Solved: Meta Ads Expert in the UK (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! I appreciate you getting in touch. It's a common problem, trying to find a Meta ads strategist in the UK who actually knows what they're doing. The market is flooded with people who talk a good game but have never managed a serious budget or delivered proper results. It can feel like a complete minefield.

I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and a bit of guidance based on my experience. This should give you a framework for cutting through the noise and finding someone who can genuinely help your business grow, rather than just burn through your cash. It all comes down to asking the right questions, and knowing what a good answer looks like.

We'll need to look at your customer, but not how you think...

Before we even touch on Meta ads, let's talk about the absolute foundation of any successful campaign: your customer. I'm willing to bet that if you've worked with strategists before, they've asked for your "Ideal Customer Profile" or ICP. And you probably gave them something that looks like a census form: "We target women aged 35-55, living in the South East, with an income over £60k." Or for B2B: "We target companies in the tech sector with 50-200 employees."

Let me be brutally honest. That kind of profile is almost completely useless. It's a marketing artifact that makes people feel like they've done their homework, but it leads to generic, soulless advertising that speaks to absolutely no one. It encourages you to target massive, vague interests on Meta like "small business owners" and then wonder why you're getting rubbish leads.

You need to completely reframe this. Your ICP isn't a demographic. Your ICP is a nightmare. It's a specific, urgent, and expensive problem state that someone is in. Your job isn't to find people who fit a profile; it's to find people who are living that nightmare right now and are desperate for a way out.

Think about it. The Head of Engineering at a startup isn't just a job title. She's a leader who's terrified that her best developers are about to quit because their workflow is a complete mess and they're bogged down in manual tasks. That's her nightmare. A partner at a law firm isn't worried about 'document management'; he's terrified of missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a million-pound malpractice suit. That's his nightmare. Your product or service needs to be the solution to that specific nightmare.

Once you've defined the nightmare, you can work backwards to find where these people congregate online. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute? What industry newsletters do they actually open and read every week? What software tools (like HubSpot or Salesforce) are they already paying for? What specific Facebook groups are they members of? This is the intelligence that forms the bedrock of a killer targeting strategy. It's hard work, but if you skip this step, you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say you need to rethink your offer before you spend a penny...

Okay, so you've defined the nightmare. The next part of the puzzle, and frankly the number one reason I see campaigns fail, is the offer. Your ads can have the best copy and the most precise targeting in the world, but if what you're offering at the end of it is weak, you will fail. Full stop.

Most B2B businesses, and even many B2C ones, have a terrible offer. It's usually some variation of "Contact Us" or, my personal pet peeve, "Request a Demo". The "Request a Demo" button is probably the most arrogant call-to-action ever invented. It presumes that your prospect, a busy and important person, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It screams high-friction and low-value. It instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor begging for their time.

Your offer's only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment. It needs to provide so much undeniable value upfront that the prospect starts to sell themselves on your full solution. You have to solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to ask for money to solve the whole thing.

So, how do you create a message they can't ignore? You need to speak directly to the nightmare we just defined. Here are a couple of simple frameworks:

• Problem-Agitate-Solve: You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad copy would be: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? (Problem). Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? (Agitate). Get an expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth. (Solve)."
• Before-After-Bridge: You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell relief. "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. (Before). Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling, seeing where every pound is going. (After). Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. (Bridge)."

This messaging leads them to your high-value offer. For a SaaS company, the gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan (with no credit card required). Let them use the actual product and feel the transformation. For a service business, you have to bottle your expertise into an asset. For a marketing agency, it could be a free, automated SEO audit. For a data analytics firm, a 'Data Health Check'. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit a prospect's failing ad campaigns for free and give them actionable advice.

You must give value first. It's the only way to build trust and get qualified people to raise their hands.

You probably should understand the numbers that actually matter...

So many businesses get obsessed with the wrong metrics. They ask, "What's a good Cost Per Click?" or "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?". These are the wrong questions. The real question you should be asking is: "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that lies in a metric that most businesses don't even calculate: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

Your LTV tells you what a customer is actually worth to you in profit over the entire time they do business with you. Once you know this number, you can make much smarter, more aggressive decisions about your advertising spend. You stop being scared of a £50 lead because you know that customer will be worth £5,000 to you.

The calculation is pretty straightforward. You just need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you typically make from one customer, per month or per year? Let's use a monthly example: £500.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods or services? Let's say it's 80%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? This is a critical one. Let's say it's 4%.

The formula is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Using our example: LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04 = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000.

In this scenario, each new customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business. Now things look different, don't they? A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a £10,000 LTV customer, you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire them and still have a very profitable business. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per lead. Suddenly that expensive-looking LinkedIn lead doesn't seem so pricey after all.

This is the maths that unlocks growth. Any strategist you hire should be having this conversation with you. If they don't ask about your LTV and churn, they're an amateur.

You'll need to use Meta's algorithm correctly, not fight it...

Now we can finally talk about Meta. Here's an uncomfortable truth: most businesses using Meta ads are actively paying the platform to find them the worst possible audience. How? By using the wrong campaign objective.

When you set up a campaign and choose an objective like "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, literal command: "Find me the largest number of people inside my targeting for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It goes out and finds all the users who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those users' attention is not in demand. It's cheap. You are literally paying to advertise to non-customers.

Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. For any business that needs to see a return on its investment, you should be using a conversion objective from day one. That means optimising for Leads, Sales, or whatever your most valuable action is. This tells the algorithm to go and find people who have a history of taking that specific action. It's more expensive per impression, but infinitely more effective.

Once you've set the right objective, you need to structure your campaigns properly to test audiences. A lot of people just throw a bunch of random interests into one ad set and hope for the best. A more systematic approach is needed. I usually prioritise audiences based on how close they are to the money, something like this:

• Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Cold Audiences: These are people who don't know you. You start here. This involves testing Detailed Targeting (interests, behaviours) based on the "nightmare" research you did earlier. Once your pixel has enough data, you can test Lookalike Audiences. The best lookalikes are built from your best customers, not just all website visitors.
• Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Warm Audiences: These are people who have engaged but not converted. You retarget them. This includes recent website visitors, people who have watched a percentage of your videos, or engaged with your Instagram/Facebook page.
• Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Hot Audiences: These are people who have shown strong buying intent. You retarget them aggressively. This means people who have added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, or visited specific high-intent pages.

For a new account, you start at the top (ToFu), using your budget to test different interest-based audiences, grouped by theme. When one starts working, you give it more budget. When it fails, you kill it quickly. Once you have enough data (at least 100 conversions, but ideally more), you build your MoFu and BoFu retargeting campaigns and start creating lookalikes. It's a process of constant testing and refinement.

Finally, how to spot a real expert from a pretender...

This brings us back to your original question: how do you find someone good in the UK? Now you have the framework to properly vet them. You're not just looking for a "Meta ads strategist"; you're looking for a strategic partner who understands everything we've just discussed.

Here’s what to look for:

1. Their Case Studies: Don't just glance at them. Dig in. Do they have experience in your niche, or a similar one? That's a bonus, but not essential. What's more important is seeing how they think. Do their case studies talk about the client's business goals, their customer's pain points, and the offers they used? Or is it just vanity metrics like 'reach' and 'impressions'? Look for real results, like revenue generated, return on ad spend (ROAS), or cost per acquisition (CPA). I remember one medical recruitment SaaS client where we managed to reduce their CPA from over £100 down to just £7. That's a specific, tangible business outcome. That's the kind of proof you want to see.


2. The Initial Call: This is their audition. A pretender will give you a slick sales pitch, promise you the world, and talk about themselves. A real expert will spend most of the call asking you smart questions. They'll ask about your LTV, your churn rate, your offer, and your customer's biggest problems. A good consultant should give you so much value on that first free call that you feel a little guilty. They should provide a taste of the expertise you'd be paying for. If you don't walk away from that initial chat with at least one or two genuine 'aha!' moments and some actionable advice you could implement yourself, they are not the right fit.


3. Reviews and Trust: Reviews are a good signal, of course. But they must be backed up by the evidence in the case studies and the expertise you witness on the call. And here’s a slightly contrarian take: if, after reviewing their detailed case studies and having a free, value-packed strategy session, you still feel the need to ask for client references, it's probably not a good fit. For a good agency, that can be a red flag. It signals a fundamental lack of trust from the very beginning, and no good partnership can be built on that foundation. The proof should be in the work and the expertise they demonstrate, not in getting you to bother one of their existing clients.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below as a final summary of what to focus on.

As you can probably tell, effective paid advertising is far more than just knowing how to click the buttons in Meta Ads Manager. It's a blend of deep customer psychology, commercial acumen, and ruthless analytical testing. It's complex, and getting it wrong can be incredibly expensive.

This is why many businesses ultimately decide to work with an expert partner. It's not just about saving time; it's about leveraging years of experience from running hundreds of campaigns, avoiding costly mistakes, and accelerating your path to profitable growth.

Hopefully this detailed breakdown has been helpful and gives you a much clearer idea of what to look for. If you'd like to have a chat about your specific business and see how these principles might apply, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a look at your situation together.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh