The brief
Arsyn (Alvie & Rao Architects Syndicate) is an architecture and interior design studio working across Islamabad and Lahore, with a commercial portfolio of well-known brands behind it. I have run their Meta ads since the account opened, and the brief has changed as the studio has grown.
At the start the studio wanted its Instagram built up. For an architecture practice the profile is the portfolio, and theirs was thin, so the first phase was about followers and profile visits. Once that was in place the studio asked for something different: enquiries from people with a real project, ideally commercial ones, since that's the work the studio most wants and the work its portfolio proves best.
What I did
Phase one: grew the Instagram. Two traffic campaigns brought 59,211 profile visits at a little over Rs4 each, one of them covering Lahore, Faisalabad and Peshawar as well. The profile filled out with the studio's work and the following grew with it. That was the brief at the time, and it did what it was meant to.
Phase two: the switch to leads, and the first tests. When the studio asked for enquiries, the first two lead campaigns, one in Lahore and one across Islamabad and Lahore, came in at Rs610.07 and Rs602.84 a lead. An account that had spent months optimising for profile visits had no lead data to learn from, the creative was built for browsing rather than enquiring, and the cost showed it. I paused both.
Audited my own account. I went back through every campaign and asked what each one had actually produced. Profile visits were cheap, but they don't commission interiors. The audit also flagged problems off the platform: contact details that didn't match across the website and profiles, and a website contact form that needed fixing, because an enquiry that can't get through is wasted.
Wrote a 30-day media plan and a creative brief. The plan moved the account back to lead generation, and the brief put the studio's commercial work at the front of the creative.
Built an audience from the commercial work. A video campaign showing the commercial projects delivered 70,094 ThruPlays at Rs0.97, so there was a warm audience of people who had watched the work through.
Relaunched lead forms for commercial projects. A new lead campaign aimed at cold audiences for commercial interiors, with a short form asking only for what the studio needed to follow up.
Results
The commercial lead campaign produced 195 form leads at Rs319.88 each, against Rs610.07 and Rs602.84 on the first two tests: a 47% lower cost per lead. Across the three lead campaigns the account has produced 363 form leads, plus 155 WhatsApp conversations at Rs158.98 from a separate messaging campaign.
In short
The Instagram phase did what the studio asked for at the time. When the brief changed to enquiries, the cost per lead started high, and fixing the creative, the audience and the contact routes brought it down by 47%. The studio now has both: a profile that works as a portfolio, and a lead campaign that brings commercial projects at a cost it can plan around.