Solved: Understanding Benefits of Hiring B2B Ad Agency

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out. I saw your query and it’s a fair question, one we hear alot. It’s completely understandable to be hesitant about investing in an agency when you feel you could maybe handle things yourself. Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance based on our experience, hopefully it'll clear a few things up for you.

The truth is, most businesses who try to run B2B ads internally for the first time end up burning through a fair bit of cash with very little to show for it. It’s not because they aren't smart, but because B2B advertising is a totally different beast to what most people expect. It’s not just about setting up a campaign on Google or LinkedIn and waiting for the leads to roll in. The real work, the stuff that actually makes a difference between wasting money and getting a return, happens way before you even open Ads Manager.

I'd say you first need to stop thinking about demographics...

This is probably the biggest mistake we see. Businesses come to us with an Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP, that looks something like this: "We sell to companies in the financial sector with 50-200 employees, and our target is the CTO."

Tbh, that's almost completely useless. It tells you nothing of real value. It leads to generic, boring ads that try to speak to everyone and end up speaking to no one. You're just another vendor shouting into the void. To stop burning cash, you have to define your customer not by who they are, but by what keeps them up at night. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, and expensive nightmare.

Your ICP isn't a demographic; it's a problem state. Let me give you an example. A Head of Engineering isn't just a job title. She's a leader who is terrified that her best, most expensive developers are about to quit because they're so frustrated with a broken, inefficient workflow. That's a real, career-threatening nightmare. Or think about a legal tech SaaS. Their customer's nightmare isn't just 'needing better document management'. It's the gut-wrenching fear of a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the entire firm to a malpractice lawsuit that could ruin them.

When you understand the problem at that level, everything changes. Your ads, your landing page, your offer – it all gets sharper and more effective. You're no longer selling a feature; you're selling a solution to a painful, expensive problem. This is the first thing any decent agency should force you to do. If they just ask for your target audience and start building campaigns, they're just glorified button-pushers.

Once you've really isolated that nightmare, you can find out where these people actually live online. Not just 'on LinkedIn'. That's lazy. Do they listen to niche podcasts like 'Acquired' on their commute? Do they actually read and trust industry newsletters like 'Stratechery'? What SaaS tools do they already pay for every month, like HubSpot or Salesforce? Are they active members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Who do they follow on Twitter for industry insight, people like Jason Lemkin? This kind of intelligence is the real blueprint for your targeting strategy. Doing this work upfront is non-negotiable. If you don't do this, you have no business spending a single pound on ads.

You probably should calculate what a customer is actually worth...

The next thing that seperates a professional approach from an amateur one is the maths. Most people obsess over the wrong question. They ask, "How low can I get my Cost Per Lead (CPL)?" The real question you should be asking is, "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?"

The answer is in its counterpart: the Lifetime Value (LTV) of a customer. Once you know this, you're not guessing anymore. You're making calculated decisions. Here’s a simple way to work it out, and it's something we do with all our clients.

You need three numbers:

-> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's a typical customer worth to you each month? Let's say it's £500.

-> Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue, after your cost of goods/service? Let's say it's a healthy 80%.

-> Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month? Let's be conservative and say it's 4%.

The calculation is simple:

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

Let's plug in our numbers:

There you have it. In this example, every single customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This changes everything.

Now, let’s think about what you can afford to spend. A healthy, 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 get a new customer and still have a brilliant business.

Let's take it a step further. If your sales team or process converts 1 in every 10 qualified leads into a paying customer (a 10% conversion rate), you can afford to pay up to £333 for a single, well-qualified lead.

Suddenly that £250 lead from a CTO on a targeted LinkedIn campaign doesn't look so expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the kind of maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to confidently invest in finding your ideal customers. This strategic financial modelling is a core benefit an experienced agency brings. They should be talking to you about this stuff, not just about click-through rates.

You'll need a message that they can't ignore...

Okay, so you know their nightmare, and you know what you can afford to spend to solve it. Now what do you actually say to them? This is where 99% of B2B ads fall flat. They are boring, full of jargon, and focused on the company, not the customer.

An agency worth its salt will have a copywriter who understands how to talk to these people. It's not about being clever; it's about being clear and empathetic. Here are a couple of frameworks that just work.

For a high-touch B2B service, you use Problem-Agitate-Solve. You don't sell "fractional CFO services." You sell a good night's sleep. Your ad copy should sound something like this:

"Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Worried you're one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? Stop guessing. 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 hooks them with a problem they feel, agitates it by mentioning competitors, and then presents a clear solution.

For a B2B SaaS product, you can use the Before-After-Bridge framework. You don't sell a "FinOps platform." You sell the feeling of relief. The ad could look like this:

"Before: Your AWS bill just landed. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out, another stressful meeting. After: Imagine opening your cloud bill and actually smiling. You see exactly where every dollar is going, and waste is automatically eliminated. Our platform is the bridge that gets you from chaos to control. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

This paints a vivid picture of their current pain and the future they want. Your product is simply the bridge to get there. This is the kind of targeted, psychological messaging that cuts through the noise. It’s a skill, and it’s something an agency should bring to the table. We’ve seen this kind of messaging be the difference between a campaign that fails and one that drives thousands of trials. I remember one B2B software client where we got them 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each, purely by nailing the messaging to their audience's pain points.

We'll need to look at your offer (and delete the 'Request a Demo' button)...

This brings me to what is, without a doubt, the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. I'm talking about your Call to Action (CTA).

Let's be brutally honest. The "Request a Demo" button is possibly the most arrogant, self-serving CTA ever invented. It presumes that your prospect, a busy and important decision-maker, has nothing better to do with their time than book a meeting to sit through a sales pitch. It’s high-friction and offers them zero immediate value. It instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor begging for 30 minutes of their time.

Your offer has one job and one job only: to deliver a moment of undeniable value. An "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution before you've even spoken to them. You have to solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for a price.

If you're a SaaS founder, this is your secret weapon. The gold standard offer is a completely free trial or a freemium plan. No credit card details required. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them feel the transformation for themselves. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a 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. We've seen a SaaS client get over 1,500 trials this way. In another instance, we helped a medical job matching SaaS client reduce their Cost Per User Acquisition from £100 down to just £7, because the offer was so compelling and frictionless.

If you're not a SaaS company, you're not off the hook. You must 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 SEO audit that instantly shows a prospect their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a data analytics firm, a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a company's failing ad campaigns and give them actionable advice. We recieve alot of positive feedback on it. This builds immense trust and demonstrates expertise far better than any sales pitch ever could.

You need to ask yourself: what is my equivalent of this? What small, valuable victory can I give my prospects for free?

You probably should re-think how you use the ad platforms...

So, you know the pain, you've done the maths, your message is sharp, and your offer is genuinely helpful. Now, and only now, should you think about which buttons to press on the ad platforms.

Another classic mistake is the "awareness" campaign. When you set your campaign objective on Meta (Facebook/Instagram) to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very clear command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being very good at its job, does exactly that. It finds the users inside your target audience who are least likely to click, engage, or ever buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. Nobody else is bidding for them. You are literally paying Facebook to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

For a growing business, awareness is a byproduct of performance, not a prerequisite for it. The best awareness you can get is a competitor's customer switching to your service and raving about it. That only happens through conversion. You should almost always be optimising your campaigns for a conversion objective - leads, trials, sales, appointments. Let the algorithm find you people who actually take action.

Then there's the targeting itself. On Google Ads, you need to target keywords that show clear buying intent. Don't go for broad, informational queries. If you sell an outreach tool, you should be targeting "software for lead generation" or "contact info finding tool," not "what is lead generation." You want people who are actively looking for a solution like yours.

On platforms like LinkedIn or Meta, you target the problem. For that same outreach tool, you'd target interests related to their challenges: "lead generation," "email marketing," people who follow marketing publications or even your competitors. Then you hit them with the problem-agitate-solve ad copy we talked about earlier. People who click that ad have pre-qualified themselves as having the problem you solve.

When we manage accounts, we also have a very clear structure for testing audiences, especially on Meta. It's not just a random collection of interests. It's a prioritised funnel. It looks something like this:

This structured approach ensures you're always testing the most valuable audiences first and systematically scaling out from there. It's a process, not a lottery. We've used this exact structure to get results like a $22 CPL for B2B decision-makers on LinkedIn ads, which is fantastic value when you know their LTV.

So, why would you hire someone to do all this...?

By now, I hope you see the difference. The real benefit of a good B2B ad agency isn't that they know how to use Google Ads or LinkedIn Ads. Your marketing junior can probably figure that out. The real benefit is the strategy, the process, and the experience.

It’s the discipline to do the hard work upfront to define the customer's nightmare. It’s the commercial acumen to build the LTV model that justifies the ad spend. It's the copywriting skill to craft a message that actually resonates. It’s the strategic foresight to build a frictionless offer that delivers value before asking for a sale. And it's the operational experience of knowing how to structure campaigns and prioritise audiences based on what's worked across dozens of other B2B accounts.

You're not paying for button-pushing. You're paying for a strategic partner who can build this entire growth engine for you, saving you from months or even years of expensive trial and error. You're paying for their past failures so you don't have to make them yourself. A good agency has already made the mistakes, burned the cash, and figured out what works on someone else's dime. You get to benefit from that accumulated knowledge from day one.

This is the main advice I have for you:

To put it all together, here is a summary of the actionable steps I'd recommend you take, whether you decide to hire an agency or try to build this capability internally. This is the framework for success.

Executing this framework properly takes time, expertise, and a lot of testing. Getting it wrong can be incredibly expensive, not just in wasted ad spend but in the opportunity cost of lost time. This, ultimately, is the real value of hiring an experienced agency. They provide the framework, the expertise, and the execution power to get you results much faster than you could on your own.

I hope this detailed breakdown has been helpful and gives you a much clearer picture of what's involved in effective B2B advertising. If you'd like to chat about your specific situation and see how we might be able to apply this kind of thinking to your business, feel free to book in a free, no-obligation strategy session with us.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh