Bringing new students to St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju
Build a digital presence for SJA Jeju among high-income families in the Russian Far East and turn precision-targeted performance marketing into qualified inquiries.
2.9M+ ad impressions across Yandex networks.
72.500+ targeted visits to the localized landing page.
Background
RMAA led the market entry campaign for St. Johnsbury Academy Jeju (SJA Jeju). This premier American international boarding school, located on Jeju Island, South Korea, offers an elite educational ecosystem that prepares students for top-tier global universities. They reached out to us to expand the number of students within the Russian Far East.
Our team identified high-income families in cities such as Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk as the primary audience due to their proximity to South Korea. Understanding that Russian parents are deeply cautious about foreign education, RMAA designed a localized marketing framework, built trust, and captured high-quality admission leads.
Goal
To establish a strong presence for SJA Jeju in the Russian market, we transformed the school's global positioning into a highly practical performance campaign. Our team focused on four primary strategic objectives:
- Mapping Audience Objections: Address specific concerns among wealthy parents about campus life, academic accreditation, and university pathways by analyzing the school's Korean platform.
- Building Localized Digital Infrastructure: Create a high-converting, responsive Russian landing page designed to turn casual website visitors into direct school applicants.
- Running Precision Paid Search: Run highly targeted advertising campaigns in Yandex to capture parents actively looking for international education and boarding schools.
- Driving qualified traffic at scale so that the landing page received a steady flow of the right households across the target cities.
Solution
Objection mapping and content framework
Russian parents weigh foreign education carefully, so the landing page had to do the convincing before the first contact with the admissions office. To build a funnel and ensure the website meets the expectations and pain points of potential customers, we built a structured set of 36 targeted questions that a family runs through while choosing a school abroad. It covered the ground that drives the decision:
- Academic compatibility lined up the 12th-grade American curriculum against the 11th-grade Russian school cycle, so parents could see how the two systems connect.
- University pathways laid out the exact steps a graduate takes to enter a leading global university.
- Campus life and safety described the housing, the meals, and the supervision that keep students cared for while they are away from home.
- Educational support explained the language help available to international students and the high school specializations on offer.
This turned the academy's global positioning into a practical narrative that closes information gaps and meets a family's concerns during the first discovery phase, well before anyone gets in touch.
Landing page and UX production
Interest only becomes an inquiry when the journey through the page is clear, so instead of translating the existing site, we designed a dedicated Russian landing page. We arranged the layout so that each text block addresses a likely doubt at the exact moment a reader hits it, following the same set of 36 questions that shaped the copy. The build runs on a no-code platform, stays fully responsive across mobile devices, and sits on a custom domain with its own hosting. To measure performance, we connected Yandex Metrica, which tracked how visitors moved through the funnel and logged every target action, from phone clicks to completed lead forms.
Paid search and Yandex Advertising Network
Once the infrastructure was ready, we launched a targeted ad campaign across the Yandex Search and Yandex Advertising Network (YAN). We produced a set of banners and text-and-graphic creatives that showed the campus and the daily life of a student there, then narrowed delivery through three targeting layers:
- High-intent keywords captured precise searches around studying abroad, private boarding schools, and international education in South Korea.
- Interest-based triggers reached users who regularly looked up international high schools and educational travel across Asia.
- Lookalike modeling used Yandex data algorithms to find families whose online behavior matched the core high-income profile.
- Socio-demographic & Geo-filtering: focused exclusively on the 25–60 age bracket in the target Far Eastern cities.
Together, these layers kept delivery on the households most likely to consider a boarding school abroad, rather than spreading impressions across a broad pool.
Results
The four-month campaign (September - December 2024) built a reliable digital pipeline for SJA Jeju and passed the traffic targets set at the start:
- New school applications and students: 100+
- Brand reach: 2,927,126 ad impressions across Yandex networks, building recognition in the target cities.
- Precise Traffic Generation: The campaign delivered 72,515 targeted visits at an average CTR of 2.48%, which is 506% higher (over 5 times) than the initial forecasted benchmark of 0.44%.
- Search Intent Mastery: Performance on Yandex Search reached a standout 4.31% CTR, confirming that the localized content perfectly matched the intent of parents actively seeking international education.
- Direct inquiries: 1,013 total target actions, including 572 phone clicks, 409 email clicks, and 52 completed lead-generation forms.
