Context
A StudioFigura franchise opened in Karlín, Prague: apparatus cosmetology and apparatus fitness, aimed at women who want to lose weight. Weeks old, no website yet, about $1,720 a month to spend.
The owner is Russian-speaking. His customers had to be Czech. He said so at the first meeting, and he said the difficult half of it too: he had concerns about needing a Czech audience and no real idea how to bring them in.
Diagnosis
The first job wasn’t creative. It was arithmetic.
A newspaper offered a placement: 197,000 readers, about $285, three days. On a roughly $1,720 monthly budget that’s a serious commitment, and reach numbers like that close deals on their own.
So it got modelled before it got bought. 56% of those readers in target, then the share who would actually see the piece, then read it, then follow a link, then book, then buy. One customer, for the whole $285. We didn’t place it.
Facebook came in at about $3.30 a lead. Across 47 campaigns and roughly $2,150, the Czech-language lead form produced 384 leads, most of them out of one campaign running twenty-nine ad sets against each other on about $7 to $9.50 a day.
The creative test had a clean answer. A discount ad, "-30% Happy Days", cost about $3.51 a lead. An ad selling the fitness zone itself cost about $2.23 and brought 68% more of them. Cheaper and better, and the discount was the thing everybody expected to win.
Then the studio started calling the leads.
Decisions
- Modelled the newspaper placement down to a purchase before buying it, rather than judging it on reach
- Committed to Czech-language acquisition rather than the owner’s own language, which is the whole reason he was worried
- Ran twenty-nine ad sets at about $7 to $9.50 a day, one offer per set, against a set carrying every offer at once
- Built a product ladder from a free plan to an approximately $760 programme, so there was something to sell somebody after the first visit
- Put a conditions checkbox in the lead form, because "free massage" attracts people who only want the free massage
- Told people in advance which number would call them, since nobody in Prague answers an unknown number any more
Results
384 leads at about $3.30 each.
And the finding worth more than the number: the cheapest creative produced the worst customers. The client’s own words after working the list, in the order they arrived: the advertising is uninformative, nobody understands what it’s about. They saw the promotion and thought it was a gym. The fitness-zone form gives plenty of leads and little comes out of it.
Cost per lead said one thing. The phone said another, and the phone was right.
Underneath it sat a problem no lead form can solve. Apparatus cosmetology isn’t a category a Czech buyer recognises, and a form can capture curiosity but it can’t explain a service somebody has never heard of. That’s why the answer stopped being about ads and became a page that explains what the thing is, what it does, how a session goes, and what it costs.
The ladder is what made any of it worth doing: free consultation, an approximately $12 first session, passes from about $47 to $186, programmes at about $357 and $593, and a roughly $760 rejuvenation course at the top. Sixty-four times the tripwire price, with a named product at every rung, so nobody had to invent the next offer in the room.