The client and the challenge
SupDesign is a private design school in Ajaccio: global design, product development, project communication. Five years of existence, a genuine pedagogical project, and never a euro invested in digital advertising. The brief fit in one sentence: recruit students for the new school year, with €5,000 of total budget. The starting maths were brutal: at least 26 qualified applications were needed to break even. Below that, the school lost money.
What we understood
With a small budget, there is no room for improvisation: every misspent euro shows. We structured the budget in three tiers: make the school known to the target (high-schoolers, students, adults retraining), turn that discovery into applications, then concentrate the remaining budget on retargeting people already reached, where cost per application is lowest. And one conviction: with a young audience, creative is everything. A school that talks like an administration will recruit nobody on Instagram.
What we did
44 creatives produced and tested over five months: face-to-camera videos, static visuals, story formats. Angles tested, measured, eliminated or amplified week after week. The curve tells the story better than we can: €430 per application in the first weeks of testing, €52 at cruising speed. And on retargeting, people already exposed to the school: €13.86 per application, the best lever of the whole campaign. That is exactly what iteration is: accepting to pay dearly at first to learn, then harvesting.
A small budget does not forbid results. It forbids approximation.
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