Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
It’s completely normal to feel a bit lost when you're starting out with paid social ads. There's a mountain of conflicting advice out there, and most of it is either too generic to be useful or just plain wrong. A lot of people think the first question is "Which platform should I use?", but that's actually one of the last questions you should ask.
The real starting point isn't the platform; it's your customer. And not in the way most marketing departments think about them. I'm happy to walk you through the framework we use, which cuts through the noise and focuses on what actually drives results. It all starts with understanding your customer's pain, knowing your numbers, and crafting an offer they can't ignore. Once you have those foundations, the right platform becomes obvious.
TLDR;
- Your first step isn't choosing a platform, it's defining your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) based on their biggest, most urgent 'nightmare', not their demographics. Generic targeting is a waste of money.
- Before you spend a single pound on ads, you MUST calculate your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This tells you exactly how much you can afford to pay to acquire a customer and frees you from chasing cheap, low-quality leads.
- Your offer is the most critical part of your campaign. Ditch vague calls-to-action like "Request a Demo" and instead provide immediate, tangible value with things like a free trial, an automated audit, or a valuable tool.
- Start with conversion-focused campaigns (e.g., optimising for leads or sales). Brand awareness is a byproduct of effective advertising that generates customers, not a prerequisite for it. Running 'Reach' campaigns is often just paying to find non-customers.
- This letter contains an interactive LTV calculator to help you understand your acquisition economics and a decision flowchart to guide your platform choice once your foundations are solid.
We'll need to look at your ICP, but not how you think...
Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing of value and 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.
Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a malpractice suit.' Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. What is the one thing that keeps them awake at 3 AM? That's what you're selling a solution to.
When you understand their nightmare, you can speak their language. Your ad copy stops being about your features and starts being about their relief. Your targeting stops being a vague demographic bucket and starts being a hyper-specific list of the niche podcasts they listen to, the industry newsletters they actually open, and the software tools they already pay for. This is the work you must do first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. It's the difference between shouting into a crowded room and whispering a secret directly into the right person's ear.
BAD: Vague Demographic
"We target SMEs in the tech industry."
BETTER: Specific Role
"We target Heads of Sales at tech SMEs."
EXPERT: The 'Nightmare'
"We target Heads of Sales terrified of missing quota because their CRM is a mess and reps waste hours on manual data entry."
I'd say you need to understand your numbers before you spend a pound...
The next most common mistake I see is businesses obsessing over low-cost leads without knowing what a customer is actually worth to them. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead (CPL) go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV).
Without knowing your LTV, you're flying blind. You might pause a campaign that's generating leads for £250 because it feels 'expensive', even if those leads turn into £10,000 customers. Conversely, you might scale a campaign generating £10 leads that never convert or churn out after a month. LTV is your strategic compass. Let's break down how to calculate it.
You need three simple numbers:
- Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month? Let's say it's £500.
- Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? After cost of goods or services, let's say it's 80%.
- Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Let's say it's 4%.
Now, the calculation is straightforward:
LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
Using our example numbers:
LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000
In this example, each new customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy industry benchmark is a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a £10,000 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer and still run a very profitable business. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.
Suddenly, that £250 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, worthless leads.
You probably should rethink your offer...
Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. The number one reason campaigns fail isn't the targeting or the creative; it's a weak offer that asks for too much and gives too little in return. 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 than book a 45-minute meeting to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor fighting for their time.
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, real problem for them, for free, to earn you the right to solve the whole thing for a price.
How you do this depends on your business model:
- 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 from their current 'nightmare' state to the better future you provide. 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.
- For Agencies & Consultants: You are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a data analytics platform, a free 'Data Health Check'. 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 upfront to demonstrate our value.
- For High-Ticket Services/Products: You need to de-risk the first step. Instead of a "Consultation", offer a "Free Blueprint Session" where they walk away with a tangible plan, regardless of whether they hire you. For a productised service, we've seen great success with a named process, like a "1-Day Filming Process". It makes a complex service feel simple, tangible, and less risky to buy.
You'll need to pick the right battlefield...
Okay, so you've defined your customer's nightmare, you know what a customer is worth, and you have an irresistible, low-friction offer. *Now* we can finally talk about platforms. The choice isn't about which one is "best" in a vacuum; it's about choosing the right battlefield based on your customer's state of mind. I call this the "Searcher vs. The Scroller" framework.
The Searcher (High Intent)
Platform: Google Ads (Search & Performance Max)
Who they are: These people are problem-aware and solution-aware. They know they have a 'nightmare' and they are actively typing queries into Google to find a fix *right now*. Their intent is incredibly high. They are pre-qualified by their own actions.
How to win: You win here by targeting keywords that signal commercial intent. Don't waste money on broad, informational queries. For an outreach tool, you wouldn't target "what is cold email". You target "best software for lead generation" or "apollo.io alternatives". Your ad needs to match their query and promise a direct path to solving their problem, leading to a landing page that delivers on that promise with your high-value, low-friction offer. I remember one software client who acquired 3,543 users at just £0.96 per user with a campaign on Google Ads.
The Scroller (Low Intent / Passive)
Platforms: Meta (Facebook/Instagram), LinkedIn
Who they are: These people are not actively looking for a solution. You are interrupting their day while they browse their feed. Your ad must be powerful enough to stop their scroll and make them realise they have a problem you can solve. This requires a much deeper understanding of their 'nightmare' because you have to articulate it for them.
How to win: The platform choice here depends entirely on how you can identify your ICP.
- LinkedIn Ads: This is your scalpel. Use it when your ICP is defined by their professional attributes: job title, industry, company size, seniority. It's more expensive, but you can target the exact Head of Engineering you need to reach. The creative needs to speak directly to their professional pain. For one software client, we achieved a cost per lead of just $22 targeting B2B decision-makers on LinkedIn.
- Meta Ads: This is your net. Use it when your ICP is defined by interests, behaviors, or broader B2B demographics like "small business owner". It's cheaper to reach people, but the targeting is less precise. You can build powerful campaigns using lookalike audiences from your best customers or retargeting website visitors. For one B2B software client, we generated 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each on Meta.
The mistake most people make is treating these platforms the same. You can't run the same ad on Google and Facebook and expect it to work. One is capturing existing demand; the other is creating it by highlighting a pain point.
Are your customers actively searching for a solution to their 'nightmare' right now?
Primary Platform: Google Ads
Strategy: Capture high-intent searchers with commercial keywords.
Is your ICP best defined by professional data (job title, industry)?
Primary Platform: LinkedIn Ads
Strategy: Interrupt their feed with hyper-relevant, pain-point copy.
Primary Platform: Meta Ads
Strategy: Target via interests & lookalikes. Create demand by highlighting their 'nightmare'.
And finally, don't run awareness campaigns...
This might be the most controvertial advice I give, but it's also one of the most important for businesses that need to see a return on their ad spend. Here is the uncomfortable truth about awareness campaigns on platforms like Meta. When you set your campaign 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 pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. By choosing these objectives, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.
The best form of brand awareness for a startup or small business is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. That is why, to find customers that will actually buy from you, you should always switch your campaign to optimise for a conversion objective, like Sales, Leads, or Trials. Let the algorithm do the hard work of finding people who are likely to take the action you care about. The awareness will follow.
Your Action Plan: The First 90 Days
I know this is a lot to take in, but breaking it down into a logical sequence of actions makes it manageable. Trying to do everything at once is a recipe for failure. Here's how I'd structure the first three months to build a solid foundation for paid acquisition.
| Phase | Key Actions | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Month 1: Foundation |
|
This foundational work determines the success of everything that follows. Skipping this is like building a house on sand. All messaging, targeting, and economic models flow from here. |
| Month 2: Initial Testing |
|
The goal here is not immediate profit, but data. You're testing which messages resonate most deeply with your ICP and establishing baseline performance metrics (CPC, CVR, CPL). |
| Month 3: Optimisation & Scaling |
|
With winning messages identified, you can now start to scale responsibly. Retargeting and lookalikes allow you to expand your reach while maintaining relevance and efficiency. |
As you can probably tell, effective paid advertising is a systematic process, not a lottery ticket. It requires a strategic foundation built on deep customer understanding and solid economics. It can be a lot to manage on top of running your business, and mistakes in the early stages can be costly and demoralising.
If you'd like an expert eye on this process or want to fast-track your path to a profitable ad system, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can review your current situation, help you clarify your ICP's nightmare, and give you some actionable advice tailored to your specific business. It's a great way to get a second opinion and ensure you're starting on the right foot.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
