My Experience: Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree Review 2024

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My Story: Why I Enrolled?

Before starting this Udacity Digital Marketing Review let me introduce myself.

When I received my Bachelor’s in Business Administration in 2018, my options included Accounting, Finance, and Marketing. Looking back, I learned a ton of information.

Yet, most of the curriculum (80-90% being my best estimate) was not applicable to my employment.

What I mean by that is that I got a general overview and concepts of the different functions needed for a successful business, but the tools and applications were not there. Theory yes, application no.

In 2019 I was working for my family’s business and employing some tactics and best practices to make them more competitive. It almost always comes down to data, but that is a different story and a different Nanodegree.

I decided to work for them while going back to school to major in Civil Engineering in hopes of becoming a project manager and builder.

As soon I was getting the groove of a new learning mindset, the lockdowns for Covid-19 began in 2020.

After taking a few college courses through Zoom, I realized this was not going to work for me. Most of the University system was not prepared for teaching on an online platform.

I personally felt a strong intuition to become more adaptable to this new trend in technology.

A Great Reset of sorts was occurring. Meaning there would be more automation, AI, big data, remote working and remote learning, and marketing needed for businesses and individuals to take part in.

I knew it was time to adapt and gain new digital skills to be able to work remotely.

I decided to fall back on my business degree and learn more about Digital Marketing. Hence, Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree (DMND).

In this Udacity Digital Marketing nanodegree review, I will take you through the entire syllabus of the course, to help you decide whether to enroll for the Nanodegree or not?

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I first heard of Udacity through a colleague at my University in 2018, yet that memory was still with me, powerful stuff.

By choosing to go with Udacity and taking the DMND program I felt more control of my learning and learned real-world applicable skills.

Now, is the time to learn whatever you want and wherever you want. If you can relate please read along more as I explain my experience and review.

But if you want to get to the bottom of it, yes, I do recommend this Udacity’s DMND. Find out why in detail in this review.

Also Read: Udacity Review-My Experience with Nanodegree

Cost of Digital Marketing Nanodegree from Udacity

Only enroll when there is a steep promotional discount, like 50% or 75%. I saw a promotion for 50% off and decided to jump on that opportunity in January 2021.

The original pricing was around 850 dollars, so I only had to pay half that.

There is also an option to finance your learning with a payment plan under Affirm, which is the route I went with. Plus, if you are living in the United States, there is no better way to spend your stimulus money than by investing in yourself.

It seems now the pricing has increased to around 1000 dollars recently, so the timing of when to get in this program is key.

Therefore, I think the pricing of this course is justifiable only if there is a promotion happening, otherwise, you might end up feeling disappointed.

You might be wondering whether the Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree is worth it? In this review, I’ve explained the syllabus in detail.

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Thoughts on Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree Syllabus

1. Marketing Fundamentals (Project)
2. Content Strategy (No Project)
3. Social Media Marketing (Project)
4. Social Media Advertising (Project)
5. Search Engine Optimization (Project)
6. Search Engine Marketing with Google Ads (Project)
7. Display Advertising (Project)
8. Email Marketing (Project)
9. Measure and Optimize with Google Analytics (Project)

1. Marketing Fundamentals 

This course is more concept-based and gets you ready by teaching you the new lingo for understanding Digital Marketing “speak”.

After learning some vocab words, you will start to learn more about the Digital Marketing framework, value proposition, customer persona, the customer journey, and setting up a marketing objective to be in line with your Key Performance Indicators (KPI).

It all comes down to understanding your business and what you will be serving and to whom.

This is done through research and interviews of the people that fall under your customer persona.

Project: Prepare to Market

Therefore, the project involves you as a marketer interviewing people who fall under your customer base.

The three options are to interview people for the DMND program, Udacity’s program for enterprises, or a real business that you work for.

I chose the DMND program since it was easier to find people to interview.

The interview process takes longer than expected, be prepared to take an hour to interview one person.

The cool part about this project is like being a detective who pieces all the people that were interviewed and meld them into one psychological profile.

Voilà, that is the person that you will target for the rest of this program (The DMND program requires you to stick with one of the three options that you chose until graduation, so pick wisely).

2. Content Strategy

This course focuses on the “how” of marketing, as in how to reach your customers.

To put it simply, this about creating great stories through posts and managing them, so it stays fresh in the minds of your customers.

It covers the content process, what kind of content is needed for the different stages in the customer journey, story structures, distributing and promoting content, landing page techniques, and measuring the impact using UTM codes.

I am a numbers guy, and I wished this course delved deeper into UTM codes. It only gives a brief of how to use them and some resources you must read on your own.

Additionally, no project was given for this part. The course talks about a content calendar, which would have been a good project to go over.

I want to say in this Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree review that they could have done better in this part of the program.

3. Social Media Marketing

As a millennial, I am well versed in social media, and it is almost intuitive to me.

For others that may not be the case, so this course does a good job to help anyone learn the social media landscape.

It is about using these free social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. to market and connect customers who have issues. Reaching out to influencers is briefly talked about, too.

We talk about all the formats and best practices for posting to reach customers while not offending them. We learn a cool formula for understanding the virality of a post, or how viral it is.

An interesting tool that was introduced is Hootsuite, a free tool that allows us to manage multiple social media platforms at once.

There is a free course for it too on their site. Still, I am upset that we did not go in-depth on how to use this tool and did not use it in our project.

Project: Market your Content

The project is a mix of content strategy and social media marketing.

The goal is to write a blog post about why we enrolled in the DMND and to talk about our background. Once we finished writing this blog post, we must post it on three different social media platforms.

There is an extra credit option to measure the views of the post. We did not use Hootsuite for this, which I found odd since it was the perfect time to learn by doing.

4. Social Media Advertising

This is the part where things started to get fun and interesting, at least for me.

We start by learning about online ads and the characteristics that form an ad. Followed by how to measure the results to make sure they are in line with the budget.

The go-to platform for social media advertising is Facebook Ads, so that is where the focus of this course is.

It is a basic introduction on how to create and manage Facebook Ads, but nothing advanced if that is what you are seeking.

The videos on Facebook Ads in the course are also outdated and from 2018, so that is one thing I want to convey through this Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree review.

Project: Evaluate a Facebook Campaign

The project involves evaluating a Facebook Ads campaign. It means that you will not be running a live campaign, which is unfortunate.

Instead, we will look at a campaign that has been done by Udacity and make recommendations to optimize it. Still a decent project to get ready for understanding what to do after running a Facebook Ads campaign.

5.Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This section of the program was comprehensive in how to implement SEO and the tools necessary to implement SEO.

SEO relates to the natural/organic search results that a business or individual gets when looking on a search engine.

Some of the lessons I learned involved keyword research, HTML tags and site structure, link building with other entities, and how to do an SEO Audit for a business.

So much was learned here. It really did open my eyes to something I did not know before. That is the power of words and blogging.

Project: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Audit

The project was no piece of cake. It involves deep research and reading using the tool known as Moz.

Moz is a keyword research tool, that will be given to students free of charge. The project requires you to do an in-depth SEO audit of a website.

For me, that was the DMND landing page. By the end of this project, I felt confident enough to do this for other businesses and individuals.

Take this project day by day, because it is likely that you will have to get it reviewed more than once.

6. Search Engine Marketing with Google Ads

This is a good introduction to the power and potential of using Google Ads for search ads.

Search ads are the ads that appear when you type in something that you are looking for in Google’s search bar. This is a good way to gain traffic for a site.

Google Ads campaigns are done through a bidding process that is looked at more in detail along with quality scores and how to pay a low price for a click.

Keywords, text ad creation, navigating the interface, and metrics and optimization are covered here.

The only gripe I have is that the course is outdated and still uses the phrase Google AdWords and shows examples from 2018. This is a change Udacity needs to do.

Overall, the concepts are still relevant though.

Project: Evaluate a Google Ads Campaign

Like evaluating the Facebook Ads campaign, the same is done here in this project.

I had to look at the results of a campaign and calculate certain metrics to see if the campaign had been successful based on the marketing objective.

After doing these calculations, I had to make recommendations on how to improve the campaign.

A valuable understanding of what to do after running a Google Ads campaign was learned in this course. 

7. Display Advertising

This course is a follow-up on Search Engine Marketing with Google Ads. Besides using search ads in Google Ads, this course introduces how to use display and video advertising within Google Ads.

The lessons include the history of display ads, how they work, and targeting display ads to the right people.

I learned that Display Advertising is usually best for building awareness since it shows pictures of the product or service you are trying to sell, unlike a search ad. The concepts are overall good and still relevant.

Project: Evaluate a Display Advertising Campaign

The format is like the other campaigns that I evaluated. I ended up calculating the results and seeing if they met the marketing objectives.

Based on the results and objectives I had to make recommendations to optimize the campaign further.

The main difference here is that it is more visual, so the changes that you recommend can involve not just the wording but also the graphics. Good practice for evaluating real campaigns.

8. Email Marketing

This is a fun course since the instructor makes it super enjoyable.

I started by thinking that emails were boring until I finished this course, and now I see the power of this channel.

I learned that conversions through email are at a high percentage compared to other forms of digital advertising, since the leads that subscribe are already interested in the business.

That is why it is important to make an email list as early as possible, and then start campaigning.

I learned about creating an effective email campaign, designing effective emails, and measuring the results.

The tool that I used is MailChimp, a free email campaign software.

Project: Market with Email

I learned how to make a real email campaign. From the design process to the final formatting of it. Additionally, I had to create an email campaign calendar.

This calendar is necessary to create a schedule of how to plan, send, and measure email results.

I did not send any emails out but instead evaluated some theoretical results. 

9. Measure and Optimize with Google Analytics

In this course, I had the opportunity to understand the power of analytics and measure the way users interact with a website.

The point here was to learn the basics of Google Analytics, understand the audience, evaluate how users were acquired, evaluate the behavior of users, and evaluate how they convert.

I thought this was a powerful course, since I discovered you can gather an exclusive amount of information on the type of user a website brings.

It is almost like looking into their lives. Let me make it clear in this review of Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree that the course does not teach you how to set up Google Analytics for a website. You do however get a practice account to learn more.

Project: Create your Digital Marketing Portfolio

The project did not involve any form of Google Analytics, because it is replaced with a portfolio project.

This involves getting all the projects and putting them together as one to showcase to employers.

The new part of this project involved creating a customer journey-based marketing plan centered on the target persona from the first project. Budget allocation is involved to simulate a live campaign.

The point here is to learn how to evaluate a campaign with all the channels that have been learned so far.

You will calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) and make further recommendations to optimize.

Course Timeline

I managed to complete the course in six weeks.

This is only because I decided to make it my mission to dedicate myself to learning this. If I had a full-time job, this would have been different.

I am currently transitioning to becoming a Digital Marketer for hire, and I am dedicating myself to this one thing.

The biggest challenge for me was the mental game of whether this decision I made was correct.

At times found myself thinking I made the wrong choice and should go focus on making income.

That doubt disappeared when I started getting into the course more and realized that these are things, I am capable of and are sought-after skills.

So if you think you are ready to start your journey with Digital marketing, you can enroll here.

Mentorship, Project Reviews, Career Services

Mentorship

I used this mainly to find answers to my questions on projects when the instructions were not clear enough for me.

To my surprise, if I had a question, I would go to the mentor area and the question was already answered.

More than likely you will experience the same and find a question that has already been asked by a fellow Nanodegree student.

Project Reviews

They were done in a timely manner. Within five hours, they would be reviewed and annotated.

The annotation would suggest where you did good or where you can improve. I had to do some re-submissions when I did not do a project correctly.

Do not feel any shame if you find yourself in this position. It is totally normal. The goals of the reviewers are not to humiliate you, but to help you understand what is missing.

Career Services

I used the LinkedIn profile review and learned some valuable tips on how to make my profile stand out more. It all comes down to marketing yourself and interacting.

But thankfully after this Digital Marketing program that is already a done deal with the process of how that is done.

The reviewer also helped give personal feedback on what is missing and what is good. I say take advantage of this service.

I did not use their Career Services for employment yet, because I am still taking a few courses that I want to master to up my digital skill game. 

Pros and Cons: Udacity Digital Marketing Nanodegree Review

Pros

• The big picture overview of how Digital Marketing is implemented in a business and the specialization that may be needed to be successful. Digital Marketing has niches within it that a person can specialize in too. If you are a writer you can just focus on SEO and Content Strategy, or if you are into numbers you can focus on Analytics and Advertising. There are many possibilities and combinations to choose from.
• Learning the many tools, like Google Ads, that are used in implementing Digital Marketing that I was not aware of before. This course opened my eyes to how the University system did not prepare students like me well enough for a competitive edge in the business world. I never once went over these simple yet powerful tools in University classes.
• The projects are hands-on and involve critical feedback that will address your understanding. The unlimited number of reviews and submissions means you can only succeed if you are willing to try your hardest. The projects also serve to showcase the proof of your work and skills to employers.
• Self-study pace allows a person who wants to learn at their own pace to do just that. If you are a slow learner, then go slow. If you are a fast learner, like me, and want to get down to business as soon as possible, you can do that too.

Cons

• Many of the courses within the program are out of date and date back to 2018. Udacity needs to do a better job of curating and keeping its program fresh so that students can only get the best material out there.
• I felt like the program could be broken up into two programs. The reason being is so that students can dive deeper into a certain subject. In my opinion, the two programs can be pay-per-click advertising with optimization and content strategy using social media and SEO.
• A tool that was not used was Hootsuite which was part of the Social Media Marketing course within the program. I harp on this because Udacity advertises this on their site, yet we do not use it or get a thorough tour of how to use it. The good news is that Hootsuite has a free course on using their tool. Furthermore, Hootsuite is also free.
• The price for this course can sometimes be too much and not worth it, as previously stated. I suggest waiting until a promotional discount is offered. I think about it like this, 40 to 50 dollars for each course within the program. Since there are nine courses in total, that comes to 360 to 450 dollars. That is the price that would make sense.

Is Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree worth it?

As a former University student in Business Administration, I can say that this program gave me a good understanding and brought me up to speed with the recent developments in Digital Marketing.

That is because most of the stuff I learned at the university was mainly theory and no real practice with the tools that are offered here with Udacity

Additionally, I do not recommend this course to the Digital Marketer who is looking for advanced courses, this will waste your time and money. 

As for me I now have a blueprint of how I see myself implementing Digital Marketing in my career, it is a start.

Currently, I am focused on learning advanced search advertising along with design principles and see myself going into this niche of Digital Marketing further.

Therefore, I can proudly say it all started with Udacity’s Digital Marketing Nanodegree.

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