Solved: Scaling Meta Ads in Barcelona (The Nightmare ICP Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your situation. Scaling Meta ads, especially in a specific market like Barcelona, can feel like you're hitting a brick wall. You pour more money in, but the results don't grow proportionally, or worse, they start to decline. It's a common frustration, and I see it all the time.

The truth is, true scaling isn't about just cranking up the budget. That's the last step. The real work, the stuff that makes scaling possible and profitable, happens way before you even touch the budget slider. It’s about building a rock-solid foundation. If your core strategy is flawed, increasing the ad spend is like trying to build a skyscraper on quicksand; it’s just going to sink faster and cost you a fortune. So, before we even talk about specific Barcelona targeting tactics, we need to completely rebuild your approach from the ground up. This is what seperates the campaigns that sputter out at £100 a day from the ones that profitably scale into the thousands.

We'll need to look at your ICP... because it's probably a nightmare, not a demographic

This is the absolute, non-negotiable starting point, and it’s where 90% of businesses get it wrong. You said you’re struggling to scale in Barcelona. My first question is: who *exactly* are you trying to reach in Barcelona? If your answer is something like "small business owners," "tech professionals," or "expats aged 25-45," you've already lost. That's a demographic, not a customer. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic, ineffective ads that speak to no one.

To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn’t a person; it's a problem state. Let's make this real for the Barcelona market.

Imagine you're selling a B2B SaaS that helps hospitality businesses manage bookings. Your old ICP might be "Hotel managers in Barcelona." Useless. Your new ICP, your *nightmare* ICP, is: "The manager of a 50-room boutique hotel in the Gothic Quarter who is terrified of the upcoming tourist season because their current booking system is a mess of spreadsheets and double-bookings. They just recieved a scathing review on TripAdvisor because a room was double-booked, and they know their job is on the line if it happens again during peak season."

See the difference? We're not targeting a job title. We're targeting a state of professional panic. This person isn't casually browsing; they are actively, desperately looking for a solution. They're probably searching Google for "best hotel booking software for small hotels," asking for recommendations in LinkedIn groups for hoteliers, and following industry influencers who talk about operational efficiency.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your entire strategy changes. You're no longer just ticking a location box for "Barcelona." You're finding the niche podcasts they listen to, the industry newsletters they actually open, the SaaS tools they already pay for. This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

I'd say you need to know what a customer is actually worth

Once you know *who* you're targeting, the next question is brutally simple: how much can you afford to pay to get one of them? The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to this dictates your entire budget and scaling potential. It's found in a metric called Lifetime Value (LTV).

Most businesses I talk to have no idea what their LTV is. They're flying blind, trying to get the cheapest clicks and leads possible, without any context for what a 'good' price actually is. This leads to turning off potentially profitable campaigns too early because the initial cost seems 'too high'. This is a massive, costly mistake.

Let's break it down with some simple maths. You need three numbers:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make from a single customer, per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after costs of service?
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is straightforward:

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

Let's say your service is €200/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 70%, and you lose 5% of your customers each month (churn).
LTV = (€200 * 0.70) / 0.05
LTV = €140 / 0.05 = €2,800

In this example, each customer is worth €2,800 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number is your North Star. It changes everything. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to €2,800 / 3 = ~€933 to acquire a single customer and still have a very healthy, profitable business. Suddenly that €50 lead from Meta doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads.

You probably should delete the "Request a Demo" button

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. I'd bet my last pound that your current call to action is some variation of "Contact Us," "Learn More," or the dreaded "Request a Demo."

The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, who you've just interrupted on social media, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to by a stranger. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor, no different from the ten others they've seen today. It's a huge reason why your campaigns aren't scaling. Your ad might be perfect, your targeting spot on, but if the destination is a dead end, you're just paying to disappoint people.

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 must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a SaaS company: The gold standard is a free trial (no credit card) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation from their current "nightmare" state to a better one. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. I remember one campaign we ran for a B2B SaaS client where we generated 1,535 trials for them using Meta Ads. Focusing on a direct, high-value offer like a free trial is a powerful way to scale.
• For a service business: You are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated website audit that shows their top 3 SEO opportunities. For a corporate training company, a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations'. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free of charge. We solve a small problem (diagnosing ad failure) to earn their trust to solve the big one (fixing it).

Stop asking for their time. Start giving them value. Your conversion rates will thank you, and suddenly, scaling won't seem so impossible.

I'd say you need to stop paying Facebook to find non-customers

This might be a bit of a shock, but it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. If you are running campaigns with the objective set to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you need to stop. Immediately. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the absolute worst possible audience for your product.

Here is the uncomfortable truth. When you select an objective like "Brand Awareness," you give the Meta algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people inside my targeting for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, 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 pull out a credit card and buy something.

Why? Because those users are not in demand by other advertisers. Their attention is cheap. The algorithm is a ruthlessly efficient capitalist. It will always take the path of least resistance to fufil your objective. If your objective is cheap eyeballs, it will find you people who do nothing but provide eyeballs. I've seen this firsthand. For one eCommerce client selling subscription boxes, by focusing their Meta Ads campaigns entirely on driving sales, we achieved a 1000% return on their ad spend. That's the kind of result that scales a business, and it comes from telling the algorithm to find buyers, not just viewers.

The best form of brand awareness for a growing business is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. You MUST switch your campaign objective to optimise for what you actually want: Leads, Signups, or Sales. This tells the algorithm, "I don't care about cheap eyeballs. Go and find me the people in Barcelona who are most similar to others who have already converted. I am willing to pay more for them." This single change can completely transform a failing account into a profitable one.

You'll need to structure your campaigns properly for scaling

Right, so we've defined our customer by their nightmare, we know how much we can afford to pay for them, we have a high-value offer, and we're using the right campaign objective. Now, and only now, can we talk about structure and scaling.

A scalable account isn't a mess of dozens of campaigns. It’s a clean, logical structure, typically based on the marketing funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• ToFu (Top of Funnel - Prospecting): This is where you reach new people who have never heard of you. Your goal is to find your Nightmare ICP within the vastness of the Barcelona market.
• MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Engagement): This is for people who have shown some interest (watched your video, visited your site) but haven't taken a key action yet. You nurture them here.
• BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Retargeting): This is for people who got very close to converting (added to cart, initiated checkout) but didn't finish. These are your hottest leads, and you need to bring them back.

Within your ToFu prospecting campaign, this is where you test your audiences. The key is to be systematic. Instead of just throwing random interests at the wall, you prioritise them based on how likely they are to contain your ICP. The further down the funnel an audience is (or a lookalike of that audience), the better it will usually perform. A systematic approach to testing and structure makes a huge difference. For one software client, we ran Meta Ads campaigns that generated 5,082 trials at just $7 per trial. Achieving that kind of efficiency is a direct result of a disciplined process.

Here’s how I would prioritise testing audiences for a new account:

1. Detailed Targeting (Interests/Behaviours): Start here. But be specific. If you're targeting that stressed hotel manager in Barcelona, don't just target 'Travel'. Target interests like 'Hotel Management' software (e.g., SiteMinder, Cloudbeds), followers of hotel industry publications, or people with the job title 'General Manager' who are also Facebook Page Admins. Layer these to get hyper-specific.
2. Lookalike Audiences: As soon as you have enough data (at least 100 conversions, but ideally more), this becomes your most powerful tool. You create audiences of people who look just like your best customers. Prioritise them in this order:
   • Lookalike of highest value previous customers
   • Lookalike of all previous customers
   • Lookalike of people who initiated checkout
   • Lookalike of people who added to cart
   • Lookalike of website visitors
3. Broad Targeting: Only once your pixel is very "seasoned" with thousands of conversion events should you even consider testing broad targeting (e.g., just age, gender, and location). The algorithm needs a lot of data to make this work.

You set up one prospecting campaign (ToFu) and create different ad sets inside it for each audience you want to test. Let them run, see which ones deliver conversions at or below your target CPL (which you now know thanks to your LTV calculation), turn off the losers, and give more budget to the winners. That's how you scale. It's not a secret trick; it's a disciplined process of testing and iteration built on a solid strategic foundation.

You'll need an action plan for Barcelona

Okay, that was a lot of information, and it's a completely different way of thinking about paid advertising than most people are used to. It's not about quick hacks or secret targeting options. It’s about building a robust, strategic machine that is designed for profitable scaling from day one. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below as a clear action plan.

Implementing all of this is a significant amount of work, I won't lie. It requires a deep dive into your business, your customers, and a disciplined approach to testing and optimisation. It’s a complex process, and frankly, it's very easy to get wrong and waste a lot of money in the process. This is where expertise can make all the difference.

Working with a specialist who has done this hundreds of times before for businesses just like yours can short-cut the painful learning curve and get you to profitability and scale much faster. You're not just paying for someone to click buttons in Ads Manager; you're investing in a strategic partner who can build this entire growth engine for you, from defining the ICP to structuring the campaigns and optimising for a profitable CPL based on your unique business metrics.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this framework specifically to your business and your goals in the Barcelona market, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at your current setup together and I can give you some more tailored advice on what your immediate next steps should be.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh