Solved: PPC Strategy for Productized Software Services

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

It’s an interesting move, shifting from pure custom dev to productised services. Lots of agencies are trying this. Happy to give you some initial thoughts on how you might approach this with paid ads, as your initial ideas might not be the best fit and could end up being a pretty expensive way to learn some tough lessons. The real challenge here isn't just picking the right ad platform, but fundamentally rethinking who you're selling to and what you're actually offering them.

We'll need to look at your customer's nightmare, not your service...

Right, let's be brutally honest. Nobody wakes up in the morning thinking, "I desperately need to buy a productised software development service." It just doesn't happen. What they *do* wake up thinking is, "Our main competitor just launched a new feature and we're months behind," or "Our lead developer just quit and our whole project is about to collapse," or "This bloody legacy system is costing us a fortune in maintenance and I can't get budget approval for a full rebuild."

This is the single biggest mistake I see agencies make when they try to advertise. They talk about themselves, their services, their features. "We offer custom module development for a flat rate." Who cares? You have to define your customer by their pain, their urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a demographic like "tech companies with 50-200 employees." That tells you nothing useful and leads to generic ads that get ignored.

Your ICP is a problem state. For example:

• The Overwhelmed CTO: She's buried in management tasks, her best engineers are threatening to leave because of a clunky workflow, and she has a critical integration project that's been on the back burner for six months. Her nightmare is losing top talent and failing to deliver on the product roadmap.
• The Non-Technical Founder: He's just secured seed funding but has no idea how to build a scalable MVP. His nightmare is burning through his cash on a shoddy product built by unreliable freelancers and having nothing to show his investors.
• The Head of Product at a larger company: They have a massive, slow-moving internal dev team. Their nightmare is watching smaller, more agile competitors run circles around them because they can't get a simple landing page or microservice built in under three months.

Once you've isolated that specific nightmare, you can build your entire marketing plan around it. Everything from the ad copy to the landing page and the offer itself should speak directly to solving that one, agonising problem. Before you spend a single pound on ads, you need to know this inside out. Do this work first, or you have no business advertising.

I'd say you should forget PMax and Shopping Ads for now...

Now that we've established who you're talking to, let's talk about where to find them. Your suggestions of PMax, Shopping ads, and Facebook Marketplace are, frankly, not where you want to be. Here’s why:

• Performance Max (PMax): This is a black box designed by Google to spend your money across all their properties (Search, Display, YouTube, etc.). For a specific, high-value B2B service, it's like using a shotgun to perform surgery. You'll get a ton of low-quality, irrelevant impressions and clicks from people who are not, and will never be, your customer. You need precise control, not broad automation.
• Shopping Ads: These are for physical e-commerce products. You're selling a service. Trying to fit your "flat-rate API integration" service into a Shopping feed is a non-starter. It's the wrong tool for the job, full stop.
• Facebook Marketplace: This is primarily for local, consumer-to-consumer sales of second-hand goods. Using it to sell six-figure software development services is... optimistic.

You need to be on platforms where you can target based on business needs and professional identity. For a B2B agency like yours, there are really only two games in town to start with:

1. Google Search Ads: The Demand Catcher
This is for people who are already problem-aware and actively searching for a solution. They're typing things into Google that signal they are in pain. Your job is to show up with the answer. You wouldn't target broad keywords like "software development agency." That's too generic and expensive. Instead, you target keywords that map directly to the 'nightmare scenarios' we discussed:

• "zapier integration for legacy crm"
• "urgent mvp development for startups"
• "outsource react native component library"
• "fixed price wordpress to headless cms migration"

These are long-tail keywords. The search volume is lower, but the intent is incredibly high. The person searching for this has a specific, burning problem, and you have the specific, productised solution. This is where you'll likely find your most qualified, ready-to-buy leads.

2. LinkedIn Ads: The Demand Creator
This is for reaching the people who *have* the problem but aren't actively searching for a solution yet. LinkedIn's power is its targeting data. You can get incredibly specific:

• Job Title: Chief Technology Officer, VP of Engineering, Head of Product
• Company Size: 51-200 employees (the sweet spot for companies big enough to have a budget but small enough to be agile)
• Industry: Financial Services, SaaS, Medical Technology

You can then put an ad in front of a CTO at a 100-person FinTech company that talks directly about their likely pains. The cost per lead will almost certainly be higher than on Google Search, but you are proactively creating demand and building your brand with your exact target audience. We've run campaigns for B2B software where we've seen a cost per lead (CPL) of around $22 for highly qualified decision-makers. It's not cheap, but for a service that could be worth tens of thousands of pounds, it's an incredible investment.

You probably should rethink your offer...

This is probably the most important part of this whole letter. The biggest point of failure for B2B advertising is the offer. You might have the perfect audience and the perfect ad, but if you send them to a landing page with a "Buy Now for £10,000" or even a "Request a Demo" button, you will almost certainly fail.

Why? Because "Request a Demo" is an incredibly arrogant call to action. It presumes your prospect, a busy, important person, wants to book time in their calendar to be sold to by a company they've never heard of. It's high-friction and offers them zero immediate value. It positions you as just another vendor. For a new productised service, asking for a direct purchase is an even bigger leap of faith that no sane business leader will take.

Your offer's only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment. A moment of undeniable value that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

Instead of "Buy Now" or "Request a Demo", your call to action needs to be something like:

• Free 15-Minute Technical Scoping Session: "Unsure how to tackle that tricky API integration? Book a free, no-obligation 15-minute call with one of our senior developers to map out a clear plan of attack. You walk away with an actionable strategy, whether you work with us or not."
• Free Performance Audit for Your Web App: "Is your app slower than it should be? Get a free, automated audit that identifies the top 3 performance bottlenecks choking your user experience. No sales call required."
• The MVP Launch Checklist: "Download our comprehensive checklist of the 50 things non-technical founders forget before launching their MVP. Avoid costly mistakes and launch with confidence."

Do you see the difference? These offers provide immediate, tangible value. They de-risk the interaction. They position you as a generous expert, not a desperate salesperson. The sales call comes after you've already proven your worth. For our own consultancy, we offer a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. It's the single most effective way we generate new business, because in those 20 minutes, we provide more value than many agencies do in a month.

You'll need to understand the numbers that actually matter...

Before you start running ads, you need to get your head around the economics of your business. So many founders get obsessed with vanity metrics like cost-per-click (CPC) or even cost-per-lead (CPL). The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a fantastic customer?" The answer lies in your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

You need to figure out what a customer is actually worth to you over the long term. Here's a simplified way to calculate it:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make from a typical client, per month or per year? With productised services, this might be based on the initial project fee plus any ongoing support or follow-on projects. Let's estimate an average project value.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for your direct costs (like developer salaries)?
3. Customer Lifetime (in months/years): How long does a typical client stick around? Or how many follow-on projects do they do? This can be tricky to estimate at first, but you need a number.

Let's run a hypothetical example. Say your average productised service package is £8,000. Your gross margin is 60%. And you find that one in every four clients comes back for a second project of similar value within 2 years. So your average LTV might be £8,000 * 1.25 = £10,000.

LTV = (£10,000 * 0.60) = £6,000

So, each new customer is worth £6,000 in gross margin to your business. A healthy rule of thumb is a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £2,000 to acquire a single new customer.

Now, let's work backwards. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads (from your free audit/strategy session) into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £200 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £150 lead from a perfectly targeted CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem expensive at all, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth. Without it, you're just guessing and will likely give up because the initial lead costs seem too high.

We'll need to craft a message they can't ignore...

Once you have your ICP, your channels, your offer, and your numbers sorted, the final piece is the ad creative itself. Your ad copy needs to grab your target customer by the collar and speak directly to their pain. Don't talk about features; talk about their problems and the transformation you provide.

The best framework for this is Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You don't sell "fractional CTO services"; you sell a good night's sleep.

Let's apply this to one of your potential productised services. Let's imagine you offer a "Legacy System API Bridge" for a flat rate.

The BAD Ad (Feature-Focused):

"Custom Software Dev Agency. We now offer a flat-rate API development service to connect your systems. Secure, scalable, and efficient. Contact us for a quote."

This is boring, generic, and will be ignored by everyone.

The GOOD Ad (Pain-Focused, using PAS):

[Problem] Is your ancient CRM holding your sales team hostage? Are you manually exporting CSV files just to get basic data into your new marketing platform?

[Agitate] You know you're leaking revenue and making bad decisions based on siloed data. Every day you wait, your competition is getting smarter while you're stuck in spreadsheet hell.

[Solve] Get a fixed-price API bridge built in 14 days. We connect your legacy system to any modern platform, unlocking your data and automating your workflows. Stop fighting your software. Get your free technical roadmap in a 15-min call."

This ad works because it doesn't lead with the solution. It leads with an empathetic understanding of a very real, very frustrating business problem. It makes the prospect feel seen and understood, which is the first step to building trust.

I've put my main recommendations for you into a table below to give you a clearer picture of the actionable steps you should take.

As you can see, getting paid advertising right for a B2B service is a lot more involved than just setting up a campaign and hoping for the best. It's a strategic process that requires a deep understanding of your customer, your business economics, and the psychological triggers that drive action. It can be a complex and time-consuming process to get right, and mistakes can be very expensive.

This is where getting some expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced consultant can help you sidestep the common pitfalls, accelerate your learning curve, and build a profitable customer acquisition engine much faster than you could on your own.

If you'd like to discuss this further, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can take a closer look at your specific productised offerings and help you map out a more detailed plan. It might be a very productive use of your time.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh