Solved: Best Ad Creatives for Conversions in Zurich

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your situation in Zurich. It's a common problem to feel like you're just throwing creatives at the wall and seeing what sticks, especially when marketing efforts aren't bringing back the results you need. The good news is the problem probably isn't the specific visuals or messaging in isolation, but the strategy underpinning them. The key isn't to guess which creative will resonate, but to build a system that uncovers it by focusing on the right customer, with the right message, and the right offer.

I've put together some detailed thoughts below that should help you re-frame the problem and give you a much clearer path forward. It all starts with forgetting about demographics for a minute and focusing on your customer's biggest nightmare.

We'll need to look at your customer, not your creative...

Right, let's get one thing straight. The idea that you need to find the "best visuals and messaging... for the local audience in Zurich" is a trap. It leads you down a rabbit hole of clichés—pictures of the Grossmünster, references to banking, maybe something about chocolate. This is surface-level thinking and it's why most advertising fails. Your customer in Zurich is not fundamentally different from your customer in London or Berlin. What defines them isn't their location; it's their problem.

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector in Zurich with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutley nothing of value. It's a lazy shortcut that leads to generic ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. This is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Your ICP isn’t a person; it’s a problem state.

For example, let's say you sell a compliance software. Your Head of Compliance client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of a regulatory fine that could damage the firm's reputation and her career. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's a partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the firm to a malpractice suit and public humiliation. That deep-seated fear is universal. The Zurich 'flavour' is just the context in which that fear exists.

So, how do you find this nightmare? You have to do the work:

• Talk to your existing customers. Not about your product, but about their world. Ask them: "What was going on in the business that made you look for a solution like ours?", "What would have happened if you didn't solve that problem?", "What does a really bad day at work look like for you?". Listen for words like "frustrated," "worried," "bottleneck," "risk," and "wasting time."
• Read the forums and communities they live in. Where do they complain? Are they on specific subreddits, LinkedIn groups, or niche industry forums? People are brutally honest when they think they're talking to their peers. These places are goldmines for the exact language they use to describe their pains.
• Analyse your support tickets and sales calls. What are the recurring themes? What problems are people trying to solve when they come to you? The initial reason they contact you is often the tip of a much larger iceberg of pain.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, then you can find them. Where do they get their information? Find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, the industry newsletters they actually open, the SaaS tools they already pay for. Are they members of the 'Fintech Switzerland' LinkedIn group? Do they follow specific influencers in their space? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting and creative strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say you need to build a message they can't ignore...

Once you have the nightmare, your ad creative almost writes itself. You stop selling your product and you start selling a solution to their problem. Your ad needs to speak directly to that pain in a way that makes them stop scrolling and think, "how do they know?". This is where proven copywriting frameworks come in. They are not magic formulas, but logical structures for presenting your solution.

For a high-touch service business, you deploy Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad isn't about you, it's about them.

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). You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief. You paint a picture of their painful 'before' state and the desired 'after' state, and present your product as the bridge to get there.

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 mention a single feature? It's all about the outcome, the transformation. The features are irrelevant until the customer believes you understand their problem. The visuals you choose should then simply reinforce this message. For the CFO ad, it might be a worried-looking founder staring at a confusing spreadsheet. For the FinOps ad, it could be a simple graph showing a cost line dramatically dropping. The image serves the copy, not the other way around. Too many people pick a stock photo of Zurich and then try to write a message to fit it. That is completely backwards.

You probably should fix your offer first...

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising, and probably the real reason you're not seeing conversions: the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do with their time than book a meeting to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention.

You could have the most emotionally resonant ad creative in the world, perfectly targeted at your ideal customer's nightmare. But if the next step you ask them to take is a chore with no immediate payoff, they will not convert. 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. It must solve a small piece of their problem for free, right now.

For SaaS founders, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. Your creatives should promote this value-first offer, not a sales meeting.

• For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities.
• For a data analytics platform, it could be a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database after they upload a sample file.
• For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers.
• For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free of charge. We solve a real problem to earn trust.

You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. Your ad creative should be screaming the value of this free offer, not whispering a request for a meeting. This single change—from a high-friction 'demo request' to a low-friction 'value-first' offer—can have a more profound impact on your conversion rates than any amount of tweaking visuals or copy.

You'll need a proper testing framework...

So let's assume you've nailed the nightmare and you have a genuinely valuable offer. Now, how do you find the creative that works? You dont guess. You build a machine that tells you the answer. There is no magic bullet. There is only a process of structured, methodical testing. This is where most people go wrong. They change five things at once, boost a post, and wonder why it didn't work. You need to be systematic.

First, and this is non-negotiable, you must change your campaign objective. Here is the uncomfortable truth about platforms like Meta. When you set your objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever sign up or pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

You must switch your campaign to optimise for a conversion objective, like Leads, Sales, or whatever your valuable offer is (e.g., 'Free Audit Signups'). This forces the algorithm to hunt for people within your target audience who have a history of taking the action you want them to take. It will be more expensive on a per-impression basis, but infinitly more effective. Awareness is a byproduct of effective conversion advertising, not a prerequisite for it.

With the right objective set, your testing structure should be simple and clean. I've run campaigns for numerous B2B SaaS companies and the structure is almost always the same.

1. Campaign Level: Set your objective here (e.g., Leads). Budget can be set here (Campaign Budget Optimisation) or at the ad set level. Start with CBO.
2. Ad Set Level: This is where you test your audiences. Each ad set should target ONE variable. For example:
   • Ad Set 1: Targets people with Job Title "Head of Compliance" in Switzerland.
   • Ad Set 2: Targets people who are members of "Swiss Compliance Professionals" LinkedIn groups.
   • Ad Set 3: Targets people with interests in competing software like "Salesforce Shield" or "Workday Financial Management".
3. Ad Level: Within each ad set, you test your creatives. Start with 2-3 distinct creative concepts. Each ad should test ONE core idea.
   • Ad 1 (Angle: Fear): Uses the Problem-Agitate-Solve copy focusing on the risk of fines. Visual is a picture of a redacted regulatory document.
   • Ad 2 (Angle: Efficiency): Uses the Before-After-Bridge copy focusing on time saved. Visual is a clean, simple dashboard UI.
   • Ad 3 (Angle: Social Proof): Uses a testimonial from a well-known Swiss company. Visual is the company's logo (with permission) and a headshot of the person giving the quote.

You let this run. You dont touch it for at least 3-5 days. You need to let the algorithm learn. After a week, you'll have clear data. You'll see which audience is delivering the cheapest conversions and which ad creative is resonating the most. Then you iterate. You turn off the losing ad set and the losing ads. You take the winning ad creative and create two new variations of it. You take the winning audience and create a new ad set with a similar but distinct audience to test against it. This is the process. It's not sexy, but it works. It's a system for uncovering what resonates, not a gamble.

And you'll need to understand the numbers...

Finally, none of this matters if you dont know your numbers. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). If you don't know this number, you are flying blind. You'll pause a campaign that's delivering £250 leads, not realising those leads turn into £10,000 customers.

Here's how you calculate it. You need three simple metrics:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue?
• 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% (meaning the average customer stays for 25 months).
LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. A healthy 3:1 LTV:CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead from your ads.

Suddenly, that £250 lead from targeting a specific job title on LinkedIn doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to focus on acquiring customers who will actually grow you're business. When you know your LTV, you can confidently invest in your campaigns, knowing exactly what a good result looks like.

I hope you can see now that your problem isn't really about finding the right creative for Zurich. It's about building a robust marketing strategy from the ground up. It requires a deep, almost obsessive understanding of your customer's pain, an offer they can't refuse, and a systematic process for testing and measurement.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull all of this together, here is a clear, actionable plan. This is the process we'd take any client through to fix a failing advertising account and build a predictable engine for growth.

Executing this requires a shift in mindset—from a creative-led approach to a strategy-led one. It takes discipline to do the foundational work on your customer and offer, and patience to let the testing process run its course. Many businesses struggle with this because they're too close to their own product and can't see it from the customer's perspective, or they lack the deep platform expertise to structure tests and interpret the data correctly.

This is where expert help can make a significant difference. An experienced paid advertising consultant or agency can bring an objective, external perspective, accelerate the research process, and ensure your campaigns are built on a solid, data-driven foundation from day one. We've implemented this exact methodology for numerous clients, turning failing accounts into predictable sources of highly qualified leads and customers.

If you'd like to walk through how these principles could be applied specifically to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your current efforts together and give you some more tailored, actionable advice. Feel free to book a time that works for you.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh