Solved: B2B Advertising Overwhelm (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you're in a pretty common spot. The world of B2B advertising is a genuine minefield, and it's easy to get paralysed by all the options or worse, spend a load of money on platforms that just dont work for you.

I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and some guidance based on my experience running these sorts of campaigns. The key thing to realise is that generating qualified leads isn't really about picking the 'best' platform first. It's about a few foundational things that most people skip over. Get these right, and the platform choice becomes much, much easier. Get them wrong, and you'll just be burning cash, no matter where you advertise.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

The first and most common mistake I see is businesses defining their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) with sterile, useless demographics. I'm sure you've seen it, or maybe even written it: "We're targeting companies in the financial services sector with 50-200 employees in the UK".

Tbh, that tells you almost nothing of value. It leads to incredibly generic ads and messaging that tries to speak to everyone and ends up speaking to no one. You have to get way more specific and a lot more personal.

To stop wasting money, you must define your customer not by their job title, but by their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare. What is the problem that keeps them awake at night? What's the career-threatening issue they're facing right now?

Your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title; he's a leader who's just had his budget slashed and is terrified of missing his quarterly target. For a cyber security consultancy, the nightmare isn't just 'needing better IT security'; it's the CTO having a cold sweat thinking about a ransomware attack grinding the entire company to a halt and making headlines for all the wrong reasons. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare wasn’t ‘needing document management’; it was ‘a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a million-pound malpractice suit.’

Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's an emotional, high-stakes situation. When you can articulate that nightmare better than they can, you instantly have their attention and their trust.

Once you've properly isolated that nightmare, the next step is to figure out where these people congregate. This is the real targeting work. You need to become an expert on their media consumption habits.

-> What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute, like 'The Diary of a CEO' or 'Acquired'?
-> What industry newsletters do they actually open and read, like 'Stratechery' or 'The Hustle'?
-> What specific SaaS tools do they already pay for and integrate into their workflow, like HubSpot, Salesforce, or Xero?
-> Are they members of specific LinkedIn Groups or Facebook communities like 'SaaS Growth Hacks'?
-> Who are the influencers or thought leaders they follow on Twitter or LinkedIn, like someone like Jason Lemkin?

This intelligence isn't just interesting data; it's the literal blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. This is the hard work you have to do before you have any right to spend a single pound on ads. Without this, you're just guessing.

We need to craft a message they can't ignore

Now that you know their deepest professional fear, you can stop talking about yourself. Stop listing features. Stop talking about your company history. None of it matters to them. Your ad's only job is to reflect their problem back at them so clearly that they feel like you've been reading their mind.

There are a couple of classic copywriting frameworks that work wonders here. For a high-touch B2B service, the 'Problem-Agitate-Solve' formula is brilliant.

You don't sell "fractional CFO services". You sell a good night's sleep. Your ad copy should sound something like this:

Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a wild shot in the dark?"
Agitate: "Are you secretly one bad month away from a payroll crisis, while you watch your competitors confidently raising their next investment round?"
Solve: "Get expert financial strategy and a clear path to predictable growth for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build the dashboards that turn uncertainty into confidence."

See the difference? It's all about them, their pain, their anxiety, and their desired future. Your service is just the vehicle.

For a B2B SaaS product, I'm a big fan of the 'Before-After-Bridge' framework. You're not selling a "FinOps platform"; you're selling the feeling of pure relief.

Before: "Your AWS bill just landed. It’s 30% higher than last month, your engineers have no idea why, and the CFO is on your back. It's another fire you have to put out, today."
After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and actually smiling. You see exactly where every single pound is going, and costly waste has been automatically eliminated before it ever becomes a problem."
Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you from chaos to control. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings in the next 15 minutes."

When you nail this messaging, everything changes. I remember one B2B software client we worked with, we managed to get them 4,622 registrations for their software at just $2.38 per registration. That wasn't because of some secret targeting hack on Meta Ads; it was because we relentlessly tested messages that spoke directly to the user's 'Before' state. They felt understood, so they clicked and converted.

You probably should Delete the "Request a Demo" Button

This brings me to the next major failure point I see in almost every B2B ad campaign: the offer. Specifically, the "Request a Demo" button.

Let's be brutally honest. "Request a Demo" is probably the most arrogant, self-serving Call to Action ever invented. It makes a huge assumption: that your prospect, who is likely a busy, stressed, C-level decision maker, has nothing better to do with their time than book a slot in their calendar to be sold to by one of your sales reps.

It's an incredibly high-friction ask. It offers very little immediate value to them and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their time. You can do so much better.

Your offer's one and only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value. An "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution long before they ever speak to a human at your company. You must solve a small, real problem for them, for free, to earn the right to talk to them about solving the whole thing.

If you're a SaaS founder, this is your ultimate advantage. The gold standard here is a genuinely free trial (with no credit card details required) or a generous freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them experience the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a simple formality. You're not generating 'Marketing Qualified Leads' (MQLs) for a sales team to chase down; you're creating 'Product Qualified Leads' (PQLs) who are already convinced and are now asking you how they can pay.

If you're not a SaaS company, you're not off the hook. You have to bottle up your expertise into a tool, an asset, or a piece of content that provides a similar moment of instant value.

-> For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated website audit that instantly shows them their top 3 SEO keyword opportunities.
-> For a data analytics platform, it could be a free 'Data Health Check' that scans their database and flags the top 5 critical issues.
-> For a corporate training company, it could be a free, interactive 15-minute video module on 'How to Handle Difficult Conversations' for new managers.

For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, our version of this is a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we'll actually audit a company's failing ad campaigns and give them actionable advice on the spot. We solve a small problem for free. It builds immense trust and perfectly qualifies the people who are serious about getting results.

I'd say you need to understand your numbers first

Before you even think about setting a budget, you need to get rid of the most dangerous question in advertising: "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?". It's the wrong question. It forces you into a race to the bottom, chasing cheap, low-quality leads that waste your sales team's time and never convert.

The real question you should be asking is, "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to pay to acquire a truly great customer?". The answer to that question is found in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

You need to know this number. If you don't, you're flying blind. It's not that complicated to get a rough idea. Here's the basic maths:

First, you need a few key metrics about your business:
1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make from a typical customer, per month or per year? Let's use a monthly example and say it's £500.
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of servicing that customer? Let's say it's a healthy 80%.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? This is critical. Let's say it's 4%.

Now, we can plug this into the LTV formula.

In this example, every new customer you acquire is worth, on average, £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their entire lifetime with you. This is your truth. This number changes everything.

A healthy, sustainable business model often aims for a 3:1 ratio of LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). This means for every £3 you make from a customer, you can afford to spend £1 to acquire them. With a £10,000 LTV, your target CAC is around £3,333.

Suddenly, that lead from a CTO on LinkedIn that cost you £250 doesn't look so expensive anymore, does it? If your sales process converts 1 in 10 of these qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per lead (£3,333 / 10). A £250 lead is actually a bargain.

This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and allows you to confidently invest in the channels and tactics that attract high-value customers, even if the upfront cost seems high.

So, which ad platforms should you actually use?

Okay, so you've defined your customer's nightmare, crafted a message that resonates, built a high-value offer, and you know your numbers. NOW, and only now, can we have a sensible conversation about which advertising platforms to use.

The choice boils down to a simple question: Is your ideal customer actively searching for a solution to their problem right now, or are they unaware they even have a good solution available?

Scenario A: They ARE Actively Searching (High Intent)

If businesses are actively looking for the kind of solution you provide, your number one choice is almost always going to be Google Search Ads. This is the lowest hanging fruit. You are simply placing your solution directly in the path of someone who has raised their hand and said, "I have this problem and I need it fixed."

The key here is to be very specific with your keyword targeting. You want to target keywords that show commercial or transactional intent, not just informational queries. For example, if you sell an outreach tool, you don't want to bid on a broad term like "sales tips". You want to bid on "software for lead generation" or "contact info finding tool". These people are pre-qualified by their search query; they are in the market for a tool.

Scenario B: They are NOT Actively Searching (Interruptive Marketing)

This is more common for innovative B2B solutions or services where the market isn't fully educated yet. Here, you need to interrupt their day with a compelling message. Your main weapons are LinkedIn Ads and, in some cases, Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads.

LinkedIn Ads is the premier league for B2B. Its targeting is second to none. You can target people by their exact job title, company size, industry, seniority, skills, groups they're in, and more. This is where your deep ICP research pays off. We ran a campaign for a B2B software client targeting specific decision-makers and managed to get a Cost Per Lead of just $22, which was phenomenal for their high-ticket offer.

Here's a sample of how you might structure targeting for a data enrichment service:

Meta Ads can also work for B2B, but it's trickier. The targeting is less precise. It can be very effective if your customers are small business owners (you can target "Facebook Page Admins" or "Small Business Owners") or if your product has a strong visual or lifestyle component. We once got a medical job matching SaaS client's cost per acquisition down from a painful £100 to just £7 using a clever combination of Google and Meta Ads, but it took a lot of testing to find the right audiences on Meta.

And one final myth to bust: The problem with "awareness" campaigns

One last piece of advice, and it's a big one. You will see an option in every ad platform to run a campaign for "Brand Awareness" or "Reach". You might be tempted to use it, thinking you need to "get your name out there" before asking for a lead. Please, do not do this.

Here's the uncomfortable truth. When you set your campaign objective to "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very unhelpful, command: "Find me the largest possible number of eyeballs for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It goes out and finds all the users within your target audience who are famous for never clicking on ads, never engaging with posts, and absolutely, positively never buying anything. Why? Because those people are not in demand. Their attention is dirt cheap. You are literally paying the world's most powerful advertising platforms to find you the worst possible audience for a business that needs to generate leads and sales.

The best kind of brand awareness for a growing business is a competitor's customer switching to you and raving about the experience. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great offer that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. For that reason, you should almost always be using a conversion-focused objective, like Leads, Sales, or Appointments.

I know this is a lot to take in, but getting these fundamentals right is the only way to build a predictable, scalable lead generation engine for your business. It's a process of deep thinking and disciplined execution, not just fiddling with buttons in an ads manager.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below in a table to give you a clear path forward:

This is the kind of strategic thinking that separates campaigns that scale from those that fail. It's not easy, and it takes time to get right, which is why many businesses decide to work with an expert who has been through this process hundreds of times.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free 20-minute strategy session where we can dive into your business and give you some actionable advice. There's no obligation at all. Just a chance to get an expert pair of eyes on your challenges.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh