Solved: New biz owner & performance marketing strategy (Data Inside)

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It sounds like you're at that classic, and honestly quite tricky, starting point that every new business owner faces. It's completely normal to feel a bit lost when it comes to performance marketing. There's a lot of noise out there, and most of it is rubbish.

I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and a bit of a strategic framework. Forget about picking a platform for a minute. The real work, the stuff that actually makes campaigns profitable, happens long before you even think about logging into Google or Meta. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at your customer in a totally different way...

Right, first things first. The biggest mistake I see, and I see it in about 90% of the accounts I audit, is that businesses define their customers by sterile demographics. "Business owners in Hamburg," "companies in the finance sector," "women aged 25-40." Tbh, this tells you nothing of any real value. It leads to generic ads with generic messages that speak to absolutely no one.

You have to stop thinking about who your customer is and start obsessing over the problem they have. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state.

Let me give you an example. Say you're selling a legal tech SaaS product. Your old, useless ICP might be "Law firms with 10-50 employees." Your new, effective ICP is based on a nightmare: "A partner at a mid-sized firm who lies awake at 3 AM terrified of missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the firm to a malpractice suit and career ruin because their current document management is a chaotic mess." See the difference? One is a spreadsheet entry; the other is a real, painful human problem. You can sell to the second person. The first is just a ghost.

When you define your customer by their pain, finding them becomes ten times easier. Where does this stressed-out lawyer go for information? What niche newsletters do they actually read? What podcasts do they listen to on their commute? What industry leaders do they follow on LinkedIn? This is the intelligence that forms the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. You're just gambling.

Most businesses follow a path that guarantees failure. They pick a platform, create a generic ad, and target a vague demographic. It's a recipe for burning cash. The correct path starts with the pain.

I'd say you need to delete the "Request a Demo" button...

Once you understand your customer's nightmare, the next most common failure point is the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is probably the most arrogant Call to Action in marketing. It presumes your prospect, who is likely a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their diary to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and immediately positions you as just another commodity vendor shouting for attention.

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 has to solve a small, real piece of their problem for free, right now. This is how you earn the right to solve the whole thing for them later.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a SaaS business: The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan, with no credit card required. Let them actually use the product. Let them feel the transformation from their "nightmare" state to a state of relief. 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; you're creating product qualified leads (PQLs) who are already convinced.
• For a service business: You are not exempt from this. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or an asset that provides instant value. If you're a marketing agency, offer a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. If you're a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers. For us, as an advertising consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns.

You must solve a small problem for free to earn trust. The higher the value you can deliver upfront, and the lower the friction to get it, the more successful your advertising will be. "Request a Demo" is the worst of both worlds: high friction and zero immediate value.

You probably should calculate how much a customer is worth...

Before you spend anything on ads, you have to answer a fundamental question: "How high a cost-per-lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer isn't a guess. It's a calculation, and it's called Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the single most important metric in performance marketing, yet most new business owners ignore it.

LTV tells you the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire time they do business with you. Once you know this, you know how much you can afford to spend to get them. Here's how to work it out:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month on average?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (i.e., Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold).
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

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

Let's use an example. Say you run a subscription software business:

• ARPA = £100/month
• Gross Margin = 80% (0.80)
• Monthly Churn = 5% (0.05)

LTV = (£100 * 0.80) / 0.05 = £80 / 0.05 = £1,600

This means each customer you acquire is worth £1,600 in gross margin to your business. Now you have the truth. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £1,600 / 3 = ~£533 to acquire a single customer.

If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can now afford to pay up to £53.30 per qualified lead. Suddenly, that £40 lead from LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the math that unlocks intelligent, aggressive growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads.

Use the calculator below to get a rough idea of your own LTV.

You'll need to choose where they live online...

Only now, once you know your customer's nightmare, you have a high-value offer, and you know what they're worth to you, can you finally think about which ad platform to use. The platform choice is simply about matching it to your customer's state of mind.

Broadly, there are two types of customers online:

1. They are actively searching for a solution (High Intent).
These people know they have a problem and are actively typing solutions into a search bar. They are problem-aware and solution-aware. The only place to catch these people is Google Search Ads.
Your job here is to bid on keywords that express this specific intent. You don't want broad, informational queries. You want keywords that signal they're ready to buy or take action. For example, if you sell an outreach tool, you target "software for lead generation" or "contact info finding tool," not "what is lead generation." The ads are shown only to people who are already pre-qualified because their search query tells you exactly what they want. We've seen campaigns for software clients achieve great results here; one got over 3,500 users for less than £1 per user just using this approach.

2. They are NOT actively searching for a solution (Low Intent / Passive).
These people have the "nightmare" you solve, but they aren't actively looking for a fix right now. Maybe they don't know a solution exists, or it's not a top priority yet. You can't reach them on Google Search. You have to interrupt them where they spend their time: social media platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram) and LinkedIn.
Here, your targeting is based on the ICP research you did earlier. On LinkedIn, you can target by job title, company size, and industry – it's brilliant for very specific B2B niches. We recently ran a campaign for a B2B software company that generated leads for just $22 per lead using this approach. On Meta, you target interests related to the problems they have or the tools they use. For that same outreach tool, you could target people interested in "lead generation," followers of marketing publications, or even people who like your competitors' software pages.

A word of warning on social media: You must set your campaign objective to optimise for conversions (leads, sales, trials). If you choose "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are literally telling the algorithm to find you the cheapest, lowest-quality audience who are least likely to ever buy anything. Awareness is a byproduct of making sales to the right people, not a prerequisite. We've had B2B SaaS clients get thousands of registrations for under $3 each on Meta just by focusing relentlessly on conversion optimisation.

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

Finally, you bring it all together in the ad itself. The ad copy has one job: to grab your ICP by the collar and say, "I understand your nightmare, and I have the way out." No clever wordplay, no corporate jargon. Just a direct, empathetic message that speaks to their pain.

There are two simple formulas that work brilliantly:

1. Problem-Agitate-Solve (for service businesses):
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."

2. Before-After-Bridge (for SaaS/product businesses):
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."

This kind of direct, pain-focused copy, combined with the right targeting and a high-value offer, is what makes performance marketing work. It's a system, not a lottery.

This is the main advice I have for you:

I know this is a lot to take in, but if you follow this sequence, you will be miles ahead of most of your competition. I've summarised the main steps in a table for you below.

This is a strategic process, not a series of disconnected tactics. It requires discipline and a willingness to do the hard work upfront before you even think about launching a campaign. But getting this right is the difference between a business that struggles and one that grows predictably.

As you can probably tell, this is a complex process with a lot of moving parts. Getting it right can be the difference between burning through your startup capital and building a scalable customer acquisition engine. This framework is a solid start, but implementation and optimisation are where the real expertise comes in—testing audiences, refining copy, analysing data, and making hundreds of small adjustments that add up to a big impact.

If you'd like to go through this process for your specific business in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session. We can take a look at your business, your goals, and help you map out the first steps of a truly effective performance marketing strategy.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh