Improving Your Student Lead Quality

In order for us to improve your student lead quality we first need to understand where our students come from. More specifically, what towns or areas do they live in. Understanding this will give us a better picture of our student demographic which we can then use to be more precise in our marketing.

When I first started working with North River Jiu Jitsu (located in Palmetto Florida), like all martial art schools, they were looking to increase new leads. One of the ways I went about this was social media advertising. Up until this point my process was fairly straight forward: create a geographic radius centered on the school's location and begin running advertisements in that area. I used this process for countless schools to generate hundreds of leads at affordable to low costs. However, when I implemented this for North River the results were not what I expected:

An embarrassing 10 leads generated in 28 days at a cost of $30 per lead. What was worse is that almost all 10 leads were low quality! I had no idea how to fix this. I spent a lot of time tweaking the ad creative, the ad copy, ad offer, still nothing.

Finally it dawned on me when I was looking at the local area around the school in Google Maps. Where exactly were these leads coming from? Where are there current students located? The next meeting I had with North River I brought these questions up to them. It turns out the area I was advertising to was the wrong one! Most of their students come from Ellenton and Parrish not Palmetto! I created new geographic radiuses around these areas and the results speak for themselves:

23 leads at a cost of $21 in 28 days! Not only did the amount of leads double but so did the quality. North River reported that they closed almost 25% of these new leads.

The lesson I learned here is that my formula is not just cut and paste for every school. All academy's are unique and require their own tailored approach.

So if you want to improve your student lead quality you first need to understand where your current students are coming from.