Solved: Finding a Meta Ads Expert (The Non-Local Solution)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I understand you're struggling to find a highly effective Meta ads strategist in the Indianapolis area. It's a common challenge to find someone who not only has the technical skills but can also align with your business goals to deliver a strong return. Happy to give you some initial thoughts on how to find the right fit. The truth is, the most common mistake people make is focusing on location. Your best strategist probably isn't in Indianapolis—they're wherever the best results are, and in this digital world, that can be anywhere. The real challenge is learning how to spot genuine expertise versus slick sales talk. It's about finding someone with a repeatable process for growth, not just someone who promises a strong return.

We'll need to look at their process, not their postcode...

Right, let's get this out of the way first. Your search for a "meta ads strategist in Indianapolis, IN" is the very thing holding you back. It's a completely outdated way of thinking. The best person to run your ads could be in London, Lisbon, or Lithuania. What matters isn't whether you can have a coffee with them, but whether they have a rock-solid, repeatable process for generating results. Anyone still insisting on local-only for a digital service is either stuck in the past or doesn't have the reputation to attract clients from further afield. Tbh, it's a bit of a red flag for me.

So, how do you vet someone from a distance? It's simpler than you think. You look for proof, not promises.

First, take a good, hard look at their case studies. And I don't mean glossy PDFs with vanity metrics like 'reach' or 'impressions'. Anyone can buy impressions. That's meaningless. You need to see case studies that talk about real business results: cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), and revenue generated. Do they have experience in your niche, or a similar one? For instance, one of our clients is a medical job matching SaaS, and we took their Cost Per User Acquisition from a painful £100 down to just £7. That's a tangible result. We also worked with a B2B software client and got them over 4,600 registrations at $2.38 a pop on Meta, a platform many people think is useless for B2B. These are the kinds of specific, measurable successes you should be looking for. If their case studies are vague or just talk about 'brand awareness', walk away.

Next, get on a call with them. This is your chance to interview them, not the other way around. A good agency or strategist should offer some sort of free initial consultation or account review. We do this for all potential clients. It’s a 20-minute session where we get into their actual ad account and give them real, actionable advice they can implement straight away. It's not a sales pitch. It's a demonstration of expertise. If a potential partner isn't willing to give you a taste of their thinking for free, it suggests they either don't have the expertise or they're not confident it'll impress you. Ask them hard questions. What's their process for testing? How do they approach audience building? What's their opinion on your current landing page? If you get generic, textbook answers, they're not the one.

Finally, look at reviews, but be critical. Are the reviews specific? Do they mention the problems the agency solved? A review that says "They were great to work with!" is nice, but useless. A review that says "They helped us figure out our LTV and scaled our lead gen while keeping our CPL under $30" is gold. Tbh, if someone asks us for references after they’ve seen our detailed case studies and had a free strategy session, it tells me there's a fundamental lack of trust, and we're probably not a good fit. The proof should be in the results and the process they lay out for you. If that doesn't build trust, nothing will.

I'd say you need to understand your numbers first...

Here’s the thing. You can hire the best ads strategist in the world, but if you don't know your own business numbers, they will fail. The most common reason campaigns don't deliver a "strong return" is because the business owner doesn't actually know what a good return looks like for them. They're just guessing.

The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but rather "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer to that is a metric that most businesses never bother to calculate: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire time they do business with you. Without this number, you're flying completely blind. You're making decisions based on fear ("that lead cost £50, that's too expensive!") instead of data.

Let's break it down. It's not that complicated. You just need three pieces of information:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you typically make from a customer each month? Let's say it's £500.
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods or services? Let's say it's a healthy 80%.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month, on average? This is a critical one. Let's say it's 4%.

Now, the calculation is simple:

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

Using our example numbers:

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

There you have it. In this scenario, each new customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This single number changes everything. It's the foundation of any intelligent advertising strategy.

Why? Because now you know what you can afford to spend to get that customer. A healthy and sustainable business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. So, with a £10,000 LTV, you can comfortably afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single new customer. Let that sink in. If your sales team closes 1 in every 10 qualified leads they talk to, you can afford to pay up to £333 for each one of those leads. Suddenly, that £50 or even £100 lead from Meta or LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive anymore, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain.

