Solved: Promoting Matlab Product in the Digital World

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on how to promote your Matlab product. It sounds like you've got a great tool but are now facing the classic developer's challenge: how to get it in front of the right people without wasting a load of time and money.

The good news is you don't need to do 'everything'. The bad news is that most of the generic 'digital marketing' advice you'll find online is probably completely wrong for a specialised B2B product like yours. You need a much more focused, almost surgical approach. I'll walk you through what that looks like based on my experience running campaigns for other B2B software companies.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, first thing's first. You probably have an idea of your "Ideal Customer Profile" or ICP. Most people in your position would say something like, "We're targeting mechanical engineers in the automotive industry with 10+ years of experience who use Matlab."

I'm telling you now, that's almost completely useless for advertising. It's a demographic, a sterile description. It tells you nothing about *why* they would ever give you their time, let alone their company's money. It leads to generic ads that say "Powerful Matlab Tool for Engineers" which get completely ignored because they speak to no one.

You need to stop defining your customer by who they are and start defining them by their pain. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't just a job title; they are a person staring at a problem that's making their life difficult.

What is the one thing that keeps them up at night?
-> Is it the fear that a multi-million-pound prototype will fail because of a tiny calculation error in their simulation?
-> Is it the frustration of their best junior engineers quitting because they're bogged down with tedious, manual data processing that takes weeks instead of hours?
-> Is it the pressure from their boss to cut project timelines by 30% without any extra budget?

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. When you understand the nightmare, you can craft a message that feels like a life raft. Your product is no longer a 'tool'; it's the solution to a massive headache. One B2B software client we worked with sold an accounting system. Their initial message was about 'privacy'. Nobody cared. Their customers cared about reliability and features. The real pain was the fear of a system crash during a tax audit or the inefficiency of their current software. Once they started talking about *that*, things began to change.

This work is non-negotiable. Do it first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. It's the foundation for everything that follows.

I'd say you only need to focus on two ad platforms

Once you know the pain, you need to find where the people experiencing it are looking for solutions. The digital world is massive, and it's easy to get suckered into thinking you need to be on TikTok, Facebook, Reddit, everywhere. You don't. For a specialised B2B product, that's a recipe for burning cash with zero return. You need to go where your audience is, and more importantly, where their *intent* is.

For a product like yours, there are likely only two platforms that matter at the start:

1. Google Search Ads: Harvesting Existing Demand
This is for the people who are already problem-aware and actively looking for a solution. They are typing things into Google like "matlab data processing automation software" or "how to speed up simulink models". These are the hottest leads you can possibly get, because they've already raised their hand and admitted they have the exact problem you solve. Your job is simply to show up at that exact moment with an ad that says "We solve that." For one of our software clients, we got them 3,543 users at just £0.96 per user almost entirely through highly specific Google Search campaigns. The demand was already there; we just had to capture it.

The key here is to be incredibly specific with your keywords. Avoid broad terms like "matlab help". You want to target long, specific phrases that signal someone is looking to buy or trial software, not just learn something. Think about what you'd type if you were desperate for a solution to your specific 'nightmare'. Those are your keywords.

2. LinkedIn Ads: Creating New Demand
This is for the people who have the problem but aren't actively searching for a solution yet. Maybe they think their slow, manual process is just 'the way things are done'. LinkedIn is unparalleled in its ability to let you target these people with surgical precision. You can target by:

-> Exact Job Title ("Lead Systems Engineer")
-> Company Industry ("Aviation & Aerospace")
-> Company Size ("1,001-5,000 employees")
-> Specific Skills listed on their profile ("Simulink", "CFD")
-> Membership in specific LinkedIn Groups ("MATLAB & Simulink Solutions")

No other platform lets you get this granular for a B2B audience. You can build an audience of the exact people you want to sell to and put a message directly in their feed that speaks to their hidden pain. We've run many successful campaigns here. One that comes to mind was for a B2B software where we were targeting very specific decision makers and achieved a cost per lead of just $22. It works, but your message and offer have to be spot on.

What about Meta (Facebook/Instagram)? Probably not. While it can work for some B2B, especially those targeting small business owners, its targeting for specific technical roles like yours is very poor. You'll end up showing ads to thousands of people who just have 'engineering' as a vague interest, which is a total waste of money. The most powerful advertising platforms are the ones that let you target your specific audience best, and for technical B2B, that's almost always Google and LinkedIn.

You probably should create a message they can't ignore

Okay, so you've identified the nightmare and you know where to find your audience. Now, what do you actually say to them? This is where 90% of B2B ads fail. They are boring, full of jargon, and focused on features, not benefits.

You need to use a simple but powerful copywriting framework. For a technical product, I find the Before-After-Bridge framework works wonders.

Before: You paint a vivid picture of their current world, using the language of their nightmare. You show them you understand their pain on a deep level.
After: You show them a vision of a new, better world where that pain is gone.
Bridge: You introduce your product as the simple, straightforward bridge to get them from Before to After.

Let's make this real. Imagine your tool automates a tedious data analysis process in Matlab.

A terrible, feature-based ad would say:
"Matlab Dev Pro: Our tool uses advanced algorithms for rapid data processing. Integrates with Simulink. Download now."

Who cares? It's boring and speaks to no one's actual problems.

A Before-After-Bridge ad would say:

Headline: Stop wasting weeks cleaning Matlab data.
Body: (Before) Another Friday evening spent manually scrubbing terabytes of simulation data. Your team is burning out, and critical project deadlines are slipping.
(After) Imagine clicking a button and getting perfectly clean, analysis-ready data in minutes. Your team is back to innovating, and you're delivering projects ahead of schedule.
(Bridge) Matlab Dev Pro is the bridge. Our tool automates the entire data cleaning process. Start your free trial and get your first weekend back.

See the difference? The second ad isn't selling a tool; it's selling the end of frustration, the return of lost time, and the feeling of being a hero to your team. It connects on an emotional level, which is just as important in B2B as it is in B2C. People make decisions based on emotion and justify them with logic later.

Here’s a rough idea of what this might look like in practice for Google and LinkedIn:

You'll need to delete the "Request a Demo" button

This might be the most important and contrarian piece of advice I can give you. The most common failure point in all of B2B advertising is the offer. And the "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant, high-friction Call to Action (CTA) ever invented.

Think about it from your prospect's perspective. They are a busy, important engineer or manager. You're asking them to stop what they're doing, fill out a form, coordinate schedules with a salesperson, and then sit through a 45-minute presentation just to find out if your tool is any good. It's a huge commitment filled with friction and uncertainty. It screams "I'm about to be sold to." Most people will just close the tab.

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. This is your massive advantage.

The gold standard offers are:

1. A genuinely free trial (no credit card required). Let them use the actual product. Let them upload their own messy data and see it get cleaned. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. This is how you generate Product Qualified Leads (PQLs), which are infinitely more valuable than the Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) a demo form gives you. I can't stress this enough. We've seen software clients struggle for months trying to get demo requests, then switch to a free trial model and see signups explode. For one client, we drove 5,082 software trials on Meta Ads because the offer was so frictionless and compelling.

2. A freemium plan. If a time-limited trial doesn't fit your model, offer a free-forever version with limited features. Let it become an indispensable part of their workflow. When they need the more advanced features, upgrading becomes a no-brainer.

If you absolutly can't do a trial or freemium plan, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into an asset that provides instant value. This could be a free, automated tool on your website that analyses a small sample of their data and flags the top 3 errors. Something that solves a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for money.

Getting someone to sign up for a demo is hard and expensive. Getting them to try something for free that solves a real problem is much, much easier. Your entire advertising strategy should be built around a low-friction, high-value offer.

I'd say you need to calculate what you can *really* afford to pay

This brings us to the numbers. Most founders get obsessed with the wrong metric. They focus on 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 truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

If you don't know this number, you're flying blind. You have no idea if your ads are profitable or if a £50 lead from LinkedIn is a bargain or a disaster. As developers, you should appreciate the logic here. Let's break it down.

You need three bits of information:
1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month on average?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after server costs, support, etc.?
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is simple:

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

Let's say your software costs £200/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 90%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (churn).

LTV = (£200 * 0.90) / 0.05
LTV = £180 / 0.05 = £3,600

In this example, each customer is worth £3,600 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,200 (£3,600 / 3) to acquire a single new paying customer.

Now, work backwards. If your sales process (or your free-trial-to-paid funnel) converts 1 in 10 trial users into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £120 (£1,200 / 10) for a single free trial sign-up.

Suddenly, that £50 per lead from a highly-targeted LinkedIn campaign doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a profitable investment. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to confidently invest in acquiring the right customers. Play around with the calculator below to see how your own numbers change the outcome.

We'll need to look at campaign structure and optimisation

Right, this is where the theory meets the road. It's not enough to have the right strategy; you need to implement it properly in the ad platforms. A messy account structure will burn through your budget and give you confusing data. The goal is clarity and control.

A simple, effective structure to start with:

You want to separate your campaigns based on intent and audience temperature. A "cold" audience (people who've never heard of you) needs a different message than a "warm" audience (people who've visited your website).

Campaign 1: Google Search - High Intent Keywords
-> Objective: Conversions (Free Trial Signups).
-> Audience: People actively searching for solutions like yours.
-> Ad Groups: Break these down by theme. For instance, one ad group for keywords around "data cleaning", another for "simulation speed", another for your top competitor's name (yes, you can bid on their brand name!). This allows you to write highly relevant ads for each specific search.
-> Measurement: Track Cost Per Trial. Is it below the maximum you calculated from your LTV?

Campaign 2: LinkedIn - Cold Prospecting
-> Objective: Conversions (Free Trial Signups).
-> Audience: Your ICP defined by job title, industry, company size etc. Start with a narrow, specific audience. Don't try to target everyone at once.
-> Creatives: Test different angles based on the Before-After-Bridge framework. Test a simple image ad vs. a short video ad. Test pointing them to your landing page vs. using a LinkedIn Lead Gen Form (which pre-fills their details, reducing friction even further). We usually test both to see which provides better quality leads for the cost.
-> Measurement: Track Cost Per Trial. Expect it to be higher than Google Search, but that's okay if it's still within your profitable range.

Campaign 3: Retargeting - All Platforms
-> Objective: Conversions (Free Trial Signups).
-> Audience: People who visited your website but didn't sign up for a trial. This is your lowest-hanging fruit.
-> Creatives: The message here is different. They already know who you are. You can be more direct. Maybe show them a customer testimonial, a specific case study, or remind them of the benefits of the free trial. You want to stay top-of-mind and give them a gentle nudge to come back and finish signing up.
-> Measurement: This should be your cheapest Cost Per Trial. If it's not, something is wrong with your website or offer.

The key is to test, test, and test again. Don't just set it and forget it. After a week or two, you'll have data. Some ad groups will perform better than others. Some ads will have a higher click-through rate. Your job is to act like a scientist: form a hypothesis (e.g., "An ad focused on saving time will perform better than one focused on accuracy"), test it, analyse the data, and double down on what works. Turn off the stuff that isn't performing. This constant process of optimisation is what separates successful campaigns from ones that just waste money. We did this for a medical job matching SaaS and took their Cost Per User Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7 by relentlessly testing and optimising.

One last myth to bust. Do not, under any circumstances, run a "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaign. It sounds tempting, right? "Get our name out there!" Here is the uncomfortable truth: when you set your campaign objective to "Reach," you are telling the algorithm, "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm does exactly that. It finds the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, engage, or ever buy anything. Their attention is cheap for a reason. You are actively paying these massive platforms to find the worst possible audience for your product. Awareness is a byproduct of getting actual customers who then talk about you. It's not something you should pay for directly at this stage.

I know this is a lot to take in, but getting these foundational pieces right from the start will save you tens of thousands of pounds and months of frustration. This isn't just about setting up a few ads and hoping for the best. It's about building a predictable, scalable engine for customer acquisition. It's complex, and the platforms are constantly changing, which is why many companies decide to bring in an expert to manage the process for them.

If you'd like to chat through your specific product and goals in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation. We can take a look at your website and walk you through how we would apply this framework to your business. It's often really helpful for founders to get a second pair of expert eyes on their strategy.

Hope this helps give you a much clearer path forward!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh