Marketing and advertising: more leads, but no more sales

An English school for adults in Almaty raised its Instagram ad budget from 300,000 to 600,000 tenge a month. Messages on WhatsApp and Instagram Direct doubled, but payments went from 20 to 21. The owner texts you: "The ads aren't pulling their weight, let's add TikTok." The numbers in this lesson are illustrative.

You could launch it. But people are already writing in and not paying, and a new channel will bring even more people who write in and don't pay. First find where they drop off between the first message and the payment, and for that you have to look beyond the ad account.

Where advertising sits in marketing

The American Marketing Association defines marketing through four activities: creating an offering that has value for the customer, communicating it, delivering it and exchanging it. Advertising handles one of the four: communicating. What to offer, at what price and how the person gets it are not decided in the ad account.

The same page walks through the 4P model: product, price, place and promotion. Advertising is one part of promotion, alongside special offers, posts and influencers. The other three are separate decisions, and each one has its own owner in the company.

For the English school it looks like this:

Newcomers hear "place" and think of an address. For a course, place is above all the timetable. If the evening groups are full and someone can only study after seven, there is no course for them, however many ads they see. That is why the diagram calls this part availability: can the person actually buy and receive what is being advertised.

Response time has no letter of its own in 4P, while the extended 7P model puts it under process. The buyer doesn't care which letter it falls under: if nobody answers on WhatsApp until tomorrow, they go to the school next door.

One drop, four causes

In the ad account, October looks great: a lead still costs 2,000 ₸ and there are twice as many. The picture changes once you put payments from the CRM next to it.

The share of paying leads fell from 13% to 7%, and each payment now costs nearly 29,000 tenge in ads instead of 15,000. The ad account won't show you this: for it, the lead is the finish line. Look for the cause in four places, and expect more than one culprit.

The wrong people are writing in. The new ads went out to a broad audience. Direct fills up with parents looking for children's classes and students who want a free conversation club. The lead was counted, but there was no buyer in it. You can see this in half an hour: read the last 30 conversations and note what people asked.

The ad sells a different course. "Speak English in a month" brings in plenty of leads. At the trial lesson the person learns the programme takes a year and doesn't come back. The ads are to blame here, but not for being too few.

The price comes as a surprise. The ad has no price, and neither does the manager's first reply. The person asks again, gets "45,000 ₸ a month" and goes quiet. If chats keep ending on exactly that message, the owner has to fix it, with instalments, a three-month pass or a cheaper group. Or the marketer can put the price in the ad, so that only people who are fine with it write in.

Leads get lost or answered late. Two people handle the leads, and in September they replied within about twenty minutes. In October there are about 14 leads every working day. One of them still keeps up, the other's replies slip to the next day, and some chats sit unread. Someone who wrote on Monday evening has signed up with another school by Wednesday.

When the queue grows, ads only make it longer

Say the conversations make the leads look on target: adults are writing in, asking about levels and timetables. They still cost 2,000 ₸ each. Yet the share of payments fell, and one of the two managers has started replying the next day or later.

Then the first thing to open is the CRM, whether that's amoCRM, Bitrix24 or a spreadsheet. Look at two numbers by week and by manager: how long it takes from lead to first reply, and what share of leads reaches payment. New channels and creatives can wait.

Marketing ends at the payment, not at the lead, and everything that happens to a lead after the ad is part of it. If the bottleneck is in sales, another 150 leads join the same queue. Replies get slower, and the payment rate drops further.

At our school the CRM hands leads to two staff members in turn, 150 each in October. Daniyar still replies within about twenty minutes, as in September, and has 15 payments, which is 10%. Aigerim also works the front desk during the day, so she replies the next day or later. She has 6 payments, 4%. Same ads, same people, same price. The difference is who replied, and when.

You can compare managers this way only when leads are handed out in turn. If one manager gets warm leads from the website and the other gets cold ones from Direct, the gap in conversion comes from the sources, not from speed.

Now work out what the slowness cost. If all 300 leads had been handled the way Daniyar handles them, there would have been about 30 payments. At September's conversion (20 out of 150) there would have been 40, and there were 21. Slow replies cost 9 of the 19 missing payments, roughly half. That gets fixed in sales: take the front desk off Aigerim and hire someone for it, or set up a bot that replies at once and offers a trial lesson slot. The head of sales or the owner decides; the media buyer can't help here.

Speed doesn't explain the other half. Daniyar replies as fast as both managers did in September, yet he converts 10% against the earlier 13%. The new leads look weaker than the old ones. The CRM numbers only hint at it, so go back to the conversations with the questions from the previous section: what the ad promised, when the person learned the price, whether the timetable suited them.

Who fixes what

The marketer won't rewrite the syllabus or make the managers reply faster. The syllabus belongs to the head of curriculum and the teachers, the timetable to the director, the leads to the sales team. That is why every check needs a named person, or it stays an item on a list.

Advertising is worth working on when the conversations show that the wrong people are writing in, or too few, while replies, price and timetable are all fine. Then change the audience, the ad copy or the placement. One at a time, or a month later you won't know what worked.

Work and results are different lines in a report

The school owner pays not for what you did but for what changed. Keep the two on separate lines in your report, or the owner will take the work for the result and a month later ask where the money is.

"Launched TikTok, made 12 creatives" is work. It has to be done, but it tells the owner nothing about money. "Twice as many leads at 2,000 ₸" is a change in an ad metric, and the school's October shows how little that is worth without payments. "More payments, and they paid back the ad spend" is the effect. You measure it in money, with revenue and all the costs, as in the P&L lesson.

On your first paid project, agree on this before you start. You are responsible for leads from the right people at the agreed price. You share responsibility for payments with the sales team, and for that you need access to the CRM or at least a weekly export of leads with their statuses. Without it, in October you would have heard "the ads don't work" and had no way to show where the money was actually being lost.

Exercise: draw the customer path

Take a business you use yourself: the coffee shop near your home, a dental clinic, a clothing store on Instagram. On one page, draw the customer path in 5-7 steps.

• Where people hear about the business: ads, 2GIS, the sign outside, a friend's advice.
• Where they land next: the Instagram profile, the 2GIS listing, the website.
• What counts as a lead here: a Direct message, a call, a booking on the website.
• Who handles the lead and how fast. Write to them yourself as an ordinary customer and time the reply.
• When the person learns the price and how they pay.
• Next to each step, note which part of the 4P it belongs to and who in the business owns it.
• Mark where people drop out and why you think so.

For a dental clinic, the path might look like this. Someone sees an Instagram ad for "Professional cleaning for 15,000 ₸", visits the profile and writes on WhatsApp. The administrator replies three hours later and offers a slot in a week. The patient comes in, the dentist finds a cavity and quotes the cost of treatment. Some people go ahead with it; others go away to think and don't come back.

They drop out in three places. Nobody answers WhatsApp on Saturday evening. A slot a week away puts off people who are in pain right now. And the treatment bill after a cheap cleaning feels like a trap. Advertising affects only the last of these, and only half of it: the ad promised a cheap cleaning, and the patient hears the treatment price in the chair. The rest is down to the administrators' shifts and the dentists' schedule. With this diagram in hand, the conversation with the clinic owner starts not with "we need more ads" but with where the clinic is losing patients.

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