This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. Any strategist who doesn't ask you about your LTV and churn rate in the first call isn't a strategist; they're a button-pusher. They're focused on the ad platform's metrics, not your business's metrics. And that's why they fail to deliver a real return. You need to know these numbers cold before you hire anyone.

You probably should define who you're actually talking to...

Once you know your numbers, the next biggest point of failure is the audience. Most businesses get this completely wrong. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing person put together. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It's a lazy description that leads to generic, boring ads that speak to precisely no one. To stop burning cash on ads that get ignored, you must define your customer not by who they are, but by the pain they are in.

You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your ideal customer isn't a job title; she's a person staring at a problem that's keeping her up at night. She's a Head of Engineering who is terrified of her best developers quitting out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing better document management'; it's 'a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the entire firm to a multi-million-dollar malpractice suit.' You see the difference? Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

When you define your customer this way, your targeting on platforms like Meta becomes infinitely more powerful. You stop thinking in terms of broad interests like "software" or "finance". Instead, you start thinking about the ecosystem around their pain. Where do they go for information to solve this problem? What tools do they already use and pay for? What influencers do they follow?

Let's make this practical. Imagine you're selling project management software for creative agencies.

The lazy, demographic approach:
-> Targeting: People who work at Marketing and Advertising agencies, Job Title: Project Manager, Interest: "Project Management".
This is terrible. You'll reach thousands of people who use Asana or Monday and are perfectly happy. They have no pain. You're just shouting into the void.

The pain-based 'Nightmare' approach:
-> The Nightmare: The agency owner is constantly dealing with scope creep, missed deadlines, and unprofitable projects. They feel like they're herding cats, and they're worried their best clients are about to fire them because of the chaos.
-> Targeting: Now we can get clever. We can target people who are admins of Facebook pages for 'Creative Agencies'. We can target interests like 'Dribbble' or 'Behance' (where designers hang out) and layer that with people who also have an interest in business software like 'QuickBooks' or 'Xero' (indicating they're likely a business owner). We can target followers of industry leaders who talk about agency profitability, like David C. Baker. We're not targeting 'project management'; we're targeting the symptoms and sources of the pain.

This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire advertising strategy. When you know their nightmare, you know the exact language to use in your ads, the exact pain points to highlight on your landing page, and the exact audiences to target on Meta. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. A good strategist will force you to have this conversation. A bad one will just ask for a list of interests to plug into Ads Manager.

We'll need to fix your offer, it's probably broken...

Now we get to the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising, and honestly, most advertising in general: the offer. I can almost guarantee that whatever you're asking people to do at the end of your ad is wrong. The "Request a Demo" button is quite possibly the most arrogant and ineffective Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes that your prospect, a busy and important person, has nothing better to do with their time than book a meeting to sit through a boring sales presentation.

Think about the psychology here. It is a high-friction, low-value request. You are asking for their time (a valuable asset) in exchange for the *possibility* of value later. It instantly positions you as a commodity, just another vendor begging for a slice of their calendar. It's no wonder conversion rates are abysmal.

Your offer has one job, and one job only: to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that is so powerful it makes the prospect sell themselves on your full solution. You have to solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to talk about solving the whole thing.

If you're a SaaS founder, this is your secret weapon. The gold standard offer is a free trial (with no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them experience the transformation firsthand. When the software 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 are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced and are now asking you how they can pay for more.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not off the hook. You must find a way to bottle your expertise into a tool, a piece of content, or an asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated website audit that instantly shows them their top 3 SEO opportunities. For a data analytics platform, it might be a free 'Data Health Check' that scans their database and flags the top five critical issues. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'How to Handle Difficult Conversations with Underperforming Employees'.

For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, our offer is this very advice. It's our free 20-minute strategy session where we get into a potential client's ad account and find real, tangible ways to improve their performance, completely free of charge. We solve a small problem for them upfront. That's what builds trust and demonstrates expertise far more effectively than any sales pitch ever could. If your offer requires a sales call to deliver any value, your offer is broken. You need to stop asking for demos and start delivering value.

The number one reason campaigns fail is a weak offer, often because there's a disconnect between what the business wants to sell and what the audience actually needs. So many founders chase what they think is a great idea, build a product with tons of features, and then struggle to get traction because they never validated that there was a real, urgent demand for it. A powerful offer doesn't just happen; it's engineered. It focuses on a very specific audience, identifies their most urgent problem, and then presents a clear, tangible solution. It turns a complex service into something that feels simple and less risky for a buyer to invest in.

You'll need a structured way to test audiences...

Even with the right numbers, ICP, and offer, you can still fail if your approach to targeting is chaotic. When I audit new client accounts on Meta, it's amazing how many people are just throwing spaghetti at the wall—testing random audiences that have no logical connection to their business goals or their customer's journey.

You need a structure. A prioritised system for testing audiences that mirrors how a real customer goes from being a total stranger to a loyal fan. The further along someone is in that journey, the more valuable they are, and the better your ads targeting them will perform. I generally break this down into three stages: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

Here’s a list of audiences I would usually prioritize, in order. This structure works for pretty much any niche, from eCommerce to B2B SaaS.

Top of Funnel (ToFu) - Reaching Cold Audiences:
This is about introducing your brand to people who've never heard of you but fit your 'Nightmare' ICP.

• 1. Detailed Targeting: This is your starting point. Use the interests, behaviours, and demographic data you uncovered when defining your ICP's pain. Don't just target "Shopify"; target people interested in Shopify *and* specific shipping apps, indicating they're an active store owner. Layering is your friend here.
• 2. Lookalike Audiences: Once you have data, this is where the magic happens. You tell Meta, "Go find me more people who look just like my best customers." You should test lookalikes in order of value. A lookalike of your highest-value purchasers is infinitely better than a lookalike of all website visitors. Start with your most valuable conversion event and work backwards as you need more scale.
• 3. Broad Targeting: This should only be used once your Meta Pixel has thousands of conversion events. At that point, you can trust the algorithm to find the right people with minimal guidance. Doing this too early is just a way to burn money fast.

Middle of Funnel (MoFu) - Re-engaging Interested People:
These people have shown some interest but haven't taken a key action yet. They know who you are. The goal is to bring them back and move them further down the funnel.

• -> Retargeting people who visited your landing page or specific product pages (but exclude those who already converted).
• -> Retargeting people who watched a significant portion of your video ads (e.g., 50% or more). This is a great indicator of interest.
• -> Retargeting people who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page.

Bottom of Funnel (BoFu) - Closing the Deal:
These are your hottest prospects. They are on the verge of converting, but something stopped them. Your ads here should be direct, maybe with an offer of help, a testimonial, or a reminder to finish what they started.

• -> Retargeting people who added a product to their cart but didn't purchase.
• -> Retargeting people who initiated checkout or added their payment info.
• -> For B2B, retargeting people who visited the pricing page or started filling out a lead form.

The key is to test methodically. Set up seperate, long-term campaigns for each stage of the funnel. Inside each campaign, create different ad sets to test your audiences against each other. Give them a few days to run. If an audience has spent 2-3 times your target CPA without a single conversion, it's probably not a winner. Turn it off and move your budget to the ones that are working. This structured approach turns advertising from a gamble into a predictable system for growth.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To wrap this all up, finding a "highly effective" strategist isn't about looking in your local directory. It's about understanding the foundational principles of good advertising yourself, so you can spot the person who actually gets it. It's about shifting your mindset from buying a service to finding a growth partner. Here are the main, actionable recommendations I'd give you based on the situation you've described.

As you can probably tell, doing this properly is a lot of work. It requires a deep understanding of business strategy, data analysis, copywriting, and the technical nuances of the ad platforms. It's not just about knowing which buttons to click in Ads Manager. That's the easy part. The hard part is the thinking that comes before you ever launch a single campaign.

This is why many businesses ultimately decide to work with an expert partner. Not because they can't learn it themselves, but because their time is better spent running their business. A good partner doesn't just manage your ads; they become an extension of your team, providing the strategic oversight needed to turn advertising from an expense into a predictable engine for growth.

If you've found this guidance helpful and would like to have a chat about how we could apply this same strategic 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 concrete, actionable advice. No hard sell, just a genuine attempt to help.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh