Career consulting for IT professionals: jobs abroad + business English

The task

The client helps IT and digital professionals find a job abroad: support all the way to the offer, a separate track for jobs inside Russia, separate business English courses, and from autumn 2025 a two-month group bootcamp. Tickets are high: international support ₽305,000 plus 5% of annual salary, the Russia track ₽54,500 plus 5%, English ₽120–150K.

The audience is Russian-speaking professionals outside Russia, scattered across dozens of countries. The task: bring in leads for expensive consulting on cold traffic, where the decision takes a long time and several touches.

What we did

Worked for 15 months straight. Traffic went not into one funnel but four parallel ones, and we kept those that paid back:

• Telegram channel — ads to a pre-lander → click-through to the channel → warm-up with content → lead. Conversion pre-lander → click-through 40–70%, click-through → subscription 40–70%.
• Webinars — separate webinars for the international track, for English, later for the bootcamp. Landing page to registration conversion 15–45%.
• Direct promo — a landing page offering a free consultation, a dialogue in Telegram.
• Quiz — lead qualification before hand-off to the CRM.

Results

For 04.2025–06.2026 in Meta:

• Ad spend — $125,104 (₽9,941,090)
• Leads — 16,391, plus 6,769 Telegram channel subscribers
• Revenue — $371,285 (₽29,271,331)
• ROMI — 297%
• Payments — 111, average ticket ₽167,673

Of the revenue, ₽18,611,690 came directly via tracking tags, another ₽10,659,641 — from subscribers of the Telegram channel built by this same advertising. Counting tags only, ROMI is 187%; the channel adds 110 p.p. on top.

Insights

Half of the revenue comes not from the payments that happened in the launch month. For the June 11 webinar, late payments in the following months (₽773,917) turned out larger than immediate payments (₽591,200), and in June 2026 late payments from past launches (₽1,371,455) exceeded the current month’s revenue. On high-ticket consulting, measuring ROMI at month close means undercounting more than half.

The Telegram channel brought almost as much as the webinars, at a fraction of the team’s effort. Channel promo pays back not through a quick sale but through warm-up: a subscriber comes for the content and buys later.

In channel promo, useful content works better than case studies. Cases generate sales inside the channel, after warm-up — a cold audience does not respond to a case-based ad head-on.

Videos with voice-over and subtitles consistently beat statics throughout the project. Switching to videos with hard triggers cut the cost per lead 2.5x.

What we switched off: a long-read article as a funnel (conversion to dialogue 2–3%), the lead form and the bot as an entry point to the bootcamp. A broad “whole world” audience gives higher conversion to registration but a more expensive click — it does not win on cost per lead.