Solved: Boost SaaS Content with Reels-Style Videos?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It's great to hear your SaaS is getting some traction and you're thinking about how to pour some fuel on the fire with paid ads. It's a smart move when you're ready to scale.

Your question about Instagram Reels is a common one, and it shows you're thinking about modern formats. But, if I can be brutally honest from the start, focusing on the *ad format* before you've absolutely nailed the underlying strategy is probably the fastest way to burn through your cash with very little to show for it. I've seen it happen countless times. Founders get excited about a trend like Reels, spend ages creating content, and then wonder why it's not converting.

The truth is, the ad format is the last piece of the puzzle. The real work—the stuff that actually determines whether you succeed or fail—happens way before you even think about hitting 'record'. It's about deeply understanding who you're selling to, what keeps them up at night, what you're actually offering them, and whether you can even afford to reach them profitably. Get that right, and you could probably get conversions with a simple text-based image ad. Get it wrong, and the most beautifully produced Reel in the world won't save you.

So, instead of just giving you tips on making videos, I thought it'd be more helpful to walk you through the framework we use when we take on a new SaaS client. It's a bit of a different way of thinking, but it's built on years of running these campaigns and seeing what actually moves the needle. We'll cover how to define your customer so you can write ads they can't ignore, how to structure an offer they can't refuse, and how to figure out the fundamental maths of your business so you know exactly how much you can afford to spend to get a new customer. Only then can we talk about where to spend it and what the ads should look like.

We'll need to look at your ICP's nightmare, not their demographics...

Right, let's get this out of the way first. When I ask a founder who their customer is, nine times out of ten I get a response like: "We sell to marketing managers in tech companies with 50-200 employees in the UK".

That's not a customer profile. That's a database query. It tells you absolutely nothing of value. It's sterile, generic, and it leads to ads that are completely forgettable because they're written to speak to a job title, not a person in a specific, painful situation.

To stop burning cash on ads that don't connect, you have to define your customer by their **pain**. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your ICP isn't a demographic; it's a problem state. What is the one thing that wakes them up in a cold sweat at 3 am? What's the problem that, if they solved it, would get them a promotion or at least a massive amount of relief?

Let's make this practical. Imagine you have a SaaS that helps teams manage their cloud spend.

• A **bad ICP definition** is: "We sell to CTOs and Heads of Engineering at Series B startups."
• A **good ICP definition** is: "Our customer is a Head of Engineering at a fast-growing startup who just got a dressing down from the CEO because the AWS bill was 30% higher than last month, again. She's terrified that this uncontrolled spend will kill their runway before they hit their next milestone, and she has no idea how to get her team to care about cost optimisation without stifling their innovation. She feels completely out of control."

See the difference? The second one gives you everything you need. You know her fears (killing the runway), her frustrations (team doesn't care), and her desires (control, predictability). Now you can write an ad that speaks directly to *her*. You're not selling a "FinOps platform"; you're selling a solution to the gut-wrenching anxiety of watching your company's cash burn away on a server you can't even identify.

This process of drilling down is non-negotiable. You have to go from a broad market to a specific, emotionally charged problem. It's the only way to cut through the noise.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can start building a real profile. Where do these people hang out online? What podcasts do they listen to on their commute (e.g., 'Acquired')? Which niche newsletters do they actually open and read (e.g., 'Stratechery')? Are they in specific Facebook groups or Slack communities? Who do they follow on Twitter/X (e.g., Jason Lemkin)? This intelligence is the blueprint for your targeting strategy. You don't guess; you go where they already are, armed with a message that shows you understand their world better than anyone else. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say you need to rethink your offer...

Now that we have a clear idea of *who* we're talking to and *what* their problem is, we need to look at what you're asking them to do. This brings us to the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer.

I'm going to take a guess that your main call-to-action on your website is something like "Request a Demo" or "Book a Call". Am I right? If so, you need to understand that this is perhaps the most arrogant and ineffective CTA ever conceived for acquiring new customers via paid ads. It presumes that your prospect, a busy and important person whose nightmare problem you've just identified, has nothing better to do than schedule a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to by a stranger. It's incredibly high-friction and communicates almost zero immediate value. It instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their time.

I've seen so many SaaS businesses with fantastic products fail at advertising because their offer stinks. They spend thousands driving traffic to a landing page, only for 99% of visitors to leave instantly because the perceived effort of booking a demo far outweighs the perceived benefit. I've run quite a few campaigns for B2B SaaS, and one of the first things we look at is the offer. I remember one client selling an accounting system who was struggling badly. Their ads weren't working. A quick look showed they were trying to sell their system with just a demo. Who is going to change their entire accounting system, a massive undertaking, without trying it first? It's a huge ask. The competition were all offering free trials for several months. We advised them to switch to a completely free trial offer. It completely changed the dynamic and was the first step in getting people in the door so they could actually experience the software.

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 advantage here: your product itself. The gold standard offer is a **true free trial** (no credit card required) or a **freemium plan**. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them solve a small piece of their nightmare problem within the first 10 minutes of signing up. Let them *feel* the transformation. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You stop generating low-quality "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs) that your sales team has to chase for weeks. Instead, you create "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs)—users who have already seen the value and are actively raising their hands to ask how they can get more of it. It's a total shift in the sales process from chasing to consulting.

If for some reason your product isn't suited to a free trial, you are not exempt from this rule. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. A free, automated audit tool. A free data health check. A free 15-minute interactive video module. For us, as an agency, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. You have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the big one.

You probably should calculate your numbers first...

Okay, let's assume you've now defined your ICP's nightmare and you've crafted an irresistible, low-friction offer. The next question is, can you actually make money? The real question in paid advertising 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: **Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)**.

If you don't know this number, you are flying blind. You're making decisions based on gut feel, which is a terrible way to manage an ad budget. Calculating your LTV gives you the hard truth about what a customer is actually worth to your business over their entire relationship with you. With that number, you can make intelligent, data-driven decisions about how much you're willing to pay to get one.

The calculation is pretty straightforward. You need three pieces of data:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month (or year, just be consistent)?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Don't use 100% of revenue; you need to account for your cost of goods sold (COGS), like server costs, support staff, etc.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? This is the most critical and often overlooked metric.

The formula is:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's run an example. Say your SaaS costs £100/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 80%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (Churn).

LTV = (£100 * 0.80) / 0.05

LTV = £80 / 0.05 = £1,600

In this example, each customer you acquire is worth £1,600 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This is your truth. This is your power. Because now you know what you can afford to spend. A healthy benchmark for a SaaS business is a 3:1 LTV to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. This means for every £3 of value a customer brings in, you can afford to spend £1 to acquire them.

So, with a £1,600 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £533 to acquire a single new customer and still have a very healthy business. Suddenly, that "expensive" £50 lead from a perfectly targeted LinkedIn ad doesn't seem so bad, does it? If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified trials into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £53.30 per trial signup. This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads on the wrong platforms.

To make this real for you, I've built a little calculator. Play around with your own numbers and see what your LTV and affordable CAC look like. You might be surprised.

You'll need to pick the right platform and targeting...

Now, and only now, can we have an intelligent conversation about where to actually run your ads. Your initial question was about Instagram Reels. The real question is: is the person with the nightmare problem you solve actively scrolling Instagram Reels with the intent to find a business solution?

Maybe. But probably not. Choosing your ad platform isn't about what's trendy; it's about matching the platform's user intent and targeting capabilities to your specific ICP. For B2B SaaS, you generally have three main contenders, each with a distinct role:

1. Google Search Ads: The Hand-Raisers

This is for capturing intent. People go to Google when they are actively searching for a solution to a problem they already have. They are "problem aware" and often "solution aware." Your job here is to show up when they search for keywords that signal they're looking for a tool like yours. The targeting is based on what they type, not who they are. This often produces the highest quality leads, because they are coming to you, but it can be expensive and scale is limited to the number of people searching.

You would target keywords like "software for [the thing you do]", "[your competitor] alternative", "how to solve [nightmare problem]". I've seen Google Ads deliver incredible results for SaaS, like one campaign we ran that brought in 3,543 users at just £0.96 per user because we perfectly matched our ads to high-intent search queries.

2. LinkedIn Ads: The Sniper Rifle

This is where you go when you know exactly who your ICP is by their job title, company size, industry, or seniority. The targeting is unparalleled for B2B. You can target "Heads of Engineering" at "Software companies" with "51-200 employees" in the "United Kingdom". It's incredibly precise. The downside is that it's the most expensive platform by far. You're not capturing existing intent; you're creating it by interrupting their feed. Your ad has to be exceptional to work. But if you know your LTV and can afford a higher CPL, this is often the most direct path to decision-makers. We ran a campaign for a B2B software targeting specific decision makers and achieved a $22 Cost Per Lead, which for their high-ticket offer was a phenomenal result.

3. Meta Ads (Facebook & Instagram): The Wide Net

This is where your original question about Reels fits in. Meta's strength is its massive user base and its powerful algorithm's ability to find patterns. B2B targeting options are much more limited than LinkedIn's, but you can target interests (e.g., people who like 'SaaS' or follow specific industry leaders), or you can build lookalike audiences from your existing customers. It's generally much cheaper than LinkedIn, but the lead quality can be more varied. It can absolutely work for SaaS, especially for products with a broad appeal or a lower price point. One campaign we worked on managed to get 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each for a B2B software on Meta, proving it can be done. However, you have to be careful.

Here's a critical mistake to avoid on Meta, and it goes back to your original impulse to "boost" content. When you choose your campaign objective, you must avoid "Reach" or "Brand Awareness". If you choose these, you are literally telling the algorithm: "Please find me the cheapest people to show my ad to, regardless of whether they are likely to ever click or buy." The algorithm does exactly that, finding users whose attention is cheap because no one else wants it. You're paying to reach non-customers.

You MUST choose a conversion objective, like "Leads" or "Sales". This commands the algorithm to find people within your audience who have a history of taking the action you want them to take. It's the single most important setting in your campaign.

...and then, finally, we worry about the creative.

So, after all that, we can finally talk about the ad itself—the image, the carousel, or the Reel. You see now why it's the last step? The creative is simply the vehicle for the message. And the message is born from everything we've just discussed: the ICP's nightmare, and your irresistible offer.

A beautifully shot Reel that talks about your product's "synergistic features" will fail. A simple, maybe even slightly ugly, image ad with copy that says "Is your AWS bill giving you anxiety? Find £1,000 in wasted spend in the next 5 minutes for free" will succeed. **The message is everything.**

For SaaS, one of the most powerful copywriting frameworks is the **Before-After-Bridge**.

• Before: You describe their current world, their nightmare problem. You agitate the pain. You show them you understand their hell. "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: You paint a picture of the promised land. The world where their problem is solved. The relief. "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated."
• Bridge: You position your product as the simple, obvious bridge to get them from the 'Before' state to the 'After' state. "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 for video scripts, for carousel cards, and for static ad copy. It's powerful because it focuses on the transformation, not the features.

So, regarding Reels vs. images. Here is my practical advice. Don't start by making loads of video content. Video is expensive and time-consuming to produce. You want to de-risk that process. Start by testing your **messages** using simple static image ads or carousels. Write 3-5 different "Before-After-Bridge" angles based on different nuances of your ICP's pain. Run them to your target audience with your free trial offer.

The data will quickly tell you which message resonates. You'll see one ad getting a much higher click-through rate and a lower cost per trial signup. That is your winner. *That* is the message you should now turn into a video or a Reel. You're no longer guessing what to say in your video; you're building it on a foundation of a proven, data-backed message. I've seen this approach work wonders. For one SaaS client, we helped reduce their Cost Per User Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7 by systematically testing messaging first, then scaling the winners with better creative.

Once you do create video, keep it simple. Often, User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos perform incredibly well for SaaS. It could be you, the founder, talking to the camera on your phone, explaining the "Before-After-Bridge". It could be a simple screen recording walking through the "aha!" moment in your software. It doesn't need to be a high-production-value masterpiece. Authenticity and a clear message will always beat slick production with a weak message.

So, what should you do now?

I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a very different answer to the one you were probably expecting. But this strategic-first approach is the only reliable way I've seen to scale a SaaS with paid ads without setting a pile of money on fire. It requires more thinking upfront, but it saves a huge amount of time, money, and heartache down the line.

This all goes to say: You may benefit from working with someone with expertise in scaling software campaigns. It's a specific skill set, and having someone guide you through this process can be the difference between success and failure.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below as a starting checklist:

If you'd like to go through this framework specifically for your business and get a second pair of expert eyes on your strategy, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can spend 20-30 minutes on a call reviewing where you're at, auditing your current approach, and building out a proper plan of attack. It's often incredibly helpful for founders to just talk this stuff through with someone who's in the trenches with it every day.

Hope this has been a helpful, if slightly unconventional, answer to your question!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh