Solved: Promote Matlab dev pro Product in Digital World

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you've built a solid product with your Matlab dev pro Team and are now facing the big hurdle of getting it in front of the right people. It's a common spot to be in, and frankly, it's where most technical founders get stuck.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on my experience running paid advertising for lots of B2B software companies. Instead of just giving you a few quick tips, I've put together a more detailed breakdown of how I'd approach this. The truth is, just "promoting your product" isn't a strategy; it's a recipe for burning cash. The real win comes from deeply understanding who you're selling to and building your entire marketing system around their specific, urgent problems. We'll get into exactly how to do that.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get this out of the way first because it's the single biggest mistake I see. You probably think your target audience is "Matlab developers," "research scientists," or "engineers in the automotive industry." That's a demographic. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic, ignorable ads. It's the reason so many B2B ad budgets get set on fire with nothing to show for it.

You need to stop thinking about *who* they are and start obsessing over their *problem state*. Your ideal customer isn't just a job title; she's a person staring at a screen at 7 PM on a Thursday, utterly frustrated by a specific, urgent, and expensive problem that is actively damaging her work, her team's morale, or even her career prospects. Your product is the solution to that nightmare.

What is the actual nightmare?

• Is it a simulation that takes 48 hours to run, causing project delays that make the entire team look bad in front of management?
• Is it buggy, unmaintainable "spaghetti code" from a predecessor that's so fragile no one dares touch it, stalling all new development?
• Is it the risk of a critical calculation error in a financial model that could cost the company millions?
• Is it a Head of Engineering who's terrified his best developers are going to quit out of sheer frustration with their broken workflow and outdated tools?

This isn't just marketing fluff. This is the blueprint for your entire strategy. Once you isolate the specific nightmare, everything else becomes clear. Your ad copy writes itself. Your targeting becomes laser-focused. Your landing page speaks directly to their pain.

Forget brainstorming features. Get on the phone with your first few customers, or even people you *think* should be customers. Don't ask them what they want. Ask them what they hate about their workday. Ask them what keeps them up at night. Ask them what process, if it broke, would get them fired. The answer to those questions is your ICP. Everything else is just noise.

Here’s a simple way to visualise the process of moving from a useless demographic profile to a powerful, pain-based one.

I'd say you need to fix your offer first

Now that we've talked about who you're targeting, let's talk about what you're asking them to do. This brings us to the second most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer.

I'm going to guess your website has a "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us" button as its main call to action. You should delete it. Today. That button is perhaps the most arrogant and ineffective CTA ever conceived. It presumes that your prospect, a highly-paid, time-poor technical professional, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, offers zero immediate value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention. It's a conversion killer.

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're a software company, which gives you an incredible advantage. The gold standard offers are:

• A Free Trial (No Credit Card): Let them use the actual product. Let them import their own data. Let them experience the "after" state where their big, frustrating problem is solved. If your product is genuinely good, it will sell itself. This approach doesn't generate "Marketing Qualified Leads" (MQLs) that a sales team has to chase; it creates "Product Qualified Leads" (PQLs) who are already convinced and just need to figure out pricing.
• A Freemium Plan: Even better. Give them a permanently free, slightly limited version of your tool. Let it become an indispensable part of their workflow. When they hit a feature limit or need more capacity, upgrading becomes a no-brainer. This is the model that built giants like Slack and HubSpot.

"But our product is too complex for a trial!" I hear this a lot, and it's usually an excuse. If it's too complex, your onboarding is the problem, not the trial model. However, if a trial is genuinely impossible, you are not exempt from the rule of providing value first. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that solves a small, real problem for free. For your "Matlab dev pro" team, this could be:

• A Free "Matlab Code Analyser": A web-based tool where they can paste a snippet of code and it flags inefficiencies, potential bugs, or non-standard practices. Instant value.
• A "Simulation Performance Calculator": An interactive tool that helps them estimate how much faster their existing simulations could run with your solution. It quantifies the value proposition.
• A Free Video Course: A 3-part, 15-minute video series on "The 3 Most Common Bottlenecks in Matlab Performance and How to Fix Them". This establishes you as an authority and builds trust.

You must give them a taste of the solution for free to earn the right to talk about the full meal. Solve a small problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for money. An offer of "give me your time and I'll give you a sales pitch" is not an offer; it's a demand. And it will be ignored.

You probably should calculate what you can afford to spend

Before you spend a single pound on ads, you need to know your numbers. So many companies just pick a random budget—"Let's try £1,000 a month"—and hope for the best. This is like navigating without a compass. You'll get lost, run out of fuel, and crash.

The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead (CPL) go?" but "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). This is the total profit you can expect to make from an average customer over the entire period they do business with you.

Let's break down the maths. It's simpler than you think. You need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month (or year)?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for costs of goods sold (e.g., server costs, dedicated support)?
3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (If you have annual contracts, you can use an annual churn rate).

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

Let's imagine your software costs £200/month, your gross margin is 85%, and you lose 3% of your customers each month.

LTV = (£200 * 0.85) / 0.03

LTV = £170 / 0.03 = £5,667

So, in this example, each customer is worth £5,667 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio for a growing SaaS business is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,889 (£5,667 / 3) to acquire a single new customer and still have a very healthy, profitable business model.

Now we can work backwards to figure out what a "good" lead costs. If your sales process (from trial signup to paid customer) converts 1 in 10 leads, you can afford to pay up to £189 (£1,889 / 10) for each qualified trial signup.

Suddenly, seeing a £50 CPL from a LinkedIn campaign targeting senior engineers doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads. I've built a calculator for you below so you can play with your own numbers.

We'll need to look at choosing your battleground

Okay, so you know who you're targeting (based on their nightmare), you have a high-value offer (like a free trial), and you know your numbers (LTV and target CPL). Now, and only now, can we talk about where to actually spend money on ads. Choosing the right platform is absolutly critical. A brilliant message on the wrong platform is like shouting into the void.

For a niche B2B product like yours, you have two primary battlegrounds:

1. Google Ads (The 'I have a problem now' channel)

This is where you find people with active, urgent intent. They are literally typing their problems into a search bar. You aren't interrupting them; you're providing a solution at their exact moment of need. This is the lowest-hanging fruit and almost always where I'd recomend a B2B SaaS company starts.

Your job is to identify the keywords that signal this commercial intent. You want to avoid broad, informational queries and focus on keywords that suggest someone is looking for a tool or service. For example:

• Bad (Informational): "how to speed up matlab code"
• Good (Commercial): "matlab performance optimization software", "alternative to matlab profiler", "matlab code refactoring tool"
• Bad (Too Broad): "matlab consulting"
• Good (Specific): "hire matlab developer for finance", "aerospace matlab simulation service"

By targeting these long-tail, specific keywords, you ensure your ads are only shown to people who are "pre-qualified" by their own search behaviour. The traffic is more expensive per click, but the lead quality is often exponentially higher than on any other platform.

2. LinkedIn Ads (The 'I know who you are' channel)

This is your primary channel for outbound prospecting when your audience isn't actively searching. Its power lies in its incredibly granular B2B targeting. You can't target "people frustrated with slow simulations," but you *can* target:

• Job Title: "Lead Simulation Engineer", "Quantitative Analyst", "Head of R&D"
• Industry: "Aerospace & Aviation", "Automotive", "Financial Services"
• Company Size: 500-5,000 employees
• Company Name: You can literally upload a list of the top 100 companies you want to work with and target decision-makers there.
• Skills listed on their profile: "MATLAB", "Simulink", "Computational Fluid Dynamics"

With LinkedIn, you are reaching the right *person*, but you have to assume they aren't looking for a solution right now. Therefore, your ad needs to work much harder to grab their attention by speaking directly to their likely nightmare (see Section 1) and your offer needs to be very low-friction (see Section 2). A Sponsored Content ad promoting a free "Matlab Code Analyser" tool to a highly-targeted list of engineers is a classic, effective LinkedIn strategy. From my experience, this approach works well for B2B software clients. One campaign we worked on achieved a consistent $22 Cost Per Lead targeting senior decision-makers this way.

3. What about other platforms? (The 'Probably not for now' channels)

Meta (Facebook/Instagram): I need to be brutally honest here. For a highly niche B2B product like yours, Meta is probably not the place to start for prospecting. The targeting is consumer-focused, and while you can target interests like "Engineering" or people who follow certain universities, you're mostly hitting students and hobbyists. The real killer, though, is a trap called the "Brand Awareness" campaign. When you set your objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are telling Meta's algorithm to "find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm does exactly that. It finds users who are cheap to reach precisely because they never click, engage, or buy anything. You are literally paying to advertise to the worst possible audience. The only time Meta becomes truly powerful for B2B is for retargeting people who have already visited your website from Google or LinkedIn. It’s a great supporting player, but a terrible lead actor for you.

Twitter/X, Reddit: These can work, but they are advanced plays. You need to be deeply embedded in the specific subreddits or communities where your audience hangs out, and the ads need to feel very native to the platform. Get Google and LinkedIn working first before you even think about these.

You'll need a message they can't ignore

You can have the most precise targeting in the world, but if your ad copy is generic, you've wasted your money. Your ad has less than two seconds to stop someone scrolling and convince them you're worth their attention. It does this by speaking directly to the nightmare we identified earlier.

Let's use the frameworks I mentioned before and write some actual ad copy for your hypothetical "Matlab Performance Suite". Our ICP is the "Lead Aerospace Engineer whose simulations take 72 hours."

Framework 1: Before-After-Bridge (Great for SaaS)

This framework paints a picture of their current hell, shows them the promised land, and presents your product as the vehicle to get them there.

• Headline: Stop Waiting on Matlab Sims. Get Results in Minutes.
• Body Copy:

  (Before) Your team hits 'Run'. The simulation will take 3 days. That's 3 days of project delays, 3 days of your best engineers being blocked, 3 days closer to another missed deadline.

  (After) Imagine hitting 'Run' and getting your results back before lunch. Your team can iterate faster, test more variables, and deliver projects ahead of schedule, making you look like a hero to management.

  (Bridge) Our Performance Suite for Matlab is the bridge that gets you there. It automatically parallelises your existing code to run on multi-core CPUs or GPUs, no complex refactoring required. Start a free trial and run your first simulation 10x faster today.

Framework 2: Problem-Agitate-Solve (Great for high-touch services or complex products)

This is more direct. You state the problem, pour salt in the wound by highlighting the negative consequences, and then present your solution as the relief.

• Headline: Slow Matlab Code is Killing Your Team's Productivity.
• Body Copy:

  (Problem) Are your Matlab simulations taking hours, or even days, to run?

  (Agitate) Every minute spent waiting is a minute your competition is moving forward. It's not just about project delays; it's about the frustration that leads your top engineering talent to look for jobs at companies with better tools.

  (Solve) Our experts can help. We'll analyse your existing codebase and deploy our proprietary toolkit to slash your runtimes by up to 90%—guaranteed. Book a free, no-obligation performance audit today and we'll show you exactly where your bottlenecks are.

Notice what these ads don't do? They don't list features. No one cares that you use "advanced vectorisation algorithms" or have a "sleek UI." They care that their career-threatening problem is going away. The features are just the proof; the problem is the hook. Your ad must sell the outcome, not the vehicle.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know we've covered a huge amount of ground here. It can feel overwhelming. To make it more manageable, I've broken down the entire process into a sequential action plan. Don't try to do everything at once. Just focus on Step 1. Once that's done, move to Step 2. This is the exact process we'd follow if we were starting a campaign from scratch.

Why you might want some help...

As you can see, effective paid advertising for a B2B product isn't just about knowing how to click the buttons in Google Ads. It's a multi-disciplinary skill that involves deep customer research, strategic thinking, financial modeling, copywriting, and data analysis. Each of the steps above is a specialism in its own right.

Getting it wrong can be incredibly expensive, not just in wasted ad spend, but in the opportunity cost of months spent learning through trial and error while your competitors are acquiring customers. I've seen countless technically brilliant products fail to get traction simply because their marketing strategy was flawed from the start.

Working with an expert who has run these playbooks for dozens of other B2B software companies can dramatically shorten your path to finding a profitable, scalable customer acquisition channel. We’ve already made the costly mistakes, so you don’t have to. One campaign we ran for a B2B software client achieved 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each, and for another SaaS client, we took their Cost Per Acquisition down from £100 to only £7. That's the kind of impact that deep expertise can have.

If you'd like to have a chat about how this strategy could be specifically applied to your business, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can look at your product, discuss your ideal customer in more detail, and map out what the first 90 days of a successful ad campaign would look like for you. There's no hard sell; the goal is simply to provide you with as much value as possible and see if there might be a fit for us to work together down the line.

Hope this detailed breakdown has been genuinely helpful and gives you a clear path forward.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh