JnS Education helps students secure university places. When I took over its marketing on a contract in 2024, leading a team of six, the account had two different problems in two regions. In the Gulf, lead volume was low, quality was poor and the cost per result was high. In Pakistan, there were plenty of leads and most of them never answered the phone.
The fix for both turned out to be the same question: should a lead come through a form or through a conversation? The honest answer was both, run together, with each doing what it's good at.
What forms are good at
Meta's instant forms are the fastest way to get volume. The form opens inside the app, pre-fills name and contact details, and takes seconds. For a consultancy that needs a pipeline of enquiries to call through, that volume matters.
The cost is quality. A form submitted in ten seconds is easy to forget about. The admissions team was calling people who didn't remember filling it in.
Two changes made the forms work. First, I removed every field that wasn't needed for the first call, because each extra question cost completions. Second, in Pakistan, awareness campaigns featuring student success stories ran ahead of the lead campaigns, so by the time someone was asked to enquire they already knew who JnS was. Leads from a familiar brand answer the phone.
What WhatsApp is good at
A WhatsApp conversation starts with the student, not with a form. They have to type something, which means they're more committed, and the admissions team can reply inside the same thread rather than cold-calling a number. Instagram DMs worked the same way for a younger audience.
The volume is lower and each conversation takes staff time. But the quality was consistently better, and in the Gulf, where the problem was quality rather than quantity, WhatsApp and DM campaigns gave the team conversations worth having.
Running them together
The approach that worked was to run both and retarget between them. Someone who opened a form and didn't submit it saw a WhatsApp ad next. Someone who started a chat and went quiet saw a form ad with a specific course. Each route caught what the other dropped, and the number of leads who never responded fell.
Localise by country, not by region
The other change was to stop treating the Gulf as one market. The UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar each got their own creative and messaging, with the universities and courses that mattered in that country. A single "Middle East" campaign had been paying for reach in markets where the message didn't land.
The result
Admissions rose 18% over the period. Cost per lead fell in the Gulf as volume and quality both improved, and in Pakistan the dual approach cut the share of leads who never responded and brought the cost per quality lead down. Organic traffic grew 28% from the SEO and content work running alongside. The JnS Education case study has the detail.
What I'd tell any education or services business
- Forms for volume, conversations for quality, and retargeting between the two.
- Cut the form to what the first call needs. Every extra field costs leads.
- If leads don't recognise the brand, run awareness first. It makes every lead that follows cheaper to convert.
- Localise properly. One campaign for five countries pays for a lot of reach that doesn't land.
And measure it on the number the business cares about. For JnS that was admissions, not leads, and the 18% is the figure I'd put at the top of any report.
I run paid ads on Meta, Google and TikTok across the UK, the Gulf and Pakistan, and build the tracking and pages around them. Get in touch or find me on LinkedIn.