Stepful

The objective

Helping 1 million job seekers achieve their dreams.

Online learning platform Stepful is on a mission to create opportunity by empowering anyone interested in a healthcare career to enter the field through access to an affordable, fully online education. As a company value, Stepful has set a goal of helping 1 million people land their dream jobs. To support this ambitious enrollment goal, the brand recognized the need to refine its advertising strategy toward audience expansion, using TikTok ads to generate new and diverse prospects.

The solution

Shifting strategy to scale success with Lead Generation.

While Stepful had already cultivated an audience and built a strong brand presence organically on TikTok, the team decided to make reaching potential new students the core of their TikTok ads strategy. Honing in on driving leads, the brand opted for running ad campaigns under the Lead Generation objective, utilizing the Web Form option. This shift let them create their own fully customizable interest form, allowing Stepful to review inputs from potential prospects, and then qualify their leads via their own website. Using the Web Form option also helped Stepful drive more traffic to their website; doing so helped support further exploration and self-education on their program offerings via their website if prospects were not ready to input their information quite yet.

Given the strategy updates, it was crucial to ensure optimal setup and maintenance of the TikTok Pixel, a piece of code that shares website events with TikTok, helping measure traffic, evaluate and optimize campaign performance, and find new customers. To optimize further, Stepful utilized the Submit Form event and avoided retargeting existing leads by excluding them audience from targeting. They also developed a lookalike audience based on their website traffic to reach new leads who shared commonalities with their existing customers. Scaling their daily spend and switching to monthly invoicing also helped the brand optimize their overall cost per lead.

Stepful’s engaging, authentic content was already connecting with their organic audience. To level up their success further for ads, they used tactics such as student testimonials, music and sounds, onscreen text, and influencers who articulated program details and offered day-in-the-life insights. Given Stepful’s robust organic presence, it also made sense to utilze their best-performing organic content as Spark Ads, an in-feed ad format that allows advertisers to boost their posts and scale results.

The results

More leads, lower costs.

The new strategy sparked massive interest and generated a huge number of leads, resulting in more than 85K Lead Generation web form submissions and a form submission rate of 9.6%. Their ads also received over 183M impressions and 887K clicks. When compared to previous TikTok ad campaigns, changing their objective to Lead Generation helped decrease their CPA (cost per acquisition) from $23/lead to to $13.29, an overall CPA decrease of more than 40%.

The tips & takeaways

• Use the Lead Generation objective with the Web Form option to drive traffic, engage leads, and increase conversions.

• Set up the TikTok Pixel to measure website traffic, optimize your campaigns, and find new customers with more precise targeting via custom and lookalike audiences.

• Implement Spark Ads to take advantage of your organic following and leverage proven popular posts.