Solved: 'Flexible Ads' Not the Core Problem

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! You asked for my opinion on "flexible ads", and I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts. Tbh, it's a question I hear a lot, but it often points to a deeper issue. People get caught up in the latest ad formats from Google or Meta, thinking it's some sort of magic bullet.

The truth is, the format of the ad is probably the least important part of the puzzle. The real flexibility you need isn't in the ad creative, it's in your strategy. Getting that right is the difference between burning cash and building a proper growth engine. So instead of just talking about ad formats, I'm going to walk you through the framework we use that actually gets results. It's a bit of a different way of thinking, but it works.

We'll need to look at your ICP... because it's a Nightmare, not a Demographic

Right, let's get one thing straight. 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. It's a lazy shortcut that leads to generic, boring ads that speak to no one and get ignored by everyone. To stop wasting money, you have to define your customer not by who they are, but by the problem they have. Their pain.

You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your ideal customer isn't just a job title; she's a person staring at a problem that keeps her up at night. For instance, we worked with a recruitment tech SaaS. Their initial target was "HR Managers". Useless. We dug deeper. Their *real* customer was a Head of Talent at a fast-growing tech firm who was terrified of her best engineers quitting out of frustration with a slow, broken hiring process. See the difference? One is a job title. The other is a nightmare.

Another example: a legal tech SaaS. Their nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the entire firm to a massive malpractice suit and reputational ruin.' Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's an emotional landscape of fear, frustration, or ambition.

Once you've truly isolated that nightmare, everything else falls into place. Your targeting becomes incredibly sharp. You stop asking "where are finance companies?" and start asking "where does a Head of Talent go to complain about losing engineers?" You find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' or 'SaaStr'. The industry newsletters they actually open, like 'Stratechery'. The SaaS tools they already pay for, like HubSpot or Salesforce. Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow people like Jason Lemkin on Twitter (now X)?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. It's the foundation for everything.

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

Once you know their nightmare, you can finally craft a message that cuts through the noise. Most B2B ads are dreadful. They're a list of features, full of jargon, and completely self-obsessed. "Our platform leverages AI synergy to optimise workflows." Nobody cares. You have to speak directly to the pain.

There are a few frameworks we use that work consistantly. They're simple but powerful.

For a high-touch service business, you use Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad copy should hit them where it hurts:

• Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a wild guess?"
• Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
• Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

For a B2B SaaS product, you use the Before-After-Bridge (BAB). You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of absolute relief.

• 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. Your stomach drops."
• After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and actually smiling. You see exactly where every single dollar is going, and waste is automatically flagged and eliminated."
• Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you from chaos to control. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

Even for high-ticket physical products, like scientific equipment, you attack the feature-obsession head-on. Don't just state the spec; state its real-world consequence. The "So What?" test.

• Feature: "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error."
• So What? "So your lab can publish results with unshakeable confidence, securing more funding and attracting top talent that other labs can only dream of."

This is how you get your ideal customer to stop scrolling and think, "how do they know?" You've shown them you understand their world better than they do. That's how trust is built, and it's what makes them click. Not some fancy "flexible" ad format.

You probably should delete the "Request a Demo" button...

Now we arrive at the most common point of failure in pretty much all B2B advertising: the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is possibly the most arrogant, high-friction Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes that your prospect, who is likely a busy, stressed-out decision maker, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to by a junior sales rep. It's a huge ask. It offers them zero immediate value and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their time.

Your offer has one job, and one job only: to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You have to give them something valuable for free to earn the right to ask for their time or money later. This is non-negotiable.

For SaaS founders, this is your secret weapon. The gold standard is a completely free trial (with no credit card details required) or a freemium plan. Let them actually use the product. Let them experience the transformation from the 'Before' state to the 'After' state. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a simple formality. You aren't generating "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs) for a sales team to chase for weeks; you're creating "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs) who are already convinced and asking you how to pay. We've seen this time and again; for one software client, focusing on a frictionless free trial offer helped us generate over 5,000 trial signups at just $7 each.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt from this rule. You just have to be more creative. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant, tangible value.

-> For a marketing agency: a free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities they're missing.
-> For a data analytics platform: a free 'Data Health Check' tool that connects to their database and flags the top 5 critical issues.
-> For a corporate training company: a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers.
-> For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: a completely free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns and give actionable advice.

You must solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to solve their entire nightmare for a price. It's about demonstrating value, not just promising it.

You'll need the math that unlocks proper growth...

This is where most businesses get it completely wrong. They obsess over the Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Click (CPC). They're constantly asking "How low can my CPL go?". This is the wrong question. It leads you to optimise for cheap, low-quality leads from the wrong audiences who will never, ever buy from you. The real question you should be asking is, "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?"

The answer to that question lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Until you know what a customer is worth to you, you're flying blind. You're making decisions based on gut feel and vanity metrics. Here's how you work it out. It's not complicated, but it's the most important calculation in your business.

You need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make from a typical customer, per month? Let's say it's £500.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for cost of goods sold or cost of service? Let's say it's 80%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? Let's be conservative and say it's 4%.

Now, the calculation is simple:

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

So in our example:

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04
LTV = £10,000

In this example, each customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy, sustainable business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means with a £10,000 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single new customer and still have a very profitable business.

Let's take it a step further. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% lead-to-customer rate), you can now calculate your maximum affordable CPL:

Max CPL = (Target CAC) / (Leads needed per customer)
Max CPL = £3,333 / 10 = £333

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a perfectly targeted LinkedIn ad campaign aimed at a CTO with the exact nightmare you solve doesn't seem expensive anymore, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. Meanwhile, your competitor is celebrating their £15 leads from a broad Facebook campaign, not realising they've just filled their pipeline with junk that will never convert.

This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap leads and allows you to confidently invest in acquiring the right customers who will stay longer and be more profitable. Use the calculator below to play with your own numbers.

I'd say you now need to choose where to find your ICP...

Ok, so now that you know who you're targeting, what their nightmare is, what you're going to offer them, and what you can afford to pay, *now* we can finally talk about ads and platforms. See how far down the list this is? Doing it this way round makes the platform choice obvious.

The choice boils down to a simple question: Is your ideal customer actively searching for a solution to their nightmare right now, or do they not even know a solution exists?

A) If they are actively searching → Google Ads is your best bet.
This is for "high intent" prospects. They know they have a problem and they are typing queries into a search bar to solve it. Your job is simply to show up with a relevant ad and a compelling offer. For an outreach tool, you'd target keywords like "software for lead generation" or "contact info finding tool". For an emergency electrician, it's "electrician near me" or "emergency electrical repair". You are capturing existing demand, not creating it. It's often more expensive per click, but the leads can be extremely high quality because they are pre-qualified by their search query.

B) If they aren't actively searching → Social Media Ads (LinkedIn, Meta) are for you.
This is for "demand generation". Your prospect is suffering from the nightmare, but they might not be actively looking for a solution. They might think it's just a problem they have to live with. Your job is to interrupt their scroll with an ad that perfectly describes their pain (using the PAS or BAB frameworks we talked about) and presents your high-value offer as the solution.

-> LinkedIn Ads: The obvious choice for most B2B. The targeting is unmatched. You can target by job title, company size, industry, specific company names, skills, group memberships... it's incredibly powerful for reaching specific decision makers. We ran a campaign for a client targeting decision makers and achieved a $22 CPL, which was a fantastic result given their LTV.
-> Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads: Don't dismiss this for B2B. It can work exceptionally well, especially if your ICP is a small business owner ("business page admins" targeting) or can be identified by interests (e.g., people who like Shopify, HubSpot, or specific industry publications). The algorithm is incredibly smart. We got over 4,600 registrations for a B2B software client at just $2.38 each using Meta. The key is to feed it the right data.

This is where audience prioritisation on a platform like Meta becomes so important. You don't just throw everything at the wall. You build a structured funnel. Below is a simplified version of how we structure our campaigns, moving from colder audiences to warmer, higher-intent ones.

And please, forget about "Awareness" campaigns...

Here is an uncomfortable but essential truth about advertising on platforms like Meta. When you select your campaign objective as "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the world's most powerful advertising algorithm a very specific, and very dangerous, command: "Find me the largest number of eyeballs for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It scours your target audience and identifies 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. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. Other advertisers aren't bidding for them because they don't convert. You are actively paying a fortune to find the worst possible audience for your product.

This is a trap so many businesses fall into. They think they need to "build the brand" before they can sell. For 99% of businesses, this is backwards. The best form of brand awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your product, having a great experience, and then raving about it online. That only happens through conversion.

Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, communicated through a compelling offer. It's not a prerequisite for making a sale. From day one, your campaigns should be set to a conversion objective: Leads, Sales, Signups, Appointments. This tells the algorithm, "Go and find me people within this audience who have a history of taking this specific action." You're instructing it to find buyers, not just viewers. It might cost more per impression, but you're paying for quality, not just quantity. This is a fundemental shift that makes a huge difference to the bottom line.

So, to bring this all together. Your question about "flexible ads" was a good starting point, but as you can see, it's just the tip of the iceberg. True flexibility and success in paid advertising comes from a robust strategy, not a specific ad format. It's about deep customer understanding, compelling offers, and a solid grasp of your business's economics.

Getting this framework in place is a lot of work, and it requires a different way of thinking. This is where expert help can make a massive difference. It's not just about setting up the ads; it's about building the entire strategic foundation that makes those ads profitable and scalable.

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

If you'd like to discuss how this framework could be specifically applied to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation strategy session where we can take a look at what you're doing now and map out a plan for growth. Feel free to book one in if that sounds helpful.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh