TikTok Ads success story · Online healthcare career school

How an online healthcare career school cut its cost per lead more than 40% with TikTok lead ads.

Name: Overtop Media Digital Marketing
Address: 933 Louise Ave Suite 101-18, Charlotte, NC, 28204, US
Telephone: (704) 237-0707
Price range: $$

Stepful already had a following on TikTok. It turned that attention into enrollments by switching its ads to the Lead Generation objective, sending people to its own interest form and boosting the videos its audience already liked.

Business: Stepful
Market: United States
Goal: More prospective students at a lower cost per lead

Woman writing notes in a notebook beside an open laptop at a desk

The results.

The cost per lead is compared with Stepful’s previous TikTok ad campaigns that did not use the Lead Generation objective. TikTok gave no baseline for the other results.

40%+lower cost per lead, from $23 to $13.29
85.5Klead form submissions
9.6%form submission rate
183Mimpressions, with 887K clicks

As published by TikTok in its case study of March 8, 2024. TikTok did not state the campaign dates; leads were tracked with the TikTok Pixel’s form submission event.

The challenge.

Stepful trains people for healthcare jobs through affordable, fully online programs, and has set itself the goal of helping one million people into the careers they want. Getting there means a steady stream of new prospective students, many of whom have never heard of the school.

The school already had an organic audience on TikTok. The question was how to turn the platform from a place people enjoyed its videos into a place that produced qualified enrollment leads, at a cost that could grow.

Set the goalLead Generation objective, sending people to the school’s own form.
Track the sign-upThe pixel reports each form submission back to TikTok.
Find new prospectsLookalikes of site visitors; existing leads left out.
Boost proven videosStudent and creator posts that worked run as Spark Ads.

What they did.

Lead Generation objective with a website form · TikTok Pixel · Lookalike audiences · Spark Ads · Creator and student videos

Ads built to collect leads: Campaigns moved to the Lead Generation objective with the website form option, so prospects filled in Stepful’s own interest form and the school qualified them on its own site.
Tracking that taught the algorithm: The TikTok Pixel was set up carefully and the campaigns optimized for the form submission event, so delivery learned which viewers actually signed up.
New people only: Existing leads were excluded from targeting, and lookalike audiences built from website visitors found new prospects who resembled the people already interested.
Proven videos as ads: Student testimonials, day-in-the-life clips and creators explaining the programs were used, and the best organic posts were boosted as Spark Ads.

Why it worked.

Our read on the decisions behind the numbers, and what any business can take from them.

The goal matched the business: Telling TikTok to find form submissions, not clicks or views, is what moved the cost per lead from $23 to $13.29.
The website did the qualifying: Sending people to its own form let Stepful ask the questions that matter for enrollment, and gave prospects who were not ready yet a place to read more.
No money spent twice: Leaving existing leads out of the targeting kept the budget on people the school had not reached yet.
Real students sold the program: A graduate describing her new job is more convincing than a course catalog. Videos that had already won organically went into ads with the guesswork removed.

How we would run this play for your business.

You do not need a national budget to use the same ideas. This is how Overtop Media Digital Marketing puts them to work in our tiktok ads management.

Optimize for the lead, not the click: We set up the pixel and the form events on your site first, then run TikTok lead campaigns that learn from real sign-ups. Our TikTok ads management reports cost per qualified lead, not views.
Your people on camera first: Your own videos come first: students, patients or customers in their own words. Then the best local creators, booked directly with no agency markup, and stock only to fill gaps.
Boost what already works: Posts that perform well on your account become Spark Ads, so paid budget goes behind videos your audience has already approved.
Follow every lead to enrollment: Leads flow into your CRM, and the ones that enroll or book are fed back so campaigns find more people like them. Google Ads and Meta ads run from the same plan.