Solved: Choosing a growth platform in Denver (LTV is Key)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you're at a really exciting, but also tricky, stage with your new product launch in Denver. It's completely normal to feel a bit lost in the sea of marketing platforms, everyone promising to be the one magic bullet.

I’m happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and a bit of a framework for how we approach this. Tbh, the question isn't really about picking a platform first. It’s about getting a few other things right before you even think about spending a single dollar. If you get the foundations sorted, the platform choice becomes much, much easier and your chances of success go way up. Let's get into it.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's be brutally honest. Most marketing fails before it even starts because the targeting is rubbish. People create these sterile "customer personas" that are completely useless in the real world. Something like: "Our target is Sarah, she's 35-45, lives in a suburb of Denver, has two kids, and enjoys hiking."

That tells you absolutely nothing of value. It leads to generic ads with stock photos that get scrolled past without a second thought. You have to go deeper. You need to stop thinking about demographics and start thinking about pain. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it’s a problem state. It's a specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare that keeps someone awake at night.

You need to become an absolute expert in that nightmare.

• What is the career-threatening problem they are facing?
• What broken workflow is making their best employees want to quit?
• What missed deadline could expose their company to a massive lawsuit?
• What inefficiency is silently draining thousands of dollars from their budget each month?

For example, one campaign we worked on was for a legal tech SaaS. Their initial ICP was "law firms with 50-200 employees." Useless. We changed it. Their new ICP was: "The partner at a mid-sized firm who lives in constant fear of a junior associate missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the firm to a multi-million dollar malpractice suit." See the difference? Now we have emotion. We have high stakes. We have a real, visceral problem to solve.

Your first job isn't to pick a platform. It's to define this nightmare with absolute clarity. Interview potential customers. Find them on LinkedIn or in local Denver business groups. Don't sell them anything. Just ask them questions. "What's the most frustrating part of your day?", "What task do you wish you could just delete from your to-do list forever?", "If you had a magic wand to fix one thing in your business process, what would it be?".

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find where these people hang out online. Not just "Facebook" or "LinkedIn." That's too broad.

• Which specific, niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute?
• Which industry newsletters do they *actually* open and read?
• What software tools (like HubSpot, Salesforce, Slack) do they already pay for?
• Are they members of the 'Denver Tech Startups' Facebook group?
• Who are the key influencers they follow on Twitter or LinkedIn?

This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. Do this work first, or you genuinely have no business spending a single penny on ads. You'll just be burning cash.

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

Once you understand your customer's nightmare, you can craft a message that hits them right between the eyes. Your ad copy and landing page shouldn't talk about your product's features. Nobody cares about your features. They only care about their own problems. Your message must be a direct answer to the pain you've identified.

There are a couple of simple, powerful copywriting formulas for this.

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)
This is perfect for services or more complex B2B products. You state the problem, you pour salt on the wound by agitating it, and then you present your product as the solution.

Let's pretend you've launched a fractional CFO service in Denver.

• Don't say: "We offer expert fractional CFO services for startups." (Boring, feature-focused)
• Instead, use PAS: "(Problem) Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? (Agitate) Are you secretly one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? (Solve) Get an expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

2. Before-After-Bridge (BAB)
This is great for SaaS products or anything that creates a clear transformation. You paint a picture of their world *before* your product, show them the ideal world *after* your product, and position your product as the bridge to get them there.

Imagine you've launched a FinOps SaaS product to manage cloud spending.

• Don't say: "Our platform uses AI to optimise your cloud infrastructure." (Yawn, jargon)
• Instead, use BAB: "(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 exactly 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."

Your messaging needs to be this direct and this focused on their pain. When you get this right, the prospect feels understood. They feel like you're talking directly to them, and they'll be far more likely to click and learn more. The goal is for them to read your ad and think, "Finally, someone gets it."

You probably should delete the "Request a Demo" button

Now we get to the most common failure point I see in advertising, especially for new B2B products: the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is possibly the most arrogant and ineffective Call to Action ever invented.

Think about it from your customer's perspective. You're asking a busy, important person to stop what they're doing, find a time on their calendar, and commit to spending 30-60 minutes being sold to by a stranger. It's a huge amount of friction for very little perceived value upfront. It instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their time. It's no wonder conversion rates on these pages are often terrible.

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. You have to give them a win, for free, before you ever ask for their money.

What does a good offer look like?

• For SaaS Founders: This is your superpower. The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them actually use the product. Let them feel the transformation from the "Before" state to the "After" state. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You're not generating "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you're creating "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs) who are already convinced and asking to buy. I remember one campaign for a B2B SaaS client where we got them over 1,500 trials using this exact approach. It works.


• For Service Businesses or High-Ticket Products: You are not exempt from this rule. You have to bottle your expertise into a tool, some content, or an asset that provides instant value. For example:
  • A marketing agency could offer a free, automated website audit that shows a prospect their top 3 SEO keyword opportunities.
  • A data analytics platform could offer a free 'Data Health Check' that scans their database and flags the top 5 critical issues.
  • A corporate training company could offer a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'How to Handle Difficult Conversations' for new managers.

For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, our best offer is a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free of charge. We solve a small, real problem for them for free. That earns us the right to talk to them about solving the whole thing. Your offer has to be so good, so valuable, that your ideal customer would feel a bit silly for not taking it.

You'll need to know how to pay Facebook to find non-customers

This is one of the biggest and most costly mistakes I see new advertisers make. They read some blog post about the "marketing funnel" and decide they need to run "awareness" campaigns first. So they go onto a platform like Meta (Facebook/Instagram), choose the "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign objective, and set it live.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: when you do that, you are giving the algorithm a very specific command. You are telling it, "Find me the largest possible number of people inside my target audience for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being an incredibly efficient machine, does exactly what you asked. It scours your audience and finds all the people who are cheap to show ads to. And why are they cheap? Because they are 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 something. Their attention isn't in demand from other advertisers, so it's sold at a discount. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

It sounds crazy, but it's true. The algorithm is optimised for the goal you give it. If you tell it you want cheap impressions, it will find you people who only ever generate cheap impressions.

For a new product launch, awareness is a *byproduct* of making sales, not a prerequisite for it. The best form of brand awareness you can possibly get is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it to their friends or colleagues. That only happens through conversion.

So, from day one, your campaigns should be optimised for a conversion objective. That means "Sales," "Leads," "Signups," or whatever that key action is that you want a user to take. When you tell the algorithm to find you people who are likely to *convert*, it will use all its data to find users who have a history of buying things, filling out forms, or signing up for trials. Yes, the cost per impression (CPM) will be higher. But you will be showing your ads to a much, much better group of people. This is how you find actual customers, not just passive viewers.

We'll need to look at what platform to actually use

Okay, so you've defined your customer's nightmare, crafted a powerful message, and built an irresistible, value-first offer. NOW we can finally talk about platforms. The choice becomes much simpler because it's dictated by your customer's behaviour.

Broadly speaking, you're choosing between two types of user intent:

1. Active Intent (They are searching for a solution) -> Google Ads
If your product solves a problem that people know they have and are actively searching for, Google Search Ads is almost always the best place to start. These are people literally typing their pain into a search bar. The intent couldn't be higher.

I remember one client, an HVAC company, where people's air conditioning breaks down and they immediately search for "emergency AC repair near me". The intent is urgent and obvious. For them, Google Ads was a goldmine. We're currently seeing around a $60 cost per lead in a competitive area, which is highly profitable for them.

Your job is to do keyword research to find what your ICP is searching for. Think about "buying" keywords, not just informational ones. For instance, if you have an outreach tool, you'd target keywords like "software for lead generation" or "contact info finding tool" rather than a broad term like "what is sales outreach". You're catching people who are pre-qualified and ready to evaluate solutions.

2. Passive Intent (They are NOT searching for a solution) -> Social Media Ads (Meta, LinkedIn, etc.)
If your product is innovative or solves a problem people don't know they have (or don't know there's a solution for), then you need to interrupt them. This is where social media comes in. You use the deep research you did on your ICP to target them based on their interests, job titles, the software they use, etc.

