Solved: First Performance Marketing Strategy (A Step-by-Step Fix)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Starting a new business is a massive undertaking, so it's smart you're thinking about your marketing strategy from the get-go. Hamburg's a great city but competitive, so getting your first steps right is pretty important. A lot of new owners waste a ton of money on ads that are doomed from the start because they miss the fundamentals.

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on what we see work time and time again. Forget about picking a platform or setting a budget for a minute. The real work, the stuff that actually determines success or failure, happens way before you ever log into an ad account. We're going to build your strategy from the ground up, starting with the one thing most people get wrong: the customer.

Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

Right, let's get this out of the way first because it's the foundation for everything else. When I ask founders who their customer is, they usually give me something sterile and useless like, "We sell to SMEs in the professional services sector in Germany with 10-50 employees."

That tells you absolutely nothing of value. It's a description, not an insight. It leads to generic ads with generic messages that speak to precisely no one. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer by their pain. Not just any pain, but their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare.

You need to become an obsessive expert in that nightmare. Your ideal client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of sheer frustration with a broken workflow. He's a Head of Sales staring at a CRM full of dead-end leads, knowing he'll miss his quarterly target. I remember one client with a legal tech SaaS, where the nightmare wasn't 'needing document management'; it was 'a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the entire firm to a malpractice suit.' See the difference? One is a feature list, the other is a gut-punch. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

So, your first job isn't to open Google Ads. It's to find that nightmare. Who are you really helping? What keeps them awake at 3 AM? Is it...
-> The fear of a sudden cash flow crisis that could kill their business?
-> The frustration of hiring expensive staff who don't deliver?
-> The anxiety that a competitor is innovating faster and will leave them in the dust?

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your whole world changes. You can now find where these people gather to complain about it. You can find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, the industry newsletters they actually open, the specific software tools they already pay for. Are they in certain groups on LinkedIn or Xing? Do they follow particular influencers? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire marketing strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have no business spending money on ads. It's that simple, and it's definitely the biggest mistake we see people make.

We'll need to look at your offer first...

Now that you're obsessed with your customer's nightmare, the next step is building the perfect cure. This is your offer, and it's the number one reason we see campaigns fail. A brilliant ad campaign pointing to a weak or confusing offer is like putting a rocket engine on a rowboat. You'll make a lot of noise, go nowhere fast, and probably sink.

Most new businesses have vague offers. They sell "Consulting Services," "Marketing Help," or "Custom Software Development." This is a massive mistake. It's intangible, risky for the buyer, and impossible to differentiate. The goal is to turn your service or product into a clear, tangible solution with a name.

I remember one client, a video production company. They were brilliant filmmakers but struggled to get clients. They sold "brand films." It was vague. We worked with them to refocus. Their ICP's nightmare? Being a talented, ambitious company that looked amateurish online, costing them big contracts. The solution? We helped them turn their service into a productised offer with a clear process: a one-day filming session on-site with clear deliverables like a hero video, social clips, and professional photos. It had a fixed price. Suddenly, they weren't selling a "brand film" anymore. They were selling a cure for the frustration of being overlooked. They were selling credibility in a box. Their sales exploded, not because the ads got better, but because the offer became irresistible to the right person.

This is your next task. Look at what you sell and ask yourself: how can I package this into a tangible, easy-to-understand solution that directly solves the nightmare I've identified? Give it a name. Define the deliverables. Set a price. This process alone will force so much clarity and make your marketing a thousand times easier.

You'll need to calculate what a customer is worth...

Okay, so you know the nightmare and you've built the cure. Now we can finally talk about money. But not your ad budget. We need to talk about what a customer is actually worth to you. The biggest trap in performance marketing is chasing a low Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). It feels good to get "cheap clicks," but cheap clicks almost always come from low-quality audiences who will never buy. 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: Lifetime Value (LTV). This number is your north star. It dictates how aggressively you can bid, which channels you can afford to play in, and ultimately, how fast you can grow. Here’s how you calculate a basic version of it.

You need three numbers:
1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month on average? (For a one-off product, this would be the average order value).
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods or direct cost of service delivery?
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (If you lose 2 out of 100 customers a month, your churn is 2%).

The calculation is simple but powerful:
LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's run an example. Say your service is €500/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 80%, and your monthly churn is 4%.
LTV = (€500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = €400 / 0.04 = €10,000

In this example, each customer is worth €10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This is the truth. A healthy business can typically afford to spend up to 1/3 of its LTV to acquire a customer. This is your target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). In this case, your target CAC is €10,000 / 3 = ~€3,333.

Suddenly, that €250 lead from a perfectly targeted ad on LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the math that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap leads that waste your time. Use the calculator below to get a feel for your own numbers.

I'd say you need to pick the right battlefield...

With a clear offer and a target CAC in hand, we can finally decide where to actually run ads. This isn't about which platform is "best." It's about matching the platform to your customer's state of mind. There are really only two states that matter for advertising:

1. They are actively searching for a solution (High Intent).
These people know they have the nightmare. They're typing things like "elektriker in Hamburg," "beste buchhaltungssoftware für kleine unternehmen," or "b2b lead generation agentur" into Google. They have a problem and they want it solved now. They are actively trying to give someone their money.

For this audience, there is only one place to be: Google Search Ads. Your job here is to show up for those high-intent keywords with an ad that proves your offer is the best cure for their specific pain. This is about harvesting existing demand. It's often the quickest path to revenue for a new business, because the audience has already qualified itself.

2. They are NOT actively searching for a solution (Low Intent).
This is a much larger group of people. They have the nightmare, but they might not be aware of it, or they've just accepted it as a part of life. They aren't searching for a fix. You have to interrupt them while they're scrolling through social media and make them realise there's a better way.

For this audience, you use platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, or Instagram. Your job here is to create demand. You target them based on their profile (e.g., job titles on LinkedIn, interests on Facebook) and hit them with an ad that articulates their nightmare so perfectly they can't help but stop and listen. For B2B, LinkedIn is usually the go-to because of its precise professional targeting. One campaign we worked on for a software client generated leads from B2B decision makers for just $22 per lead on LinkedIn by being hyper-specific with our targeting and message. For B2C, or some types of small business targeting, Meta (Facebook/Insta) can be incredibly effective.

You have to understand this distinction. They are separate strategies. Trying to create demand on Google Search is a waste of money. Trying to harvest demand on Facebook is inefficient. You need to decide: am I intercepting someone who is already looking, or am I educating someone who needs my help but doesn't know it yet?

You probably should focus on conversions, not awareness...

This brings me to a critical, myth-busting point. You will be tempted, especially by the ad platforms themselves, to run "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" campaigns. The logic seems sound: "People need to know who I am before they buy!"

This is a trap. And a very expensive one.

When you set your campaign objective to "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people inside my targeting for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out the users who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising platforms to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

For a new business, awareness is a vanity metric. What you need is cash flow. You need customers. The best form of brand awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it. That only happens through conversion.

So, from day one, your campaigns should ALWAYS be optimised for a conversion goal. That could be 'Leads', 'Sales', 'Sign-ups', whatever action you want a user to take. This forces the algorithm to do the hard work. It has to go and find the people within your audience who have a history of actually doing the thing you want them to do. It costs more per impression, but you're paying for quality, not just eyeballs. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great offer that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale.

You'll need a message they can't ignore

Now we get to the ad itself. All the strategy in the world doesn't matter if your ad copy is boring, generic, or focused on yourself. Your ad has one job: to stop the scroll and speak directly to the nightmare.

Don't sell features. Sell outcomes. Here are a few frameworks we use constantly:

For a service business: Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS)
You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. -> 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?" -> Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

For a SaaS/Software product: Before-After-Bridge (BAB)
You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of 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." -> After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated." -> Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first €1,000 in savings today."

Notice how every single line is about the customer, their feelings, their problems, and their desired outcome. Your company is just the bridge to get them there. Your ad copy should feel like you've been reading their diary.

I'd say you should delete the "Request a Demo" Button...

We've come to the final, and perhaps most common, failure point in the entire process: the landing page offer. You've done everything right—identified the nightmare, built the cure, targeted the right people with the right message. They click the ad, full of hope. And they land on a page with a button that says: "Request a Demo."

This is possibly the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy and important person, has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamoring for their time. It kills conversion rates.

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. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve their whole problem for money.

So, what do you do instead?
-> If you're a SaaS company: The gold standard is a free trial (no credit card) or a generous freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. A product qualified lead is infinitely more valuable than a marketing qualified lead.
-> If you're a service company: You are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that provides instant value. For us, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. For a marketing agency, it could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations'.

You have to give value before you ask for a sale. It builds trust, demonstrates your expertise, and filters out the time-wasters. The people who receive genuine value from your free offer are the exact people who are most likely to become your best customers.

This is the main advice I have for you:

This might all seem like a lot, so I've broken down the entire strategic process into a table. This is the roadmap. Follow these steps, in this order, and you'll be ahead of 95% of other new businesses trying to advertise online.

As you can see, a successful performance marketing strategy is 90% strategy and 10% tactics. The actual button-clicking in the ad platforms is the easy part. It's the thinking you do beforehand that determines whether you'll succeed.

While these principles provide a solid foundation, the execution—the constant testing of audiences, the crafting of compelling ad creatives, the analysis of data, and the optimisation of the funnel—is where the real work lies. It takes time, experience, and a dedicated focus to get it right, especially in a competitive market like Hamburg.

If you'd like to walk through how this framework could be applied specifically to your business, we offer a complimentary, no-obligation strategy consultation. We can take a look at your offer and goals and give you a clear, actionable plan for your first campaign.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh