Solved: B2B Ad Consultant vs DIY (The Real Reason)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

You're asking whether to hire a B2B advertising consultant or go it alone. It's a fair question, but if I'm being brutally honest, it might be the wrong one. The real question isn't about DIY vs. hiring help. It’s about whether you want to invest in a predictable system for growth, or gamble your marketing budget on a very steep, very expensive learning curve where the odds are stacked against you from the start. Most businesses who try to run complex B2B campaigns internally for the first time end up burning a lot of cash for very little return.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts based on my experience running these sorts of campaigns. Hopefully it'll help you see the landscape a bit clearer and understand what's really involved in getting this right.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

The first thing any good consultant would force you to do is tear up that Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) you probably have sitting in a PowerPoint deck somewhere. I'm talking about the one that says something like, "Our customer is a Head of HR at a tech company with 50-200 employees in the UK."

That description is utterly useless for advertising. It tells you nothing of value and leads directly to the kind of generic, wallpaper ads that get ignored. It's the reason so many B2B campaigns fail before they've even spent their first £100. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer not by their job title, but by their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare.

You need to become an obsessive expert in their problem state. Let's take that Head of HR. She isn't just a job title. She's a leader who's terrified of her best engineers quitting out of frustration with a clunky, outdated onboarding process. She's dreading her next board meeting where she has to explain why staff turnover is 15% above the industry average. She just lost a top candidate to a competitor because her team took too long to get an offer out. That is her nightmare. Your product or service needs to be the aspirin for that specific headache.

Or let's say you sell legal tech software. Your ICP isn't 'law firms'. It's the partner who wakes up in a cold sweat because he's convinced a junior associate is about to miss a critical filing deadline, exposing the entire firm to a malpractice suit. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a state of professional crisis.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, everything changes. Your targeting becomes sharper. You're no longer just targeting 'job titles' on LinkedIn. You're looking for the signals of that pain. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired'? What industry newsletters do they actually open and read, like 'Stratechery'? What SaaS tools are they already paying for, like HubSpot or Salesforce? Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' group on Facebook? Do they follow people like Jason Lemkin on Twitter?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. An experienced consultant does this work first. They understand that if you get this wrong, you have no business spending a single pound on ads, because you'll be shouting into a void. If you try to do this yourself, you'll likely fall into the trap of targeting broad demographics and wondering why nobody is responding to your ads. It's a fundamental error that costs businesses a fortune.

I'd say you need to understand the Math That Frees You from Cheap Leads

The second major mistake businesses make is obsessing over the wrong metric. They constantly ask, "What's the cost per lead (CPL)?" and try to drive it down as low as possible. This is the road to ruin. It leads you to celebrate cheap, low-quality leads that never convert, while being terrified of 'expensive' leads from decision-makers who could actually transform your business.

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). Until you know this number, you are flying blind.

Here’s how a professional would break it down. You need three simple figures from your business:

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

Now, the calculation is straightforward:

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

Let's run a hypothetical example for a B2B SaaS company:

In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number is your north star. It changes everything.

Now you can make intelligent decisions. A healthy B2B model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. With a £10,000 LTV, that means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer and still run a very profitable business.

Let's take it a step further. If your sales team converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% lead-to-customer rate), you can now calculate your maximum allowable Cost Per Lead:

Max CPL = CAC / Number of Leads to get 1 Customer

Max CPL = £3,333 / 10 = £333

Suddenly, that £250 lead you generated from a LinkedIn ad targeting a CTO doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. Meanwhile, the business owner next door, who hasn't done this math, is panicking about his £50 CPL and pausing campaigns that are probably profitable.

This is the kind of strategic financial modelling that an expert brings to the table. They free you from the tyranny of cheap leads and give you the confidence to invest aggressively in channels that actually work. Trying to manage your ads without this clarity is like trying to navigate a ship in a storm with no compass. You'll just go in circles until you hit the rocks.

We'll need to look at a message they can't ignore

Once you know who you’re talking to (the nightmare) and what you can afford to spend to reach them (the math), you need to craft a message that they simply can't ignore. This is where most B2B advertising falls flat on its face. It's boring, full of jargon, and focused on features, not outcomes.

Your ad needs to speak directly to their pain. There are proven copywriting frameworks that cut through the noise. Here are a couple we use constantly.

The goal is to hold up a mirror to their specific professional hell and then show them the clearly marked escape hatch. Your ad is that mirror. If the message is generic, they won't even recognise themselves, and they'll scroll right past. A good consultant or agency often works with specialist copywriters who know how to do this. For many of our SaaS clients, getting the copy right with an experienced writer is often the single biggest lever we can pull. Trying to write this yourself without experience is difficult; it often comes across as inauthentic or misses the deep emotional triggers that actually drive action.

You probably should Delete the 'Request a Demo' Button

Now we arrive at the most common, and perhaps most fatal, failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. What are you actually asking this busy, stressed-out person to do when they click your ad?

For 90% of businesses, the answer is a "Request a Demo" button. This is possibly the most arrogant and self-serving Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect has nothing better to do than book a 60-minute slot in their calendar to be subjected to a sales pitch. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commoditised vendor desperate for their time. It's lazy marketing.

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 piece of their problem for free, right now, to earn you the right to talk about solving the whole thing later.

Here’s what better offers look like:

• -> For SaaS Founders: This is your superpower. The gold standard is a Free Trial (no card details required) or a Freemium Plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You're not generating 'Marketing Qualified Leads' (MQLs) for a sales team to chase; you are creating 'Product Qualified Leads' (PQLs) who are already convinced and coming to you.
• -> For Agencies/Consultancies: You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a data analytics firm, a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the biggest issues in their database. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit their failing ad campaigns and give them an actionable plan. We prove our expertise before asking for a contract.
• -> For Service Businesses: Create a high-value piece of content. For a corporate training company, a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers. For a cybersecurity firm, a '5-Point Ransomware Vulnerability Checklist' that an IT manager can use immediately.

You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the big one. An expert will push you hard on this. They know that a brilliant ad campaign pointing to a weak offer like "Request a Demo" is like building a super-highway that leads to a dead end. It's a complete waste of money. Most business owners are too close to their product to see this; they think a demo is valuable because they love their product. A consultant provides the outside perspective to tell you, honestly, that it's not.

You'll need to know how to pay platforms to find non-customers

This is a slightly more technical point, but it's where huge amounts of money are wasted. There's an uncomfortable truth about advertising on platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram). When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very literal, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, in its infinite and emotionless wisdom, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. By choosing an awareness objective, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the absolute worst possible audience for your product.

The best form of 'brand awareness' for a small or growing business is a competitor's customer switching to your service 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. That is why, for 99% of B2B businesses, you should be using a conversion-based objective like 'Leads', 'Sales', or 'Appointments'.

When you tell the algorithm to optimise for 'Leads', it has a much harder, more valuable job to do. It has to sift through millions of users to find the tiny fraction who not only see your ad, but are compelled enough to click it, go to your landing page, and actually fill out a form. Yes, your cost per impression will be higher, but you are paying the machine to do the heavy lifting of qualifying your audience for you. This is a fundemental concept that DIY advertisers almost always get wrong, costing them thousands.

An expert knows how to structure these campaigns from the ground up, choosing the right objectives, bidding strategies, and attribution windows to give the platform's AI the best possible instructions to find actual customers, not just cheap eyeballs.

I'd say you need a proper campaign structure

Finally, putting this all together requires a methodical, structured approach to campaign management. You don't just create one campaign, throw a few audiences in, and hope for the best. That's a recipe for chaos and wasted spend. A professional structures an account logically, usually based on the sales funnel.

For a platform like Meta, a prioritised structure for testing audiences might look something like this. The further down the list, the "warmer" the audience is, and the better it will usually perform.

Each of these stages would be a separate campaign with its own budget and creative tailored to the audience's temperature. This is how you build a scalable, predictable machine, not a slot machine. It requires constant monitoring, methodical testing, and a deep understanding of how the platforms work. It's not something you can set up in an afternoon and expect to work. This is a full-time job for an expert.

You'll need to decide between a slow education or fast results

So, back to your original question. Can you manage complex B2B campaigns internally? Yes, you absolutely can. It will probably take you 6-12 months of intensive learning, reading blogs, watching videos, and trial-and-error. During that time, you will almost certainly waste tens of thousands of pounds on ads that are poorly targeted, have the wrong message, point to a weak offer, and use the wrong campaign objectives.

Or, you can bring in a consultant who has already made all those expensive mistakes on other people's budgets. They can get you from zero to a profitable, scalable campaign in a matter of weeks, not months or years. They can implement the strategic thinking on ICP, LTV, messaging, and offers from day one.

That's the real decision your'e making. It isn't just consultant vs. DIY. It's speed and expertise vs. a slow, expensive education. It's opportunity cost. How many £10,000 LTV customers will you miss out on during your 12-month learning curve?

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below as a starting point:

If you'd like to see what this looks like in practice for your specific business, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at what you've done so far, or what you're planning to do, and give you an honest, straightforward assessment and an actionable plan. It's our way of proving our value upfront, just like we recommend you do for your own customers.

Hope this helps you make a more informed decision.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh