Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out!
Happy to give you some initial thoughts. It's a common frustration, looking for ad copy examples and finding loads of generic, location-based stuff that just doesn't apply. Tbh, the problem isn't the lack of examples. The real issue is that most people think about ad copy all wrong. They hunt for templates to copy instead of building a proper framework to create their own compelling message.
You're not selling to a postcode; you're selling a solution to a problem. Once you get that right, the copy practically writes itself, whether you're selling in one city or the whole country. Let's get into how you can do that.
TLDR;
- Stop looking for ad copy examples. Your real problem is a weak understanding of your customer's 'nightmare scenario', not a lack of inspiration.
- Your offer is probably the biggest reason your ads fail. A high-friction "Request a Demo" button is killing your conversions before the copy even has a chance.
- Use proven frameworks like Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS) and Before-After-Bridge (BAB) to structure your message around the customer's pain, not your features.
- The most important advice is to figure out what you can actually afford to pay for a customer. Without knowing your Lifetime Value (LTV), you're just guessing with your ad spend.
- This letter includes a fully interactive LTV calculator to help you figure out your real advertising budget, plus diagrams explaining the core copywriting frameworks.
I'd say you need to forget demographics... Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Profile
Right, first things first. Let's scrap the idea of a typical Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing person probably made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It's a lazy shortcut that leads to generic, boring ads that speak to no one and waste your money.
To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. Not just any pain, but their specific, urgent, expensive, and maybe even career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't just a job title; they're a person staring at a problem that keeps them up at night.
Think about it like this:
- A Head of Engineering isn't just a "tech leader". She's a leader who's terrified that her best developers are about to quit because they're so frustrated with a broken workflow or a clunky internal tool. That's the nightmare.
- For a legal tech SaaS, the customer isn't just a "law firm partner". The nightmare is that partner missing a critical filing deadline because of disorganised documents, exposing the entire firm to a massive malpractice lawsuit.
Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's an emotional condition. When you understand that nightmare, you stop selling features and start selling a solution to that very specific hell. That's when your ads start to work.
So, how do you find this nightmare? You need to become an expert in their world. You need to find their "watering holes" – the places they go for information and to vent their frustrations.
1. Start with Basics
Job Title, Industry, Company Size. (The boring bit)
2. Dig for Pain
What are their daily frustrations? What tasks do they hate?
3. Define the Nightmare
What's the worst-case outcome of that pain? (e.g., losing clients, getting fired)
4. Find Watering Holes
Where do they complain? (Podcasts, newsletters, forums, LinkedIn groups)
Are they listening to niche podcasts like 'Acquired' on their commute? Are they actually reading industry newsletters like 'Stratechery'? Are they paying for SaaS tools like HubSpot or Salesforce? Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow specific influencers like Jason Lemkin on Twitter? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting and messaging strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. Seriously.
We'll need to look at your offer... because it's the most common failure point
Now we get to the bit that sinks more campaigns than anything else: the offer. I've seen beautifully written ads targeting the perfect audience fall completely flat because the call-to-action was rubbish.
Let's be brutally honest. The "Request a Demo" button is probably the most arrogant Call to Action ever invented. It assumes your prospect, who is likely a busy, important decision-maker, has nothing better to do with their time than book a meeting to be sold to. It screams high-friction and low-value. It instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor begging for 30 minutes of their time.
Your offer has one job and one job only: to deliver a moment of undeniable value. An "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution before they ever talk to a salesperson. It needs to be a no-brainer for them to say yes.
If you're a SaaS founder, this is your secret weapon. The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card details required) or a freemium plan. Let them actually use the product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When your product proves its own value, the sale becomes a simple formality. You stop generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase down, and you start creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced and asking to buy.
Not a SaaS company? You're not off the hook. You have to bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant, tangible value.
- For a marketing agency: A free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities.
- For a data analytics platform: A free 'Data Health Check' that scans their database and flags the top 3 critical issues.
- For a corporate training company: A free 15-minute interactive video module on 'How to Handle Difficult Conversations' for new managers.
For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it’s a 20-minute strategy session where we audit their failing ad campaigns for free and give them an actionable plan. The principle is the same across the board: you must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their entire problem for money. Delete the demo button and build an offer that actually helps someone.
You'll need to master the message... with frameworks that actually work
Okay, once you've nailed your ICP's nightmare and built a genuinely valuable offer, *now* we can talk about the ad copy itself. And you don't need to be a creative genius. You just need to use proven frameworks that are built on human psychology.
Here are the two I use most often. They work for almost any B2B product or service.
Framework 1: Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)
This is my go-to for service businesses or any solution that solves a complex, painful problem. It's simple and incredibly effective.
- Problem: You state the nightmare you identified earlier. You call it out directly and concisely. The reader should immediately think, "That's me."
- Agitate: You pour salt on the wound. You expand on the problem, reminding them of the frustration, the cost, the risk, and the consequences of not solving it. You make the pain feel real and urgent.
- Solve: You introduce your offer as the clear, simple, and effective solution to that pain.
Example for a fractional CFO service:
(Problem) Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?
(Agitate) Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while you watch your competitors confidently raising their next funding round?
(Solve) Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth.
Framework 2: Before-After-Bridge (BAB)
This one is brilliant for SaaS products or anything that delivers a clear transformation. You paint a picture of their current frustrating reality and contrast it with a much better future.
- Before: Describe their current world. What does their problem look and feel like right now?
- Bridge: Position your product or service as the bridge that gets them from the 'Before' state to the 'After' state.
- After: Paint a picture of what their world would look like once that problem is gone. Make it desirable and tangible.
Example for a FinOps (Cloud Finance) SaaS platform:
(Before) Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out.
(Bridge) Our platform is the bridge that gets you from financial chaos to cloud cost clarity.
(After) Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see exactly where every single dollar is going, and waste is automatically eliminated. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today.
Problem
State their nightmare directly.
Agitate
Remind them why it's so painful.
Solve
Introduce your offer as the solution.
Before
Describe their current frustrating world.
Bridge
Your product is the path to the better world.
After
Paint a picture of their ideal future.
The "So What?" Test for Features
Finally, a quick note on features. Too many ads just list features, which is lazy and ineffective. For every feature you write down, you must aggressively ask "So what?".
Let's use an example for some high-ticket lab equipment.
- The Feature: "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error."
- So what? "...which means your measurements are incredibly precise and reliable." (That's the benefit).
- So what? "...which means your lab can publish its research with unshakeable confidence, without fear of retraction." (That's the real consequence).
- SO WHAT? "...which means you will secure more grant funding, attract top-tier talent, and build a reputation that other labs can only dream of." (That's the dream outcome).
Your ad copy should live in that final "So What?". It's not about the spec; it's about the status, security, and success it unlocks for your customer. You're not selling a piece of metal, you're selling a Nobel prize.
You'll need to understand the numbers... or you're just gambling
Right, this is the part where most creative types switch off, but it's arguably the most important section in this whole letter. If you don't understand these numbers, you're not advertising, you're just setting money on fire.
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 that question lies in its counterpart: Lifetime Value (LTV).
This tells you how much a customer is worth to your business in gross margin over their entire relationship with you. It's the metric that separates businesses that scale from those that stagnate. Here's how to calculate a basic version of it:
- Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month?
- Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods or services?
- Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?
The calculation is simple:
LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
Let's use an example. Say your SaaS costs £500/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 80%, and you lose 4% of your customers each month (churn).
LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000
In this example, each customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business. That number changes everything.
Now you have the truth. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a customer worth £10,000, you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire them and still have a very profitable business.
Let's take it one step further. If your sales process converts 1 in every 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% conversion rate), you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead (£3,333 / 10).
Suddenly, that £250 lead from a perfectly targeted LinkedIn ad for a CTO doesn't seem expensive anymore, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. 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 your own numbers.
This is the main advice I have for you:
So, to bring this all together, stop hunting for ad copy examples. That's a tactic, and you need a strategy. Your frustration is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is a lack of clarity on your customer, your offer, and your numbers. Fix those things first, and the ad copy becomes the easy part.
| Area of Focus | The Common Mistake | The Expert Approach | Your First Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Customer Profile | Defining customers by sterile demographics (e.g., "finance companies, 50-200 staff"). | Defining customers by their urgent, expensive "nightmare scenario" (e.g., "terrified of a data breach"). | Interview 5 of your best customers and ask them what would happen if your solution disappeared tomorrow. |
| The Offer | Using a high-friction, low-value CTA like "Request a Demo". | Creating a no-brainer, high-value offer that solves a small problem for free (e.g., free audit, tool, or trial). | Brainstorm one thing you could give away for free that would deliver an "aha!" moment in under 10 minutes. |
| Ad Copy | Hunting for templates and focusing on product features. | Using psychological frameworks (PAS, BAB) to structure a message around the customer's pain and transformation. | Take your main product feature and apply the "So What?" test three times to find the real emotional benefit. |
| Measurement | Obsessing over low-level metrics like Cost Per Click or a low Cost Per Lead. | Calculating LTV to understand what you can truly afford to spend to acquire a profitable customer. | Use the calculator in this letter to get a baseline LTV for your business right now. |
| Targeting | Using broad, generic keywords and interests that get cheap but useless traffic. | Focusing on high-intent keywords and niche interests that pre-qualify your audience before they even click. | List 5 keywords someone would search for when they are ready to buy, not just research. |
I know this is a lot to take in, and it's a completely different way of thinking about advertising than most people are used to. It's a shift from being a 'media buyer' to being a strategic marketer. It takes work to get these foundational pieces right, but once you do, your advertising becomes a predictable growth engine instead of a slot machine.
This is where getting some expert help can make a huge difference. Getting these foundational pieces right is what separates campaigns that struggle from those that scale predictably. I remember one client, a medical job matching SaaS platform, who initially had a Cost Per User Acquisition of £100. Once we implemented a more strategic approach to their campaigns on Google and Meta Ads, we brought that cost down to just £7. It's this focus on strategy—customer, offer, and numbers—that unlocks that kind of result, and it's what we can help you build.
If you'd like to chat through your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can look at what you're doing now and give you some concrete, actionable advice. It's the same principle as the offers I mentioned above – we give you real value for free to demonstrate what we can do.
Hope this helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh