through data. Look at your current students’ profiles. Where do they live? What jobs do they have? What do they search for on YouTube? Then build your ads around that.
Build a content engine, not a campaign
Most people treat marketing like a sprint: launch a course, run a 2-week ad blitz, hope for the best. Then they disappear for six months.Scaling courses run on a content engine. That means consistent, valuable content that pulls students in over time. Think:
- A weekly YouTube video answering one common question from your course
- A newsletter that shares one real student win every Tuesday
- A free downloadable checklist that solves a tiny problem your audience has
This content doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to be regular. One creator built a 12,000-person email list by sending a single email every Thursday for 18 months-no sales pitch, just one practical tip related to her course topic. When she finally launched her next course, she sold 417 copies in 72 hours.
Content like this reduces your reliance on paid ads. It builds trust. It makes your brand recognizable. And it keeps your CAC low because people come to you instead of you chasing them.
Use free tools to stretch your budget
You don’t need a $10,000 marketing team to scale. Many of the most effective tools are free-or nearly free.- Canva for designing ads and landing pages
- Mailchimp (free tier) for email automation
- Google Trends to see what people are searching for
- AnswerThePublic to find real questions your audience asks
- Notion to track your marketing metrics in one place
One course creator used only these tools to grow from 0 to 2,000 students in 10 months. She didn’t buy a single ad. She wrote 87 blog posts based on AnswerThePublic questions, turned them into short videos, and shared them on Reddit and Facebook groups. Her CAC? $12.
Don’t wait to afford fancy software. Start with what’s free. Master it. Then scale.
Track what matters-not vanity metrics
Don’t fall for the trap of chasing likes, shares, or followers. Those numbers look good on Instagram-but they don’t pay your rent.Here’s what you should track instead:
- Cost per lead-how much you spend to get someone to sign up for your freebie
- Lead-to-student conversion rate-what percentage of freebie signups become paying customers
- Customer lifetime value-how much a student spends on your courses over time (including upsells)
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)-for every $1 you spend on ads, how much do you earn back?
If your lead-to-student rate is below 5%, your funnel is broken. If your ROAS is under 2, you’re losing money. If your lifetime value is less than 3x your CAC, you’re not scaling-you’re surviving.
Set up a simple spreadsheet. Update it every Monday. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.
Scale by keeping students longer
The fastest way to scale isn’t getting more students. It’s keeping the ones you have.Most courses are one-and-done. You pay, you complete, you disappear. But if you offer a next step-a certification, a community, a higher-level course-you turn a one-time buyer into a long-term customer.
One course creator started offering a $49/month community for her $299 course students. 38% of them signed up. That meant her average student value jumped from $299 to $500+. Her marketing budget didn’t change. Her revenue did.
Think about your course as the first door in a hallway. What’s the next door? A workshop? A coaching program? A group coaching circle? Build that next step into your marketing from day one. Your budget will stretch farther because each student becomes more valuable.
When to increase your budget
Don’t increase your marketing budget until you’ve hit these three signs:- Your CAC is stable or falling
- Your lead-to-student conversion rate is above 8%
- You’ve tested at least two new channels and one of them has a ROAS over 3
That’s your green light. Now you can safely increase your ad spend by 20-30% per month. But only if your systems are working. If your funnel leaks, more money just means more leaks.
One creator doubled her budget after hitting 12% conversion. Within 90 days, she went from 150 to 600 students a month. Her profit margin stayed the same. Her revenue tripled.
Scaling isn’t about spending more. It’s about spending better.
What happens when you get this right
When your marketing budget is aligned with real growth, something changes. You stop feeling desperate. You stop chasing trends. You stop wondering if your course is good enough.You start seeing patterns. You know which posts bring leads. You know which emails convert. You know who your best students are-and how to find more like them.
One course creator went from $2,000 a month to $48,000 a month in 11 months. She didn’t change her course. She didn’t hire a marketer. She just stopped guessing and started measuring. She followed the 50/30/20 rule. She built a content engine. She tracked her numbers. And she scaled.
That’s what scaling looks like. Not flashy ads. Not viral TikToks. Just smart, consistent, measurable spending.
How much should I spend on marketing for my online course?
Start with 10-20% of your projected course revenue. If you expect to make $10,000 in the first quarter, budget $1,000-$2,000 for marketing. Adjust based on your actual Customer Acquisition Cost. If your CAC is too high, cut back. If it’s low and you’re hitting conversion goals, increase your spend by 20-30% per month.
What’s the best platform to market an online course?
There’s no single best platform-it depends on your audience. If your students are professionals, use LinkedIn and email. If they’re younger or visual learners, try YouTube and Instagram. If they search for solutions, focus on SEO and blog content. Test one platform at a time. The platform that converts your ideal student is the right one.
Should I use influencers to market my course?
Only if they have a highly targeted audience that matches your ideal student. Micro-influencers (5K-50K followers) often convert better than big names. Ask for a trackable link or promo code. Measure the ROI. If the cost per student is higher than your target CAC, stop. Influencers are not a magic solution-they’re just another channel to test.
How do I know if my marketing budget is working?
Look at three numbers: your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), your lead-to-student conversion rate, and your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS). If your CAC is under 30% of your course price, your conversion rate is above 8%, and your ROAS is above 3, your budget is working. If any of those numbers are off, fix the funnel before spending more.
Can I scale my course with a $500 budget?
Yes-but only if you focus on free, high-leverage activities. Build an email list with a free lead magnet. Write 10 blog posts answering real questions. Share them in niche Facebook groups. Record 5 short YouTube videos. Use Canva for graphics. Track every lead. With $500, you can test paid ads, but your real growth will come from organic content and word-of-mouth. Many courses have scaled from $0 to $10K/month using just free tools and consistency.
If you’re serious about scaling your course, stop treating marketing like a lottery. It’s a system. Build it. Measure it. Optimize it. Then repeat.
E Jones
November 18, 2025 AT 23:45Okay but have you ever stopped to think that all this ‘measurable marketing’ is just a cult designed by Silicon Valley to make you feel like a failure if you don’t buy their $299 course on how to stop buying $299 courses? I mean, who the hell are these people tracking your ‘lead-to-student conversion rate’? Are they watching you cry over your spreadsheet at 3 a.m.? I’ve seen the shadows in the corner of my Zoom calls when I’m ‘optimizing my funnel’-they’re not algorithms, they’re demons. And they’re hungry. You think your CAC is $150? Nah. It’s your soul. You’re paying in sleep. In relationships. In the last shred of your creativity. And for what? To join a club where everyone’s broke but has a killer email sequence?
I used to believe in buckets. 50/30/20. Like it was some divine math. Then I stopped. I went dark. I posted one TikTok of me crying while eating ramen in my pajamas with the caption ‘I just spent $3k on ads and my only student is my cat.’ It got 2.3M views. I sold 87 courses in 72 hours. No funnel. No analytics. Just raw, unfiltered despair. That’s the real algorithm. The one that doesn’t care about your ROI. It just wants you to scream into the void until someone hears you.
Barbara & Greg
November 19, 2025 AT 00:29It is deeply concerning that so many educators and entrepreneurs have surrendered their intellectual integrity to the cult of quantification. Marketing is not a mathematical equation to be optimized-it is a moral endeavor. To reduce human aspiration to a CAC metric is to dehumanize the very act of learning. One does not measure the value of knowledge in dollars per lead. One honors the dignity of the seeker. The suggestion that one should ‘kill’ channels that do not yield a 3:1 return is not business acumen-it is spiritual bankruptcy. Where is the compassion for the student who needs time? For the teacher who needs patience? The soul of education cannot be tracked in Notion.
selma souza
November 20, 2025 AT 18:00You have a comma splice in the third paragraph. ‘Add up all your marketing spend over the last 90 days-ads, tools, freelancers, software-and divide it.’ That dash should be an em dash, not an en dash. Also, ‘students’ is plural, so ‘you enrolled’ should be ‘you enrolled.’ And ‘CAC is $150’-no period after the dollar amount unless it’s the end of the sentence. This article is riddled with technical errors. How can anyone trust advice on scaling when the grammar is this sloppy?
Frank Piccolo
November 22, 2025 AT 02:18Look, I’ve seen this ‘smart spending’ nonsense before. It’s just capitalism in a hoodie. You want to ‘scale’? Fine. But don’t pretend you’re not still selling snake oil. You think targeting ‘women in tech who’ve been promoted to manager but don’t know how to lead teams’ is genius? That’s just corporate speak for ‘we’re selling insecurity.’ And don’t get me started on ‘free tools.’ Canva? Mailchimp? You’re telling me a guy in his garage with a $200 laptop can outcompete a Fortune 500 marketing team? That’s not scaling. That’s delusion wrapped in a lead magnet.
James Boggs
November 23, 2025 AT 05:02Great breakdown. I’ve used the 50/30/20 model for my coaching program and saw my CAC drop from $210 to $89 in six months. The retention bucket was the game-changer-offering a monthly Q&A for past students added $18K/month in recurring revenue. Small tweaks, big results. Thanks for the clarity.
Addison Smart
November 24, 2025 AT 16:14What’s fascinating to me is how this mirrors the evolution of education itself. For centuries, learning was communal, slow, and rooted in trust. Then came mass production-lectures, textbooks, standardized tests. Now we’re back to something hybrid: personalized, digital, but still deeply human. The 50/30/20 model isn’t just about budget-it’s about balance. The 50% is your anchor to tradition. The 30% is your courage to explore. The 20%? That’s your heart. It’s where you give back. And that’s the part most people forget. We don’t just sell courses. We build communities. And communities don’t scale with ads. They scale with care.
I’ve watched students from rural Kenya join a course I built using only AnswerThePublic and free YouTube. They didn’t have credit cards. So I offered payment in stories. One wrote me about how she taught her sister to code using the checklist I gave away. That’s the ROI no spreadsheet can capture.
David Smith
November 25, 2025 AT 23:42Ugh. Another ‘growth hacker’ pretending they’re a philosopher. You’re not ‘building a content engine.’ You’re spamming the internet with your ‘weekly tip’ like a bot that got fired from a call center. And don’t even get me started on ‘micro-influencers.’ You think a guy with 12K followers on Instagram who posts yoga pics and says ‘manifest abundance’ is going to convert? Please. Your ‘$12 CAC’ is a lie. You’re just getting bots and your mom’s friend’s cousin who clicked ‘learn more’ because they thought it was a free cat video. This whole thing is a pyramid scheme dressed in Canva templates.
Lissa Veldhuis
November 26, 2025 AT 12:57I tried the 50/30/20 thing and it was a disaster. I spent $5K on LinkedIn ads targeting ‘freelance designers in Canada’ and got one sale. One. From a guy who said he only bought it because he felt bad for me. Meanwhile my ex-husband sold his ‘Mindset for Divorce Recovery’ course for $49 and made $80K in three months using only TikTok dances and a meme about ‘healing through hustle.’ So yeah. Your ‘data-driven’ nonsense is just your ego trying to control chaos. Real growth comes from chaos. From mess. From crying in your car after posting your 17th video with no views. That’s when the algorithm notices you. Not when you track your ROAS.
Michael Jones
November 27, 2025 AT 11:13Stop overthinking. Just start. Write one post. Make one video. Send one email. The rest will follow. You don’t need a spreadsheet. You need a heartbeat. And if you’re still reading this instead of hitting publish-you’re already ahead of 90% of the people who think they’re ‘ready.’ Go. Now.
allison berroteran
November 27, 2025 AT 17:04I’ve been teaching online for seven years and this is the first time I’ve read advice that didn’t make me feel guilty for not being a marketing genius. I used to think I needed to be everywhere-Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, even Clubhouse. I was exhausted. Then I focused on one thing: answering one question in my email list every Tuesday. Just one. No sales pitch. Just, ‘Here’s how I fixed this thing that kept happening to me.’ Over time, people started asking, ‘When’s your next course?’ I didn’t even advertise it. They just showed up. The numbers came later. The trust came first. I’m not trying to scale to $100K a month. I’m trying to scale to peace. And this? This feels like peace.
Gabby Love
November 28, 2025 AT 22:00Minor note: in the ‘free tools’ section, you mention Notion for tracking metrics. That’s great-but make sure you’re not spending more time organizing your Notion database than actually doing the work. I had a student who spent three weeks building a perfect tracker and never launched her course. Tools serve you. Don’t let them become your master.
Jen Kay
November 28, 2025 AT 23:25How cute. You’re telling people to ‘stop guessing’ and ‘start measuring’ like measuring is the moral high ground. Meanwhile, the woman who launched her course with a handwritten note on Facebook and a $20 gift card for the first 10 buyers made $40K in a month. She didn’t track CAC. She tracked kindness. And guess what? Her students came back. They brought friends. They wrote testimonials in cursive. Sometimes the most powerful metric is the one you can’t measure: the feeling someone gets when they finally believe they can change. Just saying.
Michael Thomas
November 30, 2025 AT 21:44USA rules. Canada? Cute. But your ‘micro-influencers’? They’re just guys in basements with 10K followers and a bad haircut. If you want real growth, go where the money is. America. Period. No fluff. No ‘cultural ambassador’ nonsense. Just results.
Abert Canada
December 1, 2025 AT 01:40As a Canadian, I gotta say-I’ve seen this play out here too. We don’t have the ad budgets of the US, so we learn to be scrappy. One guy in Halifax built a course on ‘Fishing for Beginners’ using only Reddit threads, a free Canva template, and a voice memo he recorded on his phone while waiting for his coffee. Sold 1,200 copies. CAC: $8. No ads. Just genuine help. That’s the Canadian way. Quiet. Consistent. Doesn’t need to shout to be heard.
Xavier Lévesque
December 2, 2025 AT 01:20Yeah, I tried the ‘content engine’ thing. Wrote 14 blog posts. Made 7 YouTube videos. Posted in 3 Facebook groups. Got 12 total clicks. Then I posted a meme of a raccoon stealing a taco with the caption ‘This is what your course looks like to your audience.’ Got 2000 views. 87 signups. Sometimes the algorithm likes chaos more than clarity. Who knew?
Thabo mangena
December 3, 2025 AT 01:43In South Africa, we say: ‘If you want to walk fast, walk alone. If you want to walk far, walk together.’ This article speaks of scaling-but misses the heart. In my community, we don’t sell courses. We share wisdom. A grandmother taught me to knit. I taught five girls to code. We didn’t track CAC. We tracked smiles. Now they run a free coding club for orphans. The ‘budget’? A phone, a Wi-Fi hotspot, and a lot of tea. Scaling isn’t about money. It’s about multiplying kindness. That’s the only ROI that lasts.
James Boggs
December 3, 2025 AT 23:31That’s beautiful, Thabo. I’ve started doing something similar with my students-pairing them up for peer mentoring. No cost. Just connection. One student from Nigeria now helps a single mom in Ohio with her Python homework. They’ve been talking for 8 months. I didn’t plan it. But it’s the most valuable thing my course has ever created.