Solved: Best Ad Creatives for Conversions (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I've had a look at your question about ad creatives. It's a really common problem to have, feeling like you're just guessing what might work. The good news is you dont have to. The secret to creatives that actually convert isn't about having the slickest design or the highest production value video, though that can help. It's about getting three other things right first: who you're talking to, what you're saying to them, and what you're asking them to do. Get those fundamentals sorted, and the 'creative' part almost takes care of itself.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and walk you through how we approach this. It's a bit of a different way of thinking that moves away from just testing formats and focuses on building a proper foundation for your ads to work.

We'll need to look at your customer's nightmare, not their demographics...

Right, let's get this out of the way first because it's the bit everyone gets wrong. When I ask people who their customer is, they usually say something like, "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" or "mums aged 30-45 living in London". Tbh, that's almost completely useless for making ads that work.

That kind of description leads to generic, boring ads that try to speak to everyone and end up convincing no one. You're not selling to a job title or a demographic. You are selling a solution to a specific, urgent, expensive, and maybe even career-threatening nightmare. Your entire creative strategy needs to be built on a deep understanding of that nightmare. Until you can describe your customer's problem better than they can, you've got no business spending a single pound on ads.

Think about it. Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title on LinkedIn. She's a leader who lies awake at night terrified that her best developers are about to quit out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow. She's not looking for 'workflow software'; she's looking for a way to keep her best talent and not look incompetent to the board. Your creative needs to speak to *that* fear.

Or take a legal tech SaaS. Their customer's nightmare isn't 'needing better document management'. It's the gut-wrenching dread of a partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the entire firm to a massive malpractice lawsuit that could ruin their reputation overnight. Your ad creative needs to feel like a life raft to that drowning person.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. Once you've really isolated that nightmare, everything else becomes clearer. You can find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, the industry newsletters they actually read, the specific influencers they follow, or the software tools they already pay for. This is where your targeting comes from. Not from Facebook's generic 'business interest' categories, but from a real, tangible map of your customer's world. This work is the foundation. Don't skip it.

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

Once you know their nightmare inside and out, you can finally start thinking about the actual words in your ad. The creative—the image or video—is just the shiny wrapper. The message is the actual gift. And you dont need to be a creative genius to write copy that works, you just need a framework.

For most businesses, especially B2B, there are two frameworks that work incredibly well.

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)

This is perfect for high-touch services. You state the problem, you poke the bruise to make them feel the pain more acutely, and then you present your service as the solution.

You don't sell "fractional CFO services". That's a feature. You sell a good night's sleep. A PAS ad would sound like this:

(Problem) Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?
(Agitate) Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round, leaving you behind?
(Solve) Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth.

See the difference? It's not about what you do; it's about the pain you take away.

2. Before-After-Bridge (BAB)

This one is brilliant for B2B SaaS products. You paint a picture of their current, painful 'Before' state, show them the desirable 'After' state, and position your product as the bridge to get them there.

You don't sell a "FinOps platform". You sell the feeling of pure relief.

(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, another afternoon wasted.
(After) Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see exactly where every dollar is going, and waste is automatically eliminated before it even happens.
(Bridge) Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today.

This even works for physical products. Dont just list specs; state the consequence of the spec. "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error." So what? Tell them why that matters: "So your lab can publish results with unshakeable confidence, securing more funding and attracting top talent that other labs can only dream of."

The image or video you use should simply visualise this transformation. For the FinOps ad, it could be a simple animation of a chaotic, spiky graph turning into a smooth, downward-trending one. For the CFO ad, a photo of a stressed-out founder vs. a confident one. The message does the heavy lifting.

You probably should fix your offer first...

Now we get to what is, without a doubt, the most common reason campaigns fail. It's not the creative, it's not the copy, it's not even the targeting. It's the offer.

The "Request a Demo" button is the most arrogant, high-friction, low-value Call to Action ever invented. It presumes your prospect, who is likely a busy, important person, has nothing better to do with their time than book a meeting to sit through a sales pitch. It immediately positions you as just another commodity vendor begging for their time. You have to do better.

Your offer's only job is to deliver an "aha!" moment. A moment of undeniable value that makes the prospect sell *themselves* on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their bigger problems for money.

What does this look like in practice?

• For SaaS founders: This is your secret weapon. The gold standard is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation from 'Before' to 'After' for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale is just a formality. You're creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced, not just Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) for a sales team to chase. We've seen this work time and time again. One of our B2B SaaS clients generated over 1535 trials with this approach, another got 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each. It works because it removes all the risk for the user.
• For service businesses or agencies: You're not exempt. You have to bottle your expertise into something tangible. For a marketing agency, it could be a free, automated website audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For us, as a paid ads consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit their failing ad campaigns and give them actionable advice. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations'. Give them a taste of the result you deliver.

This brings us to a crucial bit of maths. To understand what kind of offer you can afford to make, you need to know what a customer is actually worth to you. This is called Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). Once you know your LTV, you can work backwards to determine your maximum allowable Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).

Most businesses massively underestimate their LTV, and as a result, they are too scared to spend what's necessary to acquire great customers. They focus on cheap leads instead of valuable customers. Let's run the numbers.

You'll need to tell the ad platforms what you really want...

Okay, so you've defined your customer's nightmare, you've crafted a message that speaks directly to it, and you have an irresistible, high-value offer. Now, and only now, are you ready to actually set up a campaign. And this is the last fundamental peice that so many people get wrong.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth. When you go onto a platform like Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very unhelpful, command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being a very literal machine, does exactly what you asked. It goes out and finds all the users inside your targeting criteria who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively, least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those users aren't in demand. Their attention is cheap. By choosing these objectives, you are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

This is why 'awareness' is a byproduct of sales, not a prerequisite for them. You dont build a brand by showing your logo to millions of uninterested people. You build a brand when one of your competitor's customers switches to your product and raves about it to their network. That only happens through conversion.

So, you MUST always choose a conversion-based objective. "Leads," "Sales," "Signups," "Appointments." Whatever your goal is, tell the platform. This completely changes the game. Now, the algorithm's job is to sift through your audience and find the specific people who have a history of taking the action you want them to take. It will cost more per impression, but you're paying for quality, not just quantity. I remember for one client, a medical job matching SaaS, we reduced their cost per acquisition from £100 down to just £7 by fixing this and other fundemental issues.

So, what should your creative *look* like?

It's only now, after we have all the strategic foundations in place, that we can finally answer your original question. What format should the creative be?

And the honest answer is: it depends, and you need to test it. But the testing is now strategic, not random. You're not just throwing things at the wall. You're testing different ways to deliver a message that you already know is powerful, to an audience you know is right, with an offer you know is valuable.

Here are a few thoughts based on our experience:

• Single Image Ads: These are the workhorse. They're fast to make and can be incredibly effective. The goal is to stop the scroll. Use a high-quality, striking image that visualises the 'Before' pain or the 'After' dream. For e-commerce, that means professional photography, often with models or showing the product in a lifestyle context. For B2B, it can be a clean graphic, a picture of your ideal customer looking relieved, or even just a bold statement in text.
• Video Ads: Video can work exceptionally well, particularly for more complex products. The first 3 seconds are everything; you need to hook them immediately. Always use subtitles, as most people watch with the sound off. And keep it short and to the point for colder audiences. I remember several SaaS clients we worked with saw fantastic results with simple User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos – they feel more authentic and less like a slick corporate ad.
• Carousel Ads: These are great if you have multiple features to highlight, different product variations, or if you want to walk people through a multi-step process. Each card in the carousel can be a mini-ad in itself, telling a small part of the story.

The key is to set up a proper split test. Within the same campaign and ad set (so the audience is the same), test one single image against one short video and maybe one carousel ad. All three creatives should use the same core message and offer. Let them run for a few days until you have enough data, and see which one delivers conversions at the lowest cost. Then, you turn off the losers and iterate on the winner. That's how you optimise.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To pull this all together, here's a simple table outlining the shift in thinking you need to make. This is the core of our approach and the reason our campaigns get results where others fail.

As you can probably see, creating ads that consistently convert is a lot more involved than just picking a nice picture. It requires a deep, strategic understanding of your customer, your market, and the technical nuances of the ad platforms. It's a full-time job to get this right, and it's why so many businesses waste a lot of money getting it wrong.

This is the kind of strategic thinking and rigorous process we bring to every client campaign. We don't just manage ads; we build the entire engine that drives predictable growth, from defining the customer nightmare all the way through to optimising the creative.

If you'd like to have a chat about how we could apply this process to your business, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at what you're doing now and give you some clear, actionable advice on how to improve. It's a great way to get a second pair of expert eyes on your strategy.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh