The problem
A local, in-person welding school had never run paid ads. Tuition runs $18,000 to $22,000 per student — a real-dollar decision, not an impulse buy — and the school needed a way to fill seats beyond word of mouth and walk-ins.
Five weeks ago, we launched Meta ads for the school with a test budget of $100 a day, roughly $3,000 a month. The goal for this phase wasn't to scale — it was to find out which funnel, which message, and which avatar actually convert before spending real money at real volume.
The machine we built
We specialize in growing enrollments for trade and vocational schools — welding, HVAC, IT, healthcare, and more — and the core of that work is putting the right video in front of the right person at the right time. For this launch, that meant three things happening before a single ad went live:
1. Nailing the avatar
Rather than guess who enrolls in a welding program, we mined the school’s own history — past sales call recordings and past student profiles — to find the real pattern. The primary avatar: 18 to 24 year-olds just out of high school, not headed to college, looking for something that pays well. The next group: parents of those students. After that: adults considering a career change.
2. Killing the wrong objection before the call
A portion of prospects in this space assume welding school works like a paid apprenticeship — you get paid to attend. We treat that as a landmine, not a selling point: those programs tend to pay low wages and slow-walk advancement to recoup the cost of training you. So the messaging made it explicit upfront: this is a paid program, meaning the student pays tuition. That one clarification keeps the sales team’s calendar filled with prospects who already understand the deal, instead of burning calls correcting a misunderstanding.
3. Running two funnels side by side
Instead of betting the whole budget on one funnel, we tested two:
- A scheduled-call funnel — ad to a page with a short, mini-webinar-style video that nurtures the prospect on the program, then books a call with the sales team.
- A click-to-call funnel — a prospect scrolling their feed taps the ad and calls in live, right from their phone.
Once a lead was in either funnel, we kept circling them with proof between the click and the sales call — testimonial videos, classroom highlights, a day-in-the-life look, and a personal message from the founder — so the conversation was already warm by the time the sales team connected. Underneath all of it, email and SMS automation ran in the background so no lead sat untouched: real-time CRM tagging, task scheduling, and smart-view routing kept the sales team aligned on exactly where every lead stood.
The results (first 5 weeks)
| Metric | Target | Actual |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly test budget | ~$3,000/mo ($100/day) | $2,340 over 5 weeks |
| Funnels tested | 1 | 2 (scheduled-call + click-to-call) |
| Confirmed enrollments | — | 3 confirmed, 1 verbal |
| Tuition per enrollment | $18,000–$22,000 | ~$20,000 |
| Estimated tuition pipeline | — | ~$60,000 |
| Cost per enrollment | — | $780 |
The scheduled-call funnel ran first: roughly $1,400 in spend produced 2 enrollments. The click-to-call funnel launched more recently and has already produced 1 confirmed enrollment plus 1 verbal confirmation off about $924 in spend — the early read is that click-to-call is outperforming the scheduled-call funnel, though both are working.
The takeaway
This is still early innings — five weeks of testing, not a scaled campaign. But the pattern is already visible: the ad itself is only about a third of the work. Understanding the avatar, killing the wrong objection before the phone rings, and keeping leads warm with the right follow-up between click and call decide the outcome long before the sales team ever picks up.
Next up for this school: rolling out Atomic Enrollment's AI SDR to handle follow-up automatically — tees up calls for the sales rep, answers FAQs in real time, and makes sure no lead goes cold waiting on a callback.