Solved: More Leads from LinkedIn Ads in Liverpool?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out about your LinkedIn ads. It's a common story to hear that campaigns aren't delivering, especially when you're targeting a specific geographic area like Liverpool. It can feel like you're just throwing money at the platform with very little to show for it.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience running B2B campaigns. The problem usually isn't the location targeting itself, but a much deeper issue with the core strategy. We need to stop thinking about who your customers *are* (e.g., "businesses in Liverpool") and start focusing obsessively on the problems they *have*. That's where the real leverage is.

Let's unpack this a bit.

We'll need to look at your ICP... It's a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's be brutally honest. "Potential customers in Liverpool" is not a target audience. It's a pin on a map. This is the single biggest mistake people make, and it's why most B2B ads fail. You're defining your customer by a sterile, useless demographic that tells you nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to absolutely no one.

To stop burning cash, you must redefine your customer by their pain. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your ideal client isn't just a "Marketing Manager in Liverpool"; she's a leader terrified of presenting another failed campaign's results to her board, worried about her job security. The "Operations Director" at a logistics firm near the Port of Liverpool isn't just a job title; he's a man who can't sleep because his outdated warehouse system is causing shipping delays that are costing the company thousands per day and damaging its reputation.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Once you’ve isolated that specific nightmare, your entire strategy changes. You're no longer just layering "Liverpool" over "Job Title." You start asking the right questions:

• What specific software do they use daily and probably hate? (e.g., an old CRM, clunky project management tools).
• Which local Liverpool business groups or national industry associations are they members of on LinkedIn?
• What industry-specific jargon or acronyms do they use that you can put in your ad copy to signal that you "get it"?
• Who are the local influencers or major companies in the Liverpool City Region they follow?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. If you haven't done this work, you have no business spending another pound on LinkedIn Ads. You're just gambling. Every decision, from the audience you select to the words you write, must flow from a deep understanding of this professional pain. This is the foundation. Without it, everything else we discuss is pointless.

I'd say you need to understand the real cost of getting a customer...

The second thing killing your campaign is probably your mindset. You're focused on "getting leads," which makes you focus on the Cost Per Lead (CPL). This forces you into a race to the bottom. You start chasing cheap leads, which are almost always low-quality leads that waste your time and never convert. The real question isn't "How low can my 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).

Most businesses I talk to haven't calculated this properly. They have a vague idea, but they don't know the actual number that should be guiding their entire marketing budget. Let's work it out. You need three pieces of information:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Be honest here).
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is simple but powerful: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's say you provide a service that costs £1,000 a month, your gross margin is 70%, and you lose about 2% of your clients each month. Your LTV would be (£1,000 * 0.70) / 0.02 = £35,000. Each customer is worth £35,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime.

Now, a healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a customer worth £35,000, you can afford to spend up to £11,666 to acquire them. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £1,166 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £100 CPL you were getting from a poorly targeted campaign doesn't just look bad, it looks strategically incompetent. And a potential £500 CPL for a perfectly targeted lead from a Finance Director in Liverpool's commercial district doesn't seem expensive; it looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth.

Play around with your own numbers using the calculator below. This is the single most important bit of financial modelling you can do for your advertising.

You probably should have a message they can't ignore...

Now that you know who you're targeting (someone in a state of professional pain) and what you can afford to spend, you need to craft a message that hits them right between the eyes. Your ad copy's only job is to get the right person to stop scrolling and think, "They're talking about me."

Generic copy like "Award-winning business consultancy in Liverpool" is a waste of money. It's about you, not them. You need to flip it. For a high-touch service business, you deploy the Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) framework. You don't sell "IT support"; you sell uninterrupted workflow.

Here's how it works:

• Problem: State their nightmare clearly. "Another IT outage brought your Liverpool office to a standstill? Again?"
• Agitate: Twist the knife. Remind them of the consequences. "Every minute of downtime isn't just lost productivity; it's another deadline missed, another client frustrated, and another question from the board about why this keeps happening."
• Solve: Introduce your service as the clear, obvious solution. "Get proactive IT support that fixes problems before they happen. We guarantee 99.9% uptime so your team can focus on what they do best. See how we help other Liverpool businesses stay online."

Notice how specific that is? It calls out the location and the exact pain point. A Head of Operations in Liverpool seeing that ad feels understood. It's magnetic.

For a product or SaaS, you can use the Before-After-Bridge (BAB) framework. You don't sell a "CRM platform"; you sell a world where no lead ever gets forgotten.

• Before: Describe their current, frustrating world. "Your sales data is scattered across three different spreadsheets, and you've just realised a high-value lead from that Liverpool networking event was never followed up on."
• After: Paint a picture of the ideal world. "Imagine every single lead, from every source, automatically captured, nurtured, and assigned to the right salesperson in seconds. Your pipeline is crystal clear, and your revenue forecasts are actually accurate."
• Bridge: Position your product as the vehicle to get them from Before to After. "Our CRM is the bridge. It unifies your sales process in under an hour. Start your free trial and close your first deal this week."

Stop talking about your features. Nobody cares. Talk about the transformation. Talk about their pain and how you are the only logical cure. That's how you get clicks that matter.

You'll need an offer that doesn't suck... Delete the "Request a Demo" Button

This brings us to the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. The "Request a Demo," "Book a Call," or "Contact Us" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do with their time than block out 30 minutes to be sold to by a stranger.

It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor, just another person asking for their time. It's a massive barrier. Think about it from their perspective. They've just seen an ad. They're mildly interested, but they don't know you, they don't trust you, and they're certainly not ready to commit to a sales call. You need to earn that right.

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. It has to be low-friction and high-value.

You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value and solves a small, real problem for free. Here are some ideas:

• For a Marketing Agency: A free, automated "Liverpool Local SEO Audit" that shows a business how they rank against 3 local competitors for their most important keywords.
• For a Financial Consultant: A "Cash Flow Projection Template" designed specifically for UK service businesses that they can download and use immediately.
- For an IT Support Company: A "5-Minute Cybersecurity Health Check" PDF that helps them identify the most common vulnerabilities in their current setup.
• For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: We offer a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free. There's no hard sell; we provide genuine value upfront to demonstrate our expertise.

This approach does two things. First, it generates a lead. Second, and more importantly, it pre-qualifies that lead. Anyone who downloads a cash flow template is clearly thinking about their cash flow. You've not only captured a contact, you've captured their intent. This makes the follow-up sales conversation a hundred times easier and more natural. You're not a cold caller; you're the helpful expert who already gave them something useful.

You must solve a small problem for free to earn the right to solve their whole problem for a fee.

We'll need to look at how you're targeting on LinkedIn...

Okay, with the strategy sorted (Pain-based ICP, LTV-driven budget, PAS copy, high-value offer), we can finally talk about the buttons to press on LinkedIn. Now, your targeting can become incredibly precise and effective. Instead of a blunt instrument, it becomes a surgical tool.

Here’s how you should think about layering your targeting. The goal is to create a small, highly-concentrated audience of people who are extremely likely to have the 'nightmare' you solve. We're aiming for quality, not quantity. A campaign targeting 2,000 perfect-fit people in Liverpool is infinitely better than one targeting 50,000 vaguely relevant ones.

Let's break down the flowchart above:

1. Geography (The 'Where'): This is your base layer. Start with "Liverpool, England, United Kingdom" or the "Liverpool City Region." This is the only time we think broadly about location.
2. Firmographics (The 'What Company'): Now, we narrow. What kind of companies experience the pain you solve most acutely? Use Industry (e.g., 'Maritime', 'Financial Services', 'Creative Agencies') and Company Size (e.g., '51-200 employees'). Be specific. If your solution is only for SMEs, don't waste money showing ads to enterprise giants like Peel Ports.
3. Role (The 'Who'): Who within those companies feels the pain? Use Job Function (e.g., 'Operations', 'Finance', 'Marketing') and Seniority (e.g., 'Director', 'VP', 'C-Suite'). Avoid targeting by exact job titles if you can, as they vary wildly. 'Head of Magic' might be a marketing manager. Function and Seniority are more reliable.
4. Pain Point Proxy (The 'Why They Care'): This is the secret sauce. This is where you seperate yourself from the amateurs. You need to narrow the audience further with an AND condition. Target people who match the above criteria AND also have certain Member Skills on their profile (e.g., "Agile Project Management," "SaaS sales," "Supply Chain Optimisation") or are members of specific Member Groups (e.g., "SaaS Growth Hacks," "The Liverpool Chamber of Commerce"). These act as powerful signals that they are deeply involved in the area you can help with.

After you've built this 'nightmare' audience, you can think about ad formats. For your goal of generating leads, you generally have two solid options:

• Sponsored Content with a Lead Gen Form: This is an ad that appears in the newsfeed (image, video, or carousel) and when clicked, opens a pre-filled LinkedIn form. It's very low-friction for the user, which is great. For example, one B2B software campaign we ran on LinkedIn used this exact approach. We were able to generate leads from key decision-makers for just $22 each. The downside is that because it's so easy, the lead quality can sometimes be lower. It's best used for offers like downloading a guide or checklist.
• Sponsored Content to a Landing Page: This is the more traditional approach. You send traffic from the ad to a dedicated page on your website. This is higher friction, so your CPL will almost certainly be higher. However, the leads are often much more qualified because they've had to make the effort to visit your site and fill out your form. This is the best option for higher-commitment offers like signing up for a webinar or booking a free audit.

My advice? Test both. Run two identical campaigns, one with a Lead Gen Form and one pointing to a landing page, both offering the same high-value asset. Let the data tell you which approach delivers not just the cheapest leads, but the leads that actually turn into revenue.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull this all together, here is a summary of the actionable steps I'd recomend you take. This isn't just a list of suggestions; it's a fundamental shift in how you should approach advertising on LinkedIn. Moving from a passive, hope-based strategy to an active, diagnosis-based one.

Executing this strategy correctly takes time, expertise, and a willingness to be disciplined and data-driven. It's a significant departure from the 'set it and forget it' approach that so many fall victim to. The truth is, running ads is easy. Running ads that reliably generate profitable customers is a completely different skill set.

If you're feeling a bit overwhelmed by the depth of this, that's perfectly normal. This is what specialists do all day, every day. We've spent years making the mistakes, analysing the data, and refining these processes across dozens of B2B accounts. We know the benchmarks, we know the pitfalls, and we know how to get from A to B faster.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this framework specifically to your business and potentially manage this whole process for you, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can look at your current campaigns together and identify the biggest opportunities for improvement.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh