The leads arrived. Never predictably, and never in a shape you could plan a year around.
Achieving 5× ROAS and expanding to new outlet
How Allset, a personal training studio for seniors, went from unpredictable enquiries to a dedicated headquarters and a plan for hiring, inside five months.
Over 100 qualified leads, and more than 100 phone calls.
Cost per lead at about a quarter of the market rate.
Including the dead months. December declines were worked through, not written off.
Allset trains older adults, mostly in their sixties and seventies, to build strength safely.
On video
The Allset success story
The same engagement and the same figures, said out loud.
Before
A business doing well, run on guesswork.
Allset trains older adults, mostly in their sixties and seventies, to build strength safely. Time-efficient sessions, a strong emphasis on healthy ageing. At the time of the engagement it was a small business with a lean team, working out of several shared gym locations.
Leads came in. How many next month was anybody’s guess.
Marketing was handled internally, through YouTube content, a newsletter and LinkedIn posts. It produced leads. It did not produce enough of them, and it did not produce them predictably, which is the part that matters when you are deciding whether to sign a lease.
Quality was the second problem. From past experience, a high share of enquiries came from people looking for a free trial with no real intention of committing. Time and effort went into them anyway. The volume figure flattered a pipeline that was thinner than it looked.
Without reliable marketing results, scaling decisions could not be made with any confidence, and so they were not made at all. Hiring and expansion both sat behind the same missing number.
Coaching one to one on a gym floor. At the time of the engagement the business worked out of several shared gym locations.
Why Ice Cube
He watched for years before he spent anything.
Jing Shi found Ice Cube through Ted’s YouTube videos. What stuck was not a promise. It was the structure: a systematic way of approaching marketing that matched how he already thought about his own craft in fitness.
Several years of staying in touch. No ad spend in any of them.
He was not ready to invest in ads at the time, and he did not. He stayed in contact with the team anyway, mostly with Jax, across several years before any of it turned into a budget.
When he did decide to put money into paid marketing, Ice Cube was the natural choice. Trust that had been built up over that time, alignment in thinking and approach, and a run of prior interactions and communication that had gone well.
If you are choosing an agency on the strength of a proposal, this is the paragraph to read twice. What won this engagement was several years of being useful to someone who was not buying.
During the work
What actually happened, month by month
Nothing here was clever. It was clarity first, then a tight loop of testing, measuring and talking often enough to catch things early.
01
Positioning and messaging, clarified first
Before spend was scaled, the offer was made legible: the target audience, the unique selling point and the key benefits, distilled into one clear value proposition and summarised into a single framework simple enough to hold in your head. Targeting and messaging were then aligned so the audience being paid for was the audience actually wanted.
02
Campaigns optimised on data, not opinion
Continuous experimentation and refinement, with regular insight on keywords, on ad spend allocation and on campaign improvements, all of it driven by what the numbers showed rather than by whose idea it was. Seasonal dips, including the December decline, were worked through rather than accepted as a write-off.
03
Monthly strategy calls, daily WhatsApp
A monthly call for planning and performance review, and a daily WhatsApp line for quick idea validation and feedback, for anything that could not wait for the call. Strategic insights and optimisation recommendations were shared as they came up rather than saved for a report.
After
What the engagement returned
Figures as published, rounded down where the source hedges. Nothing here is annualised or projected.
Cost per lead
Of the market rate, so the same budget bought roughly four times the volume
Return on ad spend
Achieved across the engagement
Qualified leads
Resulting in more than 100 phone calls, nearly all of them relevant to the target audience
Structured growth
From engagement to a faster and more structured growth footing
Volume was never the point on its own. Nearly all of the leads were relevant and aligned with the audience Allset wanted, which is what turned a lead count into more than 100 actual phone calls.
What the figures do not show
Two things sit outside the table. The first is conversion quality: these were people already searching for the service, so the potential was high before anyone picked up the phone. That is what narrow niche positioning buys, and it does not show up in a cost per lead.
The second is referral. The work produced significant referrals from existing clients, particularly inside senior communities, which is demand the ad account never gets credit for and no dashboard will attribute to it.
What it bought
Specialised equipment, in a fitted-out space rather than on a shared gym floor.
Asked to rate the work out of ten, Jing Shi answered “10, 11, maybe 12”.
Jing Shi, founder, Allset
He now recommends Ice Cube Marketing to other service-based business owners, and describes the relationship as a trusted long-term partnership. That is the only endorsement on this page, and it is worth more than a wall of logos, because it comes with a name attached and a business you can go and look at.
One distinction in his account is worth stating plainly, because it is the difference between the two kinds of agency relationship a business owner has to choose between: Ice Cube functions not as a marketing vendor but as a strategic partner, helping guide business decisions and marketing direction rather than only running the ad account.
Opened a dedicated headquarters
New site
Moved off shared gym floors to a permanent, scalable setup
Done
Invested in specialised equipment to serve clients better
Done
Gained the confidence to plan hiring: freelancers, full-time staff and interns
Planned
Why it continued
Consistent delivery of high-quality leads
Ongoing
Strategic insights and optimisation recommendations
Ongoing
Clear reporting and performance reviews
Monthly
Strategy calls for planning and review
Monthly
WhatsApp, for quick validation and feedback
Daily
“Trusted long-term partner.”
How Jing Shi describes the working relationship
Actively recommends the work to other service-based business owners.
Reported in the case study
Point by point
What changed, and what it changed to
Each of these was a stated problem before the engagement. Open one to see what it became.
Inconsistent lead flow, with low predictability
Consistent delivery of high-quality leads, sustained across the engagement, including through the December seasonal decline that had previously been treated as an unavoidable dead month.
Why this one matters most: predictability, not volume, is what makes a lease signable.
Poor lead quality, with many non-committed prospects
Nearly all leads relevant and aligned with the target audience, which converted a lead count into more than 100 actual phone calls rather than a longer list of people who were never going to book.
Why this one matters: a lead figure with no relevance figure beside it tells you nothing.
Uncertainty in scaling decisions
A dedicated headquarters opened, the business moved off shared gym floors onto a permanent and scalable setup, specialised equipment was bought, and hiring across freelancers, full-time staff and interns could finally be planned rather than guessed at.
Why this one matters: it is the only item on the list a customer of Allset would actually notice.
Marketing effort that produced too little for the work put in
Internal YouTube, newsletter and LinkedIn activity had built real long-term brand value, but generated too few leads to support growth. Paid campaigns were added on top of that groundwork rather than replacing it, and the cost per lead landed at about a quarter of the market rate.
Why this one matters: the existing content was not wasted, and any agency telling you to scrap it should be asked why.
No clear read on whether any of it was working
Close monthly reporting and performance reviews, a monthly strategy call for planning, and a daily WhatsApp line for anything that could not wait. Strategic insights and optimisation recommendations were raised as they arose rather than held back for a report.
Why this one matters: ask any prospective agency for their contact cadence in writing. The vague answers are the informative ones.
The next step
See whether the same thinking applies to your business
Want to find out the 5 critical elements in creating trust and overcoming skepticism over the internet? And see how you can apply the same idea to your business?
Fill in the form below to speak to our digital marketing specialist.
The Ice Cube Marketing team, Singapore.
A specialist, not a queue. The Allset engagement ran on monthly strategy calls and a daily WhatsApp line.
Singapore and Malaysia. Offices in Singapore and Johor Bahru.
Google Partner and Meta Business Partner.
Speak to a specialist
We will use your details to contact you about your enquiry and nothing else.
