Solved: First Marketing Strategy (A Step-by-Step Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you're right at that exciting but also slightly terrifying stage of launching a new business. I get it, the amount of marketing advice out there is completely overwhelming, and most of it is generic rubbish. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and a bit of a framework to help you cut through the noise. This isn't about picking a random channel; it's about building a proper foundation so your ad spend isn't just wasted.

My goal here is to give you a bit of a roadmap. We'll start with the stuff that actually matters *before* you even think about placing an ad, then move into the practicals of strategy and costs.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get one thing straight. The first mistake almost everyone makes is defining their customer with vague demographics. "Businesses in Hamburg with 10-50 employees" or "women aged 25-40 who like yoga". This is useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic ads that get ignored.

To stop burning cash before you even start, 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 Ideal Customer Profile isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let's make this real.

-> Bad ICP: "We sell to HR managers in tech companies."
-> Good ICP (The Nightmare): "Our customer is an HR manager at a 100-person tech scale-up in Germany who is secretly terrified. Their top engineer just quit, citing burnout from a chaotic onboarding process. Now she's staring at a 6-month recruitment bill and the CTO is breathing down her neck. She doesn't need 'HR software'; she needs to stop the talent bleed *now* before it torpedoes their product roadmap."

See the difference? The first is a category. The second is a story, a motivation, a deep-seated fear. This is what you build your entire marketing around. You're not selling a feature; you're selling a solution to that nightmare.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find them. Where do they go to solve this pain? What podcasts do they listen to on their commute (maybe something like 'Acquired' or a local German tech podcast)? What industry newsletters do they actually open? What software tools (like Personio or Workday) are they already paying for? Are they in specific XING or LinkedIn groups for German HR professionals? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Honestly, if you can't answer these questions, you have no business spending a single euro on ads yet.

We'll need to look at your Offer... and delete the 'Request a Demo' button

Now we get to the second most common failure point in all of advertising: the offer. I'm going to bet your initial plan involved a big "Contact Us" or "Request a Demo" button on your website. Delete it. Now.

The "Request a Demo" button is probably the most arrogant Call to Action ever invented. It presumes your prospect, who is busy and stressed (remember their nightmare?), has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention. It's a massive barrier.

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 must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing. This builds trust and demonstrates your expertise, rather than just claiming it.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a SaaS business: The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan. No credit card. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation from their nightmare to relief. A Product Qualified Lead (PQL) who has already seen the value is a thousand times better than a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) who just downloaded a PDF. I remember one B2B SaaS client we worked with who generated 1,535 trials just by switching from a demo request to a frictionless free trial offer.
• For a service business: You are not exempt. You have to bottle your expertise into an asset. If you're a marketing agency, offer a free, automated website audit that reveals the top 3 SEO issues. If you're a financial consultant, offer a 'Cash Flow Health Check' calculator. For our agency, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a prospect's failing ad accounts. We provide real value, and if they're impressed, they ask about working together. The offer does the selling for us.

Your offer should be a bridge from their pain to a glimpse of the solution. You need to make it a no-brainer for them to take that first step. Think about what a genuinely helpful, no-strings-attached first step could be for your specific buisness.

I'd say you need to decide where to fish

Okay, so you've defined the nightmare and crafted an irresistible, low-friction offer. *Now* we can talk about channels. The choice isn't about what's trendy; it's about matching the channel to your customer's state of mind.

There are fundamentally two types of potential customers:

1. The Actively Searching (High Intent): These people know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. They are typing things into Google like "elektriker hamburg" (electrician Hamburg), "b2b saas marketing agentur" (B2B SaaS marketing agency), or "beste buchhaltungssoftware für kmu" (best accounting software for SMEs). Their intent is clear and they are ready to evaluate options.

-> Your Channel: Google Ads (Search). This is the absolute best place to start for most businesses. You're not trying to convince someone they have a problem; you're just showing up as the solution when they're looking for one. The downside is that it can be competitive and expensive, but the lead quality is typically very high. You are paying to be the answer to a direct question.

2. The Passively Unaware (Low Intent): These people have the nightmare you solve, but they aren't actively searching for a solution. They might be tolerating the pain, or they don't even realise a better way exists. You can't wait for them to search; you have to find them.

-> Your Channels: Social Media Ads (LinkedIn, Meta, etc.). Here, you use the targeting capabilities to get in front of your ICP. For that HR manager we talked about, you'd use LinkedIn to target people with her job title, at companies of a certain size, in the tech industry, located in Germany. Your ad's job is to interrupt their scrolling with a message that speaks directly to their hidden nightmare. Something like: "Losing top engineers to burnout? A chaotic onboarding process could be the silent killer." This is about problem agitation and education. It's a longer game, and leads can be cheaper but less qualified initially. One campaign we worked on for a B2B software client brought in leads for decision-makers at around the $22 mark using well-targeted LinkedIn ads, which was incredibly efficient for them.

For a new business in Hamburg, I'd almost always suggest starting with Google Search Ads, assuming people are searching for what you offer. It's the most direct path to revenue. You can use Google's Keyword Planner to see if people are actually searching for terms related to your buisness in your area. If the search volume is too low or non-existent, then you'll be forced to go down the social ads route to generate demand.

You probably should calculate what you can afford to spend

The next question I always get is "what should my budget be?" or "what's a good cost-per-lead?". These are the wrong questions. The real question is "How high a cost-per-lead can I *afford* to acquire a truly great customer?". The answer is found by calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

This single metric changes everything. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to invest confidently in acquiring the right customers. Here's the basic maths:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue.
• Customer Lifetime (in months): How long does an average customer stay with you? The simple way to calculate this is 1 / Monthly Churn Rate. (Churn rate is the % of customers you lose each month).

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) * Customer Lifetime

Let's use the calculator below to make this tangible.

Suddenly, a €50 lead from Google Ads doesn't seem so expensive, does it? If your LTV is €10,000 and you can afford to spend €3,333 to get a customer, and your sales process converts 1 in 20 leads, you can afford to pay up to €166 per lead. This is the maths that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth. Without it, you're just guessing.

And what about actual costs? Well, it varies wildly. For simple lead-gen (like an email signup), you might see costs of €2-€15 in a developed country like Germany. For a B2B lead for a high-ticket service, it could be €50-€250+. For eCommerce, the cost per purchase depends massively on your product price. The key isn't to find the 'average' cost, but to know *your* affordable cost based on your LTV.

You'll need a framework for what actually works

Finally, let's put this together into a practical advertising structure. Forget complicated media plans. Think of it as a simple funnel: Top (ToFu), Middle (MoFu), and Bottom (BoFu).

When you start, 90% of your effort and budget should go into the ToFu prospecting campaign. You need to feed the funnel. The MoFu and BoFu campaigns are for retargeting, and they become powerful once you have a steady stream of traffic. One of our e-commerce clients, a cleaning products company, saw a 633% return precisely because they had a robust retargeting system in place to convert visitors who didn't buy on their first visit.

Once you're running, the data tells you where the problem is:

• Low Click-Through Rate (CTR)? Your ads are the problem. The targeting is wrong, or the ad copy/creative isn't grabbing attention and speaking to the nightmare.
• High CTR but low Conversion Rate (CVR)? Your landing page is the problem. It's not persuasive, the offer isn't clear, or it's technically broken.

This simple diagnostic framework prevents you from randomly changing things and allows you to methodically improve performance. There's a lot of testing involved, trying different audiences and ad creatives, but this structure provides the foundation for it all.

This is the main advice I have for you:

This is a lot to take in, I know. But getting this foundation right is the difference between a succesful launch and a lot of wasted money. Here is a simplified table of the process I've just walked you through.

I know this looks like a lot of work, and it is. Getting performance marketing right is complex, and it's very easy to burn through a lot of money with little to show for it. The learning curve is steep and mistakes are costly.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced consultant or agency has already made the mistakes, run hundreds of tests, and knows the patterns. We can help you build this foundation correctly from day one, navigate the platform complexities, and start getting results much faster, ultimately saving you money and a lot of frustration.

If you'd like to chat through your specific business and how this framework could apply to you, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can dive into your plans in more detail. It might be helpful just to get a second pair of expert eyes on things.

Either way, I hope this has given you a much clearer, more strategic way to think about your launch. Focus on the fundamentals, not the fads.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh