Solved: Scaling Paid Media Effectively (Unlock Predictable Growth)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your situation.

From what you've said, it sounds like you're stuck in a common trap. You're focusing on tweaking individual campaigns, but the real problem is likely much deeper – it's about the fundamental strategy and maths behind your customer acquisition. Scaling isn't about finding a magic "optimise" button; it's about building a machine where you know exactly how much a customer is worth and can confidently spend to get more of them. We're going to break that down.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get one thing straight first. The number one reason paid media fails to scale is because the advertiser doesn't truly know who they're talking to. And I don't mean they don't have a spreadsheet somewhere that says "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees". That's completely useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to the kind of generic, wallpaper ads that get ignored by everyone.

To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. By their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile isn't a person; it's a problem state. Let's make this real.

Imagine you sell a project management tool. Your demographic-based ICP might be "Head of Engineering at a tech company". Useless. Your nightmare-based ICP is "A Head of Engineering who is terrified of her best developers quitting out of sheer frustration with a broken, chaotic workflow. She's just had two key people hand in their notice, the big product launch is six weeks behind schedule, and she's getting grilled by the CEO in every single leadership meeting."

See the difference? The first is a job title. The second is a person with a problem so painful she'd pay almost anything to solve it. One we can target with generic ads about 'efficiency', the other we can hit with a message that feels like it's reading her mind.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your entire targeting strategy changes. You stop targeting broad interests like "software development". Instead, you find the niche channels where your ICP lives.

• -> What podcasts does she listen to on her commute to try and get ahead? Maybe it's 'Acquired' or 'Software Engineering Daily'.
• -> What industry newsletters does she actually open and read, instead of instantly archiving? Probably something like 'Stratechery' by Ben Thompson.
• -> What SaaS tools does her company already pay for? HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira. These are all targetable interests or integrations you can leverage.
• -> What specific online communities is she a member of? Is she in the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Does she follow people like Jason Lemkin or Gergely Orosz on Twitter/X?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have absolutely no business spending another pound on ads. It's the difference between shouting into a crowded stadium and whispering a solution directly into the ear of someone who desperately needs it.

We'll need to calculate your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Okay, so you've nailed down your ICP's nightmare. The next question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but rather "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to this changes everything, and it's found in one metric: Lifetime Value (LTV). Without knowing this number, you're flying completely blind, making decisions based on gut feelings and vanity metrics like click-through rate.

Most businesses I see obsess over the initial Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) without any concept of what that customer is actually worth to them over time. This leads to a crippling fear of spending money. They see a £250 lead from LinkedIn and panic, thinking it's too expensive. But what if that customer goes on to spend £10,000 with you? That £250 isn't an expense; it's one of the best investments you could possibly make.

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

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you each month?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Be honest here. This is revenue minus the direct costs of servicing that customer (cost of goods sold).
3. Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? (If you measure annually, just divide by 12).

The calculation is straightforward:

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

Let's use an example. Say you're a SaaS business:

• ARPA = £500/month
• Gross Margin = 80% (0.80)
• Monthly Churn = 4% (0.04)

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04

LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

There it is. In this example, each customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This is your truth. This is the number that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth.

Now, how does this help you scale? A healthy, sustainable business model for SaaS and many service businesses aims for a 3:1 LTV to CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio. This means for every £1 you spend to get a customer, you get £3 back in lifetime gross margin. So, with a £10,000 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer.

Let's take it a step further. If your sales process converts 1 in every 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% lead-to-customer rate), you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead (£3,333 / 10).

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to compete for the attention of your most valuable customers. Use the calculator below to figure out your own numbers.

You probably should delete the 'Request a Demo' Button

Now we get to the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. You can have the perfect ICP and know your numbers inside out, but if your offer stinks, you will never scale. And the "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant, highest-friction Call to Action ever conceived.

Think about it from your prospect's perspective. You're asking a busy, important person to give up 30-60 minutes of their time to be sold to by one of your junior sales reps. It presumes they have nothing better to do. It offers them zero immediate value and positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention. It's a massive ask, and it's why your conversion rates are probably terrible.

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 before they ever speak to a human. You need to replace high-friction asks with high-value, low-friction gifts.

If you're a SaaS founder, this is your unfair advantage. The absolute gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card details required) or a genuinely useful freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them experience the transformation firsthand. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. I've seen this time and again; one of our clients generated over 5,000 software trials with Meta Ads simply by making it incredibly easy for people to get started. You're not generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you're creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced and coming to you to ask how they can pay.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt from this rule. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant, tangible value.

• -> For a marketing agency: Don't offer a "free consultation". Offer a free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities and how they stack up against a competitor.
• -> For a data analytics platform: Offer a free 'Data Health Check' that connects to their database and flags the top 5 critical issues in under 60 seconds.
• -> For a corporate training company: Offer a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers. Give them a real taste of the training.
• -> For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: We offer a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns and provide actionable advice, completely free.

You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their whole, massive problem for a price. Stop asking for their time and start giving them value. Your campaign performance will transform overnight.

I'd say you need a message they can't ignore

Alright, so we have a clearly defined nightmare, we know the LTV so we can afford to reach them, and we have a high-value offer that doesn't suck. Now, and only now, can we talk about what to actually say in the ads. Your ad copy's job is not to list features. Nobody cares about your features. They only care about their problems. Your ad needs to speak directly to the nightmare you identified earlier.

There are simple, proven frameworks for this. Stop trying to be clever and just use what works. Two of the best are Problem-Agitate-Solve and Before-After-Bridge.

For a high-touch service business (like a fractional CFO), you deploy Problem-Agitate-Solve.

• Problem: You state the nightmare directly. "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
• Agitate: You pour salt on the wound. You make the pain more vivid. "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
• Solve: You introduce your service as the specific cure for that specific pain. "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

You're not selling "fractional CFO services"; you're selling a good night's sleep. The service is just the delivery mechanism for the relief.

For a B2B SaaS product, you use the Before-After-Bridge.

• Before: You paint a picture of their current, hellish reality. "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
• After: You show them the promised land. A world where their problem no longer exists. "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see exactly where every dollar is going, and waste is automatically eliminated."
• Bridge: You position your product as the simple bridge from Before to After. "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

You're not selling a "FinOps platform"; you're selling the feeling of relief and control.

Even for something as mundane as a high-ticket physical product, like lab equipment, you attack the feature-obsession head-on. Don't just state the spec; state its consequence. "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error. So what? So your lab can publish results with unshakeable confidence, securing more funding and attracting the top talent that other labs can only dream of."

This is not complicated, but it requires discipline. Every single ad you run must be rooted in the customer's problem, not your product's brilliance. Get this right, and your click-through rates will improve, but more importantly, the quality of the people clicking will be infinitely higher because you've pre-qualified them by speaking their language.

You'll need to rethink your campaign objectives

This might be a bit of a tough pill to swallow, but I need to be brutally honest here. If you've ever run a campaign on a platform like Meta (Facebook/Instagram) with the objective set to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you have actively paid the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

Here's the uncomfortable truth. When you give the algorithm a command like "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price," it does exactly what you asked. It's a ruthlessly efficient system. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are the least likely to click an ad, 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. Their attention is cheap. There's no competition for it. You are literally paying to reach non-customers.

For a startup or a business focused on growth and ROI, "brand awareness" is a dangerous distraction. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem and running ads that drive conversions, not a prerequisite for making a sale. The best form of brand awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it to their network. That only happens through conversion.

So, what should you do? From this day forward, almost every ad campaign you run should be optimised for a conversion event that happens as close to the money as possible.

• -> If you're a SaaS with a free trial, your campaign objective is 'Signups' or 'Leads', tracked via a pixel.
• -> If you're an eCommerce store, your campaign objective is 'Purchases'.
• -> If you're a service business generating leads, your objective is 'Leads' via a lead form or a thank you page conversion.

By telling the algorithm to "find people likely to convert," you unleash its true power. It will now sift through your audience to find users whose past behaviour indicates they actually buy things, sign up for trials, and fill out forms. Yes, your CPMs (cost per 1,000 impressions) will be higher. Your cost per click might be higher too. But your cost per result will be dramatically lower, because you're fishing in a pond full of actual fish, not just muddy water.

I remember one medical job matching SaaS client who was stuck with a £100 Cost Per User Acquisition running broad campaigns. By switching their entire strategy to conversion optimisation and refining their targeting and offer, we brought that down to just £7. That's the difference between a business that fails and one that scales exponentially. Stop paying for eyeballs and start paying for actions.

You'll need a better audience targeting strategy

Once you've got your strategy straight, you can get more tactical. When I audit client accounts on Meta, a common mistake is testing audiences randomly without any kind of structure or prioritisation. You need a logical framework that moves people from being unaware of you (Top of Funnel - ToFu) to considering you (Middle of Funnel - MoFu) to becoming a customer (Bottom of Funnel - BoFu).

The further down the funnel an audience is, the better it will perform because they're 'warmer' and have already shown some intent. Here's a prioritised list I use for most accounts, which you can adapt for your own niche.

META ADS AUDIENCE PRIORITISATION

Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Reaching New People:

1. Detailed Targeting (Interests/Behaviours): This is where you start for a new account. Use the 'nightmare' research you did earlier. Target interests like competing software, industry publications, influencers, and job titles. Group them into related themes.
2. Lookalike Audiences: Once you have enough data (at least 100 conversions, but ideally 1,000+), this becomes your most powerful tool. You create audiences of people who 'look 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 / filled out most of a lead form
   • -> Lookalike of all website visitors
3. Broad Targeting: This is for when your account is very mature and has thousands of conversion events. You can then trust the Meta pixel to find the right people with minimal targeting inputs (e.g., just country and age). Don't start here.

Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Re-engaging Interested People:

This is for retargeting people who've shown interest but haven't taken that final step. You'll show them case studies, testimonials, or address common objections.

• -> All website visitors in the last 30-90 days (excluding converters)
• -> People who watched 50%+ of one of your video ads
• -> People who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Closing the Deal:

This is your highest ROI audience. These people are on the verge of converting. You retarget them with urgency, special offers, or reminders.

• -> People who visited your checkout/pricing page in the last 7-14 days
• -> People who added a product to the cart in the last 7-14 days
• -> People who abandoned a lead form

How to Implement This:

You should structure your account with separate, long-term campaigns for each stage of the funnel (e.g., 1 ToFu campaign, 1 MoFu/BoFu campaign). Inside your ToFu campaign, you'll have different ad sets, each testing a different interest group or lookalike audience. Let them run for a few days. If an audience has spent 2-3x your target CPA without a conversion, it's probably a dud. Turn it off and test a new one. Always be testing. This systematic approach takes the guesswork out of it and ensures you're constantly optimising towards what actually works, not just what you think should work.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Scaling paid media isn't about finding a secret hack; it's about building a solid, strategic foundation. If you just take away a few things from this, let it be the points in the table below. This is the roadmap from burning cash to investing it intelligently for predictable growth.

I know this is a lot to take in. Moving from tactical tweaking to this kind of strategic approach is a significant shift, and implementing it correctly across multiple platforms takes expertise and a lot of focused effort. It's not just about setting up an ad; it's about building and managing an entire customer acquisition engine.

That's where working with a specialist can make a huge difference. With years of experience scaling campaigns for businesses from B2B SaaS to high-growth eCommerce, we can help you implement this entire framework, avoiding the costly mistakes that come with learning on your own dime. We've seen firsthand how this approach can transform a company's growth trajectory. For example, in one campaign we generated over $115k in revenue for a course creator in just six weeks, and in another, we took a software company to over 45,000 signups at under £2 each.

If you'd like to discuss how we could apply this thinking to your specific business, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at your current campaigns and give you some actionable advice you can use right away.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh