How I cut lead costs 85% for an online dance and vocal academy (without increasing spend)

For one of the world’s top 3 online K-pop training academies, teaching students around the globe.

This client felt like they were just burning money on Meta ads with terrible unit economics. Their cold leads cost ~$11 USD and retargeting wasn’t better at ~$7, as their ROAS sat between 0.7-1.2.

They were losing money on every campaign.

But the first thing I noticed wasn’t a budget problem, it was chaos. Random creative testing, no landing page feedback loop, designers working without direction, and messaging scattered across multiple segments.

Here’s how I fixed it. I implemented 3 core changes.

1/ Systematic testing

You can’t get cheaper results without testing.

So I batched rounds of 3-5 new ad formats with 2 angles, 4 headlines and multiple variants, and ran 2 tests at a time for clean data. You keep the winner and replace the loser.

And this wasn’t just for the same offer. The offer got tested too, which led us to find that the webinar offers drastically outperformed a simple “request info” (on cold traffic, roughly half the cost per lead).

2/ Design organisation

The designer had been working without a structured workflow, which made communicating and turning around new ideas very, very slow.

So I built a structured workflow in monday.com with standardised designer briefs - a clear messaging matrix and wireframe references, with the ad copy tied to specific angles to create the variations.

Here’s one brief, and the ad that came out of it:

This moved them from one-off designs to batch production.

3/ Segment focus

Not every target is created equal.

We also worked together to narrow down from multiple poor performing personas to the best performing persona. This helped make it crystal clear what triggers and objections to dig into.

The results?

• Cost per cold lead: from ~$11 to ~$1.70
• Retargeting leads: from ~$7 to ~$0.85
• ROAS: increased to ~4.0

And here’s how it looked in Ads Manager, before (top) and after (bottom):

And a happy client that could focus elsewhere on the business instead of troubleshooting the ads all day.

Here’s what they said afterwards:

Ben is phenomenal to work with both as a media buyer and creative strategist. Great communication, collaboration, and achieved & maintained CPL’s at multiples above industry average. Ben was the first marketer that we were truly able to set & forget because he had things covered. Ben also doesn’t charge by & adspend, a terrible practice by many agencies. Couldn’t recommend higher.

If you run a school or training programme, here’s more on Facebook ads for schools.