SaaS Go-To-Market: Paid Ad Strategy for New Products

Most go-to-market strategies for new SaaS products are doomed from the start. They're built on a foundation of product features, demographic guesswork, and a desperate hope that if you just shout loud enough about your "innovative solution," customers will magically appear. Tbh, it's a recipe for burning cash with nothing to show for it.

The truth is, a successful paid acquisition strategy isn't about your product at all. It's about becoming an expert in your customer's most urgent, career-threatening nightmare. Once you understand that, everything else—the targeting, the ad copy, the offer—falls into place. This is the playbook for building a paid ad machine that actually finds customers, not just clicks.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get one thing straight. That Ideal Customer Profile you've got that says "companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" is completely useless. It tells you nothing of value and it leads to generic, boring ads that speak to absolutely no one. You have to stop thinking about who your customer *is* and start obsessing over what problem they *have*.

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's a specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare. For example, your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title; she's a leader staring at a flat-lining sales chart, terrified she's going to miss her quarterly target and have to explain why to the board. For a compliance SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing better reporting'; it's 'the CEO getting a seven-figure fine from the regulator because of a reporting error.' That's the stuff that keeps people awake at night, and that's what they'll pay to fix.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your targeting becomes a thousand times easier. You stop guessing with broad interests and start looking for signals. Where do people with this specific pain congregate? Find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' for tech leaders. Identify the industry newsletters they actually read, like 'Stratechery'. Figure out the SaaS tools they already pay for, like HubSpot or Salesforce, and target users of those tools. Are they in the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow people like Jason Lemkin on Twitter? This isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire paid ad strategy. If you haven't done this work, you have no business spending a single pound on ads. If you need more guidance on this, we've put together a deeper look into the founder's guide to paid acquisition for B2B SaaS.

How Much Should You Really Be Paying for a Customer?

Every founder I talk to is obsessed with one question: "What's a good Cost Per Lead?". It's the wrong question. The real question is, "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that is unlocked by its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Most people overcomplicate this, but the basic maths is simple. You need three numbers:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's an average customer pay you each month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Be honest.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

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

Let's run an example. Say your ARPA is £500, your gross margin is 80%, and your monthly churn is 4%.
LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

Suddenly you have the truth. Each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is about 3:1, which means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to get a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified trials into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 for that trial signup.

That £250 lead from a perfectly targeted CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive now, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the math that unlocks intelligent, agressive growth and stops you from chasing cheap leads that never convert. Play around with the calculator below to see how your own numbers stack up.

How Do You Write Ads That Actually Get Clicks?

Once you know the customer's nightmare and how much you can afford to pay to solve it, you need to write a message they can't possibly ignore. Stop listing features. Nobody cares about your "AI-powered synergy engine". They care about their problems.

For B2B SaaS, the best framework is the Before-After-Bridge. You paint a vivid picture of their current hell (the Before), show them the promised land (the After), and position your product as the clear, simple path to get there (the Bridge).

You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief. Your ad would say:

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 pound 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."

This structure works because it connects directly to the pain you identified in the first step. You're not selling software; you're selling a transformation from chaos to control. We have a whole playbook for reaching early SaaS adopters that goes deeper on this.

Why "Request a Demo" is Killing Your Funnel

Now we get to the single biggest point of failure in B2B advertising: the offer. I'm going to be brutally honest. The "Request a Demo" button is probably the most arrogant, self-serving Call to Action ever invented. It assumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly makes you look like every other commoditised vendor fighting for their attention.

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. For SaaS founders, you have an incredible unfair advantage here. The gold standard offer is a free trial (with no credit card details) or a freemium plan. Let them actually use the product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. I remember one software client we worked with who generated over 5,000 trials with this model by focusing on getting people into the product, not into a sales call.

When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You stop generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase, and start creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced and ready to buy. If you're finding you're getting low signups despite having a freemium model, the problem usually lies in your messaging or targeting, not the offer itself.

Where Do You Actually Find These Customers?

Okay, so you know their pain, you know what you can afford to pay, you have a killer message, and a value-first offer. Now, where do you run the ads? The platform you choose depends entirely on your customer's mindset.

Google Search Ads: This is for when your customer is problem-aware and solution-aware. They are literally typing their pain into Google. Your job is to show up with an ad that promises relief. For SaaS, this is often the best place to start because the intent is so high. You're not trying to convince someone they have a problem; you're just showing them you have the best solution. We have a complete guide on Google Ads for B2B SaaS which covers this in more detail.

LinkedIn Ads: This is your tool when you need to be precise, and your audience isn't actively searching. You need to reach a Head of Compliance at a FTSE 100 bank? You can do that on LinkedIn. It is more expensive, no doubt about it, but the targeting is surgical. We ran a campaign for a B2B software client and were able to get leads from key decision makers for around $22 a pop, which was a fantastic result given their LTV. For a deeper look, check out our guide to LinkedIn ads for B2B SaaS.

Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram): A lot of B2B founders dismiss Meta, and they're making a huge mistake. Its power isn't in its demographic targeting (which is average for B2B), but in its lookalike audiences. Once you have a list of your best customers, you can tell Meta "go find me more people who look exactly like these" and its algorithm is terrifyingly good at it. For one B2B software client, we generated over 4,600 registrations at just $2.38 each using this exact approach. It can absolutely work if you feed the machine high-quality data.

Shouldn't I Run Awareness Campaigns First?

Here’s an uncomfortable truth. When you launch a campaign on Meta or Google with "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" as the objective, you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very stupid, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being a loyal servant, does exactly what you asked. It scours your target audience and finds the users who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively, least likely to ever pull out a credit card and buy anything. Why? Because those users aren't in demand by other advertisers. Their attention is cheap. You are literally paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

For a new SaaS, awareness is a *byproduct* of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. The best form of brand awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your service and raving about it. That only happens through conversion. From day one, every penny of your ad spend should be driving a conversion action—a trial signup, a lead form submission, something that moves a prospect closer to becoming a customer. The launch phase is critical, and you can't afford to waste money on vanity metrics, which is something we discuss in our guide to launching a product with paid ads.

My Ads Are Working, But I Can't Seem to Scale. What Now?

This is a good problem to have, and its quite normal for software campaigns. You've found a winning combination of targeting, creative, and offer, but when you try to increase the budget, your CPA goes through the roof and your ROAS plummets. This is the scaling plateau.

It happens because you've saturated the core pocket of your most motivated audience. To scale further, you can't just do more of the same. You have to get smarter. There are a few levers you can pull:

• Improve Your Funnel: Even a small increase in your website's trial-to-paid conversion rate can have a massive impact. A 1% bump means you can afford to pay more for every trial, instantly making your ads more profitable and allowing you to scale spend.
• Increase Your LTV: Can you add a higher-tier plan? An annual discount to reduce churn? A usage-based component? The higher your LTV, the more you can spend to acquire a customer, giving you a huge advantage over competitors.
• Relentless Creative Testing: You need to find new ways to talk about the same problem. We've seen SaaS clients get amazing results with things like User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos—they feel more authentic and cut through the noise. You need a pipeline of new ad ideas to constantly test.
• Expand to New Platforms: Once you've truly maxed out the potential on Google Search, for example, it's time to take your winnings and start methodically testing LinkedIn or Meta. Use what you learned from your first platform to accelerate the process on the next.

It's about a systematic process of optimisation. We worked on one campaign for a medical SaaS where the initial CPA was a painful £100 per user. Through a rigorous process of testing and optimisation, we managed to bring that down to just £7. That's the difference between a failing business and a scalable one. The entire process is a part of what we call the complete customer acquisition framework for SaaS.

So, What's the Action Plan?

We've covered a lot of ground, from high-level strategy to specific tactics. It can feel like a lot, but the process is logical. You build a strong foundation and then systematically test and scale. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

When Does It Make Sense to Get Help?

You can absolutely follow this framework yourself. But it's a full-time job. As a founder, you're already juggling product development, fundraising, hiring, and a million other things. Your time is your most valuable asset, and it's probably better spent on the things only you can do.

Working with an expert who has scaled dozens of other SaaS companies is an accelerant. It's about avoiding the costly mistakes we've already made for other clients, implementing a proven system from day one, and getting to predictable growth months, or even years, faster than you could on your own. It's not about outsourcing the work; it's about plugging in expertise.

If you're serious about growing your SaaS with paid advertising and want an expert opinion on your current strategy, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We'll audit your campaigns, review your offer, and give you actionable advice you can implement immediately. There's no sales pitch, just a genuine attempt to help. If it seems like a good fit to work together after that, we can discuss it. If not, you walk away with a ton of free value.

Hope this helps!