• B2B Product/Service: LinkedIn Ads is often the best choice here, despite being more expensive. The targeting is unmatched. You can target specific decision-makers (like a Head of Marketing) at companies of a certain size (50-200 employees) in a specific industry (e.g., SaaS). We ran a campaign for a B2B software client targeting decision makers and achieved a $22 cost per lead, which was fantastic for their high-ticket offer.
• B2C or B2B with broader appeal: Meta (Facebook/Instagram) can be incredibly powerful. You can target users based on interests (e.g., people interested in 'Shopify' and who are 'small business owners'). For one B2B software client, we got over 4,600 registrations at just $2.38 each using Meta ads, proving it can work brilliantly for B2B if you get the targeting and offer right.

The key is to use your ICP research to build highly specific audiences and then hit them with your problem-focused messaging. Your ad needs to stop their scroll and make them realise they have a problem you can solve.

You'll need to know what to expect to pay

This is the million-dollar question, isn't it? The honest answer is: it depends. It's affected by your industry, targeting, ad quality, landing page, and offer. However, based on the hundreds of campaigns we've run, I can give you some realistic ballpark figures for a developed market like the US.

Let's break it down by objective.

For Leads/Signups/Free Trials (Quick Conversions):

• Cost Per Click (CPC): You'll likely see CPCs in the range of $0.75 - $2.00.
• Landing Page Conversion Rate: A decent landing page should convert between 10% and 30% of clicks into a lead or signup.
• Estimated Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): Based on this, your math looks like this:
  • Worst Case: $2.00 CPC / 10% Conversion Rate = $20 per lead.
  • Best Case: $0.75 CPC / 30% Conversion Rate = $2.50 per lead.

For Sales (eCommerce or Direct Purchase):

• Cost Per Click (CPC): The CPC range is often similar, around $0.75 - $2.00.
• Website Conversion Rate: This is much lower for a direct purchase. A typical eCommerce store converts between 2% and 5% of visitors into customers.
• Estimated Cost Per Purchase (CPP): The math gets a bit scarier here:
  • Worst Case: $2.00 CPC / 2% Conversion Rate = $100 per sale.
  • Best Case: $0.75 CPC / 5% Conversion Rate = $15 per sale.

These numbers aren't promises, but they are a realistic guide. They help you understand if your initial results are in a normal range or if you need to make urgent changes. We recently helped a medical job matching SaaS reduce their Cost Per User Acquisition from over £100 down to just £7 by systematically optimising their targeting, ads, and funnel.

I'd say you need to calculate your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Here's a concept that separates businesses that scale from those that stay small. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but rather "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

LTV tells you the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire period they do business with you. Once you know this number, you can make much smarter decisions about your ad spend. Here's a simple way to calculate it for a subscription or recurring revenue business:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month? Let's say it's $100.
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for costs of goods sold (COGS)? Let's say it's 80%.
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? This is critical. Let's say it's 5%.

Now, the calculation is simple:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
LTV = ($100 * 0.80) / 0.05
LTV = $80 / 0.05 = $1,600

In this example, each new customer is worth $1,600 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime.

This number changes everything. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means that for a customer worth $1,600, you can afford to spend up to $1,600 / 3 = ~$533 to acquire them and still have a very healthy business model.

Now let's work backwards. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to $533 / 10 = $53.30 for a single qualified lead. Suddenly, that $20 lead from a LinkedIn ad doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain.

This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to focus on acquiring high-value customers, even if it costs a bit more upfront.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this all up, launching a new product is less about picking the "best platform" and more about executing a solid, customer-centric strategy. If you just throw money at a platform without getting the foundations right, you'll most likely be dissapointed with the results. I've broken down the steps I'd recommend you take into a simple table below.

This whole process can feel a bit daunting, I know. It's not just about pushing a few buttons in an ad platform; it's about deep customer understanding and rigorous strategic thinking. A lot of businesses try to do this themselves and end up wasting a lot of time and money before they figure it out.

That's where getting some expert help can make a massive difference. An experienced agency or consultant has been through this process hundreds of times. We know the pitfalls to avoid and the shortcuts to success. We can help you get from Phase 1 to Phase 3 much faster and with a higher chance of success.

If you'd like to chat through your specific product and situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can dive into your plans and give you some more tailored advice. It might be a really helpful next step for you.

Either way, I hope this detailed breakdown gives you a much clearer path forward for your launch in Denver. Get the strategy right first, and the results will follow.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh