B2B Paid Social: The Founder's Complete Playbook

Most B2B paid social campaigns are a complete waste of money. Founders and marketers pour thousands into LinkedIn and Meta only to get a handful of rubbish leads and a sky-high cost per acquisition. They then blame the platform, the algorithm, or the economy. Tbh, the problem is almost always the strategy. You're trying to apply B2C tactics to a B2B world, and it just doesn't work. You're interrupting highly-paid, time-poor decision-makers and asking them for their time with a generic message and a weak offer. It's no wonder they ignore you.

The good news is, it doesn't have to be this way. When done right, paid social can be an incredibly powerful engine for B2B growth, generating a predictable stream of qualified leads who actually want to talk to you. But it requires a completely different mindset. It’s not about flashy creative or chasing vanity metrics. It's about deep customer understanding, ruthless financial modelling, and creating offers so valuable people would feel silly saying no. This is the real founder's guide to paid social, cutting through the nonsense to give you a framework that actually works.

So, Why Are My B2B Ads Failing Miserably?

Let's be brutally honest. If your ads aren't working, it’s not because of some secret algorithm change or because your competitor has a bigger budget. It's because your fundamental approach is flawed. Most failing campaigns I see make one of three critical errors, and usually it's all three at once.

First, they target sterile demographics. You tell Meta to find "CMOs in the UK" or "IT Directors at companies with 50-200 employees." This tells you nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one because you're targeting a job title, not a person with a problem. Your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best account executives quitting because the CRM is a mess and their pipeline is drying up. That's the pain. That's what you target.

Second, they run "Brand Awareness" campaigns. This is probably the most common way to burn cash. When you set your objective to "Reach" or "Awareness," you are giving the platform a very clear instruction: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm does exactly that. It finds the users inside your targeting who are the absolute least likely to click, engage, or ever buy. Why? Because their attention is cheap. You are actively paying to find the worst possible audience for your product. Awareness is a byproduct of great performance, not a prerequisite for it.

And third, the offer is rubbish. The "Request a Demo" or "Book a Call" button is the most arrogant Call to Action in marketing. It presumes your busy, C-level prospect has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It’s high-friction and offers them zero immediate value. Your campaign lives or dies on the strength of your offer, and asking for a sales call is one of the weakest offers you can make.

Getting this right means completely flipping your approach. You need to stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a problem-solver. The flowchart below shows the two paths. I'd bet you're currently stuck on the left.

How Much Should I Be Paying for a Lead?

This is the wrong question. It's the question that keeps businesses small, timid, and stuck. The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The moment you make that shift, you stop being a cost-cutter and start being a strategic investor in your own growth. And the answer lies in a metric most B2B founders ignore: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Calculating your LTV isn't just an academic exercise; it's the key to unlocking your entire advertising budget. It tells you exactly how much you can spend to acquire a customer while remaining profitable. The goal is to maintain a healthy ratio, usually around 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). For every £1 you spend on ads, you should be getting at least £3 back in lifetime gross margin. I remember one client we worked with, a B2B SaaS in the medical recruitment space, was struggling with a £100 cost per user acquisition. After we refined their campaigns, we reduced that cost to just £7. This case highlights a fixation on the cost per acquisition number itself, without the context of the customer's lifetime value. They were potentially leaving a huge amount of growth on the table because they were focused only on lowering the initial cost, rather than understanding what a profitable customer was truly worth.

Let's do the maths. You need three numbers:

• -> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month?
• -> Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Don't use 100%!)
• -> Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a perfectly targeted CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and is essential for figuring out your paid social media ROI. Use the calculator below to find your own numbers.

Which Platform Should I Use? The LinkedIn vs Meta B2B Showdown

Once you know who you're targeting (by their pain) and what you can afford to spend (from your LTV), the next question is where to find them. For B2B, the debate almost always comes down to two platforms: LinkedIn and Meta (Facebook/Instagram). There's no single right answer, and the best strategy often involves both. The trick is understanding what each platform is good for and choosing the right platform for your specific goal.

LinkedIn is the obvious choice for many. Its major advantage is its targeting data. You can target people based on their job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even specific company names. If you need to get your ad in front of 'Heads of IT at FTSE 250 financial services companies', LinkedIn is the only place you can do that with any real accuracy. I remember one client in the environmental controls industry who needed to reach very specific decision-makers. Using the powerful targeting options on LinkedIn, alongside Meta Ads, we were able to reduce their cost per lead by 84%. The downside? It's expensive. You're competing with every other B2B advertiser for a finite and very valuable audience, so expect to pay a premium for every click and lead.

Meta, on the other hand, is often underestimated for B2B. People think it's just for selling clothes and gadgets. This is a huge mistake. While its B2B targeting options are more limited (you can target things like 'small buisness owners' or 'Facebook page admins'), its algorithm is far more powerful at finding people who are likely to convert, often at a much lower cost. We've had great success for B2B SaaS clients on Meta, like one campaign that drove 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each. The key with Meta is that you can't rely on the demographic targeting alone. Your ad creative and your offer have to do the heavy lifting of calling out your specific audience and filtering out everyone else.

The right choice depends entirely on your Ideal Customer Profile. If your ICP is a very specific, senior role in a large enterprise, LinkedIn is your best bet to start. If your ICP is a small business owner or a role that's harder to define by job title, Meta could be a goldmine. For a detailed breakdown, our guide on LinkedIn vs Meta ads goes into much more detail.

How Do I Actually Target People on These Platforms?

Okay, let's get into the specifics. Great strategy is useless without solid execution. The way you build your audiences is fundamentally different between the two platforms, and you need to master both if you want to acheive a truly effective full-funnel approach.

On LinkedIn, it's all about layering. Think about your ICP's pain point, then translate that into their professional attributes. For instance, if you sell data enrichment software, your primary companies might be SMEs with 50-200 employees in the software or financial services industries. The decision-makers would be the CMO, Head of Sales, or CTO. On LinkedIn, you can build this audience directly. You'd create a campaign targeting:
-> Company Industries: Computer Software, Financial Services, Marketing & Advertising.
-> Company Size: 51-200 employees.
-> Job Functions: Marketing, Sales, Information Technology.
-> AND Job Seniorities: Director, VP, C-Suite.
This combination ensures your ad is only shown to the most relevant people. You can even upload a list of target companies and tell LinkedIn to only show ads to the decision-makers at those specific firms. This is how you get hyper-relevant and it's why it's the focus of our complete guide to LinkedIn ads.

On Meta, the approach is different. It's less about building a perfect profile and more about giving the algorithm the right signals. For new accounts, you start by testing detailed targeting based on interests and behaviours. But you have to be clever about it. If you're targeting e-commerce store owners, don't target the interest "Amazon." That's way too broad. Instead, target interests like "Shopify," "WooCommerce," or people who are admins of a Facebook retail page. You're looking for interests that your target audience is much more likely to have than the general population.

Once you have some data (website visitors, leads, customers), you unleash Meta's real power: lookalike and retargeting audiences. I usually prioritise these in order of value. The best audience is a lookalike of your highest-value customers. The next best is a lookalike of all customers, then people who initiated checkout, then people who added to cart, and so on. You're creating audiences based on high-intent actions, and Meta's algorithm is brilliant at finding more people just like them. For retargeting, you'll show seperate ads to people who visited your site but didn't convert, reminding them of the value you offer.

Your Ad Copy is Rubbish. Here's How to Write a Message They Can't Ignore.

Even with perfect targeting, your campaign will fail if your message is weak. Most B2B ads are a laundry list of features and jargon. They talk about "synergistic platforms" and "end-to-end solutions." Nobody cares. Your prospect cares about their own problems. Your ad's only job is to hook into that problem and present your product as the clear, obvious solution.

For a high-touch service business, you should use the Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) framework. You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep.
-> Problem: Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?
-> Agitate: Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?
-> Solve: Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth.

For a B2B SaaS product, you use the Before-After-Bridge (BAB) framework. You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief.
-> Before: Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out.
-> After: Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated.
-> Bridge: Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today.

Notice how none of these examples lead with the product. They lead with the customer's nightmare. They demonstrate empathy first, then introduce the solution. This is how you stop the scroll and get the click. If you're based in the capital, these principles are core to our guide on building a B2B paid social strategy for London businesses, where competition for attention is fierce.

Please, For the Love of God, Delete Your "Request a Demo" Button

This brings us to the single most common and destructive failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. I've said it before, but it's so important it needs its own section. The "Request a Demo" button must die. It's a conversion killer.

Think about it from your prospect's perspective. They are a busy, important person. They've just been interrupted by your ad. They click, and you immediately ask them to commit 30-60 minutes of their valuable time to sit through a sales presentation. It's an incredibly arrogant ask. It provides them with zero immediate value and positions you as just another vendor trying to get into their wallet. It's high friction, low value, and the main reason your landing page conversion rates are terrible.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. The goal is to move from a high-friction "sales call" offer to a low-friction "value" offer.

For SaaS founders, this is your unfair advantage. A free trial or a freemium plan is the gold standard. Let them use the actual product and feel the transformation. If you're not a SaaS company, you must bottle your expertise. A marketing agency could offer a free, automated brand audit. A data analytics firm could offer a free 'Data Health Check'. For us, as an agency, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. Give away value first. Trust will follow, and so will the sales.

What Should My Campaign Structure Actually Look Like?

Alright, we've covered the why and the what. Now for the how. A disorganised campaign structure is just as bad as a bad strategy. You need a logical, scalable framework that lets you test audiences and creative effectively without everything becoming a complete mess. The goal is to avoid the common mistake of lumping everything into one campaign, which gives you no real insight into what's actually working. Instead, you should seperate your campaigns by their objective and stage in the funnel.

I usually build out a structure based on the ToFu/MoFu/BoFu (Top, Middle, Bottom of Funnel) model.
-> ToFu (Top of Funnel): This is your prospecting campaign. The goal here is to reach new, cold audiences who have never heard of you before. Your audiences will be your interest-based groups on Meta and your layered demographic audiences on LinkedIn. The objective is always conversions (leads, signups, etc.), not awareness.
-> MoFu (Middle of Funnel): This is for warming up people who have shown some interest but aren't ready to buy. These are your website visitors, video viewers, and page engagers. You'll retarget them with different ads, perhaps case studies or testimonials, to build trust.
-> BoFu (Bottom of Funnel): This is for closing the deal. You're retargeting people who have shown high intent, like visiting the pricing page or abandoning a checkout. The ad copy here is more direct, often with an offer of help or a special incentive to get them over the line.

By splitting your campaigns this way, you can allocate your budget more intelligently and tailor your messaging to the user's level of awareness. It's the foundation for a system that doesn't just generate leads, but nurtures them towards becoming a customer. The ultimate goal is to stop wasting money on disorganised ads and build a predictable growth machine.

This is the main advice I have for you:

This Seems Complicated. Can I Do It Myself?

You absolutely can. Everything I've outlined here is a strategic framework you can start implementing today. But I'll be honest, it's not easy. It takes time, expertise, and a lot of testing to get right. You'll need to become an expert in your customer's psychology, a data analyst for your LTV and campaign metrics, a copywriter for your ads, and a strategist for your funnel.

Many founders try to do this themselves and end up spending months and thousands of pounds on trial and error, making the very mistakes I've described. They burn through their budget, get frustrated with the poor results, and conclude that "paid social doesn't work for B2B."

The alternative is to work with someone who has already made all the mistakes and knows the shortcuts. A specialist can help you bypass the painful learning curve, implement a proven strategy from day one, and start generating qualified leads much faster. It's about deciding whether your time is better spent becoming a paid ads expert or focusing on what you do best: running your business and serving your customers.

If you're serious about growing your B2B company with paid social and want an expert opinion on your current strategy, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute consultation. We'll look at your ad account, your offer, and your funnel, and give you actionable advice you can use immediately. There's no sales pitch, just a genuine attempt to help. If we think we're a good fit to work together after that, we can discuss it. If not, you'll still walk away with a ton of value.

Hope this helps!