Solved: Best Audience for CV E-book Campaign?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance on your campaign for the CV e-book. It’s a common question, how to find the right audience, but tbh the way most people think about it is completely backwards and it’s why they end up burning cash with nothing to show for it. The real issue isn't just picking an 'audience' from a dropdown menu on Facebook, it's about deeply understanding the specific, urgent pain that drives someone to look for help with their CV in the first place.

We'll need to look at your ICP, but not how you think...

Right, let's get this sorted first because it’s the foundation for everything else. When you say you're launching a campaign for a CV e-book, the immediate temptation is to think in broad strokes. "I'll target students," or "I'll target recent graduates," or "I'll target people interested in 'job hunting'."

Forget that. It's a complete waste of time and money. That’s not a strategy; it’s a guess. You’re targeting millions of people, 99.9% of whom do not have an urgent need for your e-book today. The algorithm will then do what you told it to: find the cheapest people to show your ad to within that massive group, who are almost certainly the least likely to ever buy anything.

You need to become an expert in your customer's specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic; it's a problem state. A person doesn't wake up one morning and think, "I fancy buying a CV e-book today." They buy one because something painful has happened. They’ve been rejected for the 10th time. They’ve been made redundant. They feel trapped in a dead-end job and are desperate for a change. That desperation is what you're selling a solution to.

Your job is to isolate that nightmare. Let's build a few proper ICPs based on pain, not just a job title.

You see the difference? "Students" tells you nothing. "The Redundant Tech Worker" tells you exactly what problem to solve, what language to use, and where to find them. Your first and most important job is to define 2-3 of these nightmare profiles. Don't spend a penny on ads until you've done this work. This is the bedrock of a successful campaign and something most people completly neglect.

I'd say you need to pick the right battleground first...

Once you know *who* you're targeting and what their specific pain is, you need to decide where to engage them. The choice of platform isn't about what's trendy; it's about matching the platform's user intent with your customer's mindset. For an e-book, you're dealing with a low-cost, high-volume product, which means your ad spend has to be incredibly efficient.

1. Google Search Ads (Your Priority #1)

This is where you start. Why? Because people on Google are actively looking for a solution to their problem. They have intent. They've typed their pain into a search box. You're not interrupting their day; you're providing the answer they're literally asking for. This is the lowest-hanging fruit and will almost always give you the best conversion rate.

Your campaigns should be structured around your ICP's specific search queries. You wouldn't run a generic "CV Help" campaign. You'd run separate, hyper-focused campaigns:

• -> Campaign: Tech Career CVs
  Ad Group: Redundancy Keywords
  Keywords: "cv help after being made redundant", "tech cv template 2024", "how to list layoff on cv", "software developer cv example".
• -> Campaign: Career Change CVs
  Ad Group: Retail to Office
  Keywords: "career change cv no experience", "how to show transferable skills on cv", "cv for moving from retail to admin".
• -> Campaign: Graduate CVs
  Ad Group: First Job Woes
  Keywords: "graduate cv template", "what to put on cv with no work experience", "how to write a cv for internship".

This way, your ad copy and the landing page can speak directly to that user's specific pain point. The person searching for redundancy help sees an ad that says "Made Redundant? Here's How to Reframe Your CV to Land Interviews Fast." That's powerful. That gets clicks from people who are ready to buy.

2. Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram - Use With Caution)

Social media is a different beast entirely. You are interrupting people while they are looking at pictures of their mates' holidays. The intent is low. This means your targeting and your creative have to be absolutly spot on to grab their attention. It's much harder and often more expensive to get a conversion here for a low-cost item.

This is where your deep ICP work pays off. You don't target 'Interest: Job hunting'. You layer interests to build a profile of your ICP:

• -> For the Redundant Tech Worker: Target people who live in London, are interested in 'Software Engineering' AND 'TechCrunch' AND follow job sites like 'Otta'. You could even try targeting people who recently engaged with posts from major tech companies that announced layoffs.
• -> For the Career Changer: Target people interested in 'Retail' or 'Hospitality' but ALSO interested in pages like 'The Open University', 'Reed.co.uk', or follow career coaches who specialise in career transitions.

Tbh, for a low-priced e-book, I would only use Meta for one thing initially: Retargeting. Anyone who visits your website from a Google Ad but doesn't buy should be put into a retargeting audience on Facebook. Then you can show them ads with testimonials, a special offer, or a different angle to persuade them to come back and finish the purchase. It's a way to mop up the high-intent traffic you've already paid for.

3. LinkedIn Ads (Probably a "No")

I know it seems obvious - "it's a professional network!" - but LinkedIn Ads are expensive. Like, really expensive. I remember we ran campaigns for B2B software clients where a single click could cost £10-£15. One campaign we worked on was getting leads for B2B decision makers for $22 each, which was a great result for their high-ticket software. But for an e-book that might sell for £19.99? The maths just doesn't work. You'll go broke. Stick to Google Search to capture intent and Meta for surgical retargeting.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

Okay, so you've defined your nightmare ICPs and you know where to find them. Now, what do you actually say to them? A generic ad with a headline like "CV Writing E-book" and a picture of the cover is destined to fail. It's boring, it speaks to no one, and it will be ignored.

Your ad's only job is to reflect the prospect's pain back at them so accurately that they feel understood, and then present your e-book as the clear, obvious solution. We use a simple but powerful framework for this: Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS).

Let's write some ads for our ICPs using this framework.

The key here is specificity. The tech worker ad mentions "ATS bots" and "framing a layoff" – language that speaks directly to their world. The career changer ad focuses on "transferable skills" and the emotional pain of feeling "trapped". This is how you cut through the noise. You make the person reading it think, "that's me, they understand my exact problem." That's when they click.

You probably should figure out your numbers...

This is the part that everyone ignores, and it's why so many small businesses fail with paid ads. You can have the best targeting and the best ads in the world, but if the maths doesn't work, you're just lighting money on fire. For a low-priced product like an e-book, your margins are razor-thin. You absolutely HAVE to know how much you can afford to spend to get one customer.

Most people ask, "What's a good Cost Per Click?". It's the wrong question. The real question is, "What's my maximum affordable Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)?"

Let's do some simple maths. This is critical.
E-book Price: Let's say you sell it for £19.99.
Platform Fees: The platform you sell on (Gumroad, Stripe, etc.) will take a cut. Let's say it's around 7%. So you're left with £18.59.
Profit Margin: It's a digital product, so your margin is high, but not 100%. Let's account for the platform fees, so your gross profit per sale is £18.59.
Target Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): This is how much revenue you want to make for every £1 you spend on ads. A common starting target is 2x or 200%. This means for every £1 spent, you make £2 in revenue. This gives you a 100% profit margin on your ad spend to cover your other business costs.

So, if you want a 2x ROAS on a £19.99 product, your maximum affordable CPA is £19.99 / 2 = £9.99.

This means you cannot, under any circumstances, pay more than £9.99 to get a single customer. This is your breakeven point on ad spend. Any higher, and you are officially losing money on every sale driven by ads.

Now, let's look at the funnel. A typical conversion rate for a good e-commerce landing page is around 2-5%. Let's be optimistic and say yours is 3%. This means for every 100 visitors you send to your page, 3 will buy.

If you need to get a sale for under £9.99, and your conversion rate is 3%, you can calculate your maximum affordable Cost Per Click (CPC):
Max CPA * Conversion Rate = Max CPC
£9.99 * 0.03 = £0.30

That's your magic number. You cannot afford to pay more than 30p per click on average. In the UK, for competitive search terms on Google, CPCs can easily be £1.00-£2.00 or more. This is why targeting broad, generic terms will bankrupt you. You have to find those niche, long-tail keywords ("cv for moving from retail to admin") where the CPC might be lower and the intent is much, much higher.

I've built a small calculator for you below so you can play with these numbers yourself. Be honest with your inputs. This will give you a dose of reality and tell you how viable your ad campaigns are before you start.

I'd say your offer needs to be stronger...

This might be a bit of blunt feedback, but it's important. In 2024, an "e-book" on its own is a relatively weak offer. There is so much free information available online—blogs, YouTube videos, TikToks—that asking someone to pay, even £20, for a PDF requires a lot of trust and a very compelling promise. The perceived value of an e-book has decreased over time. This makes your marketing job even harder.

So, how do you fix this? You don't just sell an e-book. You sell a solution package. You need to stack the value so high that paying £20 feels like an absolute bargain. The goal is to make the prospect feel like they'd be stupid *not* to buy it.

Here are some ways to strengthen your offer:

1. Bundle it with High-Value Resources: Don't just sell the book. Sell the book PLUS a bundle of templates.
   • -> "The Ultimate CV Makeover Kit": Includes the e-book, 10 ATS-friendly CV templates (in Word and Google Docs), 5 cover letter templates, and a pre-interview checklist. Now it’s not just information; it’s a toolkit.
2. Create a "Tripwire" or Lead Magnet: Instead of trying to get a sale from a cold ad click, get their email address first. Offer something valuable for free in exchange for their email. This gets them into your world and allows you to build trust before asking for the sale.
   • -> Free Offer: "Free 5-Point CV Scorecard". A simple PDF checklist that lets them audit their own CV. They download it, realise their CV is terrible, and you've perfectly set them up to buy your e-book, which you can then offer to them via email.
   • -> This also builds an email list, which is a massive asset. You can market to this list for free forever.
3. Add a Community or Support Element: People pay for access and community.
   • -> Offer: "Buy the e-book and get a free one-time pass to our monthly 'CV Clinic' Q&A session on Zoom". This adds a human element and a sense of exclusivity.

By strengthening your offer, you increase the perceived value, which makes it easier to justify the price. This will directly improve your landing page conversion rate. If you can lift your conversion rate from 3% to 4% by having a better offer, your maximum affordable CPC jumps from £0.30 to £0.40. That tiny change can be the difference between a failing campaign and a profitable one.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, but getting paid ads right for a new product isn't about finding one magic audience. It's about building a systematic machine where each part—the ICP, the platform, the message, the numbers, and the offer—works together. Getting any one of these wrong can cause the whole thing to fail, especialy with a lower priced product where the margins for error are so small.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you in a table below as a sort of action plan.

Running successful campaigns, especially in a competitive space like career help, requires constant testing and optimisation. You have to analyse the data, see where people are dropping off, and be willing to change your approach. I recall one campaign we ran for a course creator that generated $115k in revenue in just 1.5 months, but that success came from a deep understanding of the audience and rigorous testing of the funnel and offer.

It's not about just 'turning on the ads'. It's about building a robust system. And honestly, for a solo creator or a small business, managing all these moving parts can be a full-time job in itself. Getting an expert eye on your strategy can often be the difference between burning through your budget and building a profitable sales machine.

If you'd like to go through your specific plans in more detail, we offer a free initial consultation where we can review your strategy and give you some more tailored advice. It might be helpful to have a second opinion before you start spending.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh