Targeting Nightmares: The Ultimate Paid Ad Guide

Let's be brutally honest. If your approach to audience targeting starts with demographics like "men aged 35-54 living in Manchester," you're not advertising, you're just throwing money into a digital furnace. That entire way of thinking is a relic, a lazy shortcut that guarantees you'll talk to everyone and be heard by no one. The secret to finding your best customers isn't about who they are, it's about what nightmare keeps them awake at night. You need to become an obsessive expert in their most urgent, expensive, and frustrating problems. Once you understand their pain with an uncomfortable level of detail, finding them becomes almost trivial.

This is a masterclass in how to stop guessing and start targeting with surgical precision across the platforms that actually matter. We're going to dismantle the old myths and build a new framework from the ground up, one based on intent, context, and pain. Forget broad strokes; we're using a scalpel.

Is Your "Ideal Customer Profile" a Useless Work of Fiction?

That PDF your last marketing person made? The one with the stock photo of "Marketing Mike," a 42-year-old who enjoys golf and lives in a semi-detached house? Bin it. It's actively harming your business. Sterile, demographic-based profiles lead to generic, wallpaper ads that get ignored. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you nothing of genuine value.

You must redefine your customer not by their demographic, but by their problem state. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a specific, career-threatening nightmare. For instance:

-> The Head of Engineering at a 150-person SaaS company isn't just a job title. She's a leader who is terrified of her two best senior developers handing in their notice because they're sick of a broken, inefficient workflow. That's her nightmare.

-> For a legal tech company, the nightmare isn't a vague 'need for document management'. It's a partner missing a critical filing deadline by one hour, exposing the entire firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice lawsuit. That's the pain.

Once you've isolated this specific nightmare, your real research begins. You need to find out where these people congregate to talk about their problems. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired' or 'The All-In Podcast'? What industry newsletters do they actually open and read, like 'Stratechery'? What SaaS tools are already on their company credit card—HubSpot, Salesforce, Asana? Are they lurking in the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Who do they follow on Twitter, people like Jason Lemkin or Shaan Puri?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the entire blueprint for your targeting strategy. Doing this work first is non-negotiable. If you skip this, you have no business spending a single pound on ads. You're just gambling. In fact, many people think LinkedIn ads are useless precisely because they target demographics instead of these deep-seated professional nightmares.

How Should I Think About Targeting on Different Ad Platforms?

Every platform has its own language and its own philosophy. Trying to apply the same targeting logic to Google, Meta, and LinkedIn is like trying to speak French in Tokyo – you'll just get confused looks. You need to respect the native environment of each one.

Google Ads: The Intent Machine

Google is the simplest to understand. You're not trying to find people; you're making yourself available to people who are already looking for you. They are raising their hand and telling you their problem through the search bar. Your entire job is to match their intent.

This means you must be ruthless with your keyword selection. You need to target keywords that signal a specific, commercial intent, not broad informational queries. For example, if you sell an outreach tool like Apollo.io, you don't target "what is lead generation". You target people who are ready to buy a solution, people searching for "software for lead generation", "best contact info finding tool", or "salesloft alternative".

These users are already pre-qualified by their own actions. They have the problem, they are aware of the problem, and they are now actively searching for the solution. It's the lowest hanging fruit in all of digital advertising, and if you get this wrong, nothing else matters. I remember one local electrician business whose entire lead flow came from targeting "emergency electrician near me". It's simple, direct, and it taps directly into an urgent need.

Meta (Facebook & Instagram): The Pattern Recogniser

Here is the most uncomfortable truth about advertising on Meta. When you set up a campaign and choose the "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" objective, you are giving the algorithm a very specific, and very stupid, command: "Find me the largest possible number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, being the ruthlessly efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It scours your target audience to find the users who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because those users' attention is not in demand. It's cheap. You are literally paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

To get Meta to work for you, you have to do the opposite. You must always, always optimise for a conversion objective that happens further down the funnel—Leads, Add to Carts, or, ideally, Purchases. When you do this, you give the algorithm a new command: "Go and find me more people who look and behave like the ones who already perform this valuable action."

Now, the algorithm starts working for you. It analyses the thousands of data points of your existing converters and builds a complex pattern of their behaviours, interests, and on-platform actions. Then it goes and finds more people who match that pattern. Your job is not to tell Facebook who your customer is with dozens of narrow interests; your job is to give it enough high-quality conversion data so it can figure out who your best customers are. This is a fundamental shift in thinking that most advertisers fail to grasp.

LinkedIn: The Professional Context

LinkedIn is where you go for B2B. It’s expensive, the creative is often stale, and the user experience can be clunky. But it has one killer feature: reliable, self-reported professional data. You can target with a level of accuracy that is impossible elsewhere, but only if you do it right.

The mistake everyone makes is stopping at the surface level. "CMO at a company with 50-200 employees in the Software industry." That's a start, but it's lazy. You need to combine this firmographic data with the 'Nightmare ICP' we discussed earlier. Your real target isn't just a CMO. It's a CMO at a 50-200 person software company who is a member of the 'B2B Marketing' group, follows Dave Gerhardt, and whose company has recently posted jobs for 'Content Marketer'.

Now you're not just targeting a demographic; you're targeting a context. You're finding someone who is actively signaling they have the exact problem your service solves. It’s the difference between shouting into a stadium and whispering in someone's ear. This is the real reason most LinkedIn campaigns fail; they lack this crucial layer of context and pain-point targeting. One campaign we ran for a B2B SaaS client targeted specific decision makers and achieved a CPL of just $22, purely because we were obsessive about combining job titles with company-level signals of need.

How Do I Actually Build and Prioritise My Audiences?

Okay, theory is nice, but let's get practical. How do you structure this in your ad accounts? Think of it like a funnel, from the coldest audiences who've never heard of you, to the hottest prospects who are one click away from buying. The further down the funnel an audience is (or a lookalike of that audience), the better it will almost always perform.

Here’s a typical prioritisation I use for eCommerce clients on Meta, but the logic applies to almost any business.

ToFu (Top of Funnel - Prospecting):

1. Detailed targeting (interests, behaviours): Your first port of call for a new account. Base these on your 'Nightmare ICP' research. What tools, publications, and influencers does your ideal customer follow?

2. Lookalike audiences (ranked by quality): Once you have data, this is where the magic happens. Prioritise them like this:
-> Lookalike of highest value previous customers
-> Lookalike of all previous customers
-> Lookalike of people who added payment info
-> Lookalike of people who initiated checkout
-> Lookalike of people who added to cart
-> Lookalike of all website visitors
-> Lookalike of 50% video viewers

3. Broad targeting: Only use this once your pixel is 'seasoned' with thousands of conversion events. You basically target nothing but a country and an age range, and trust the algorithm to find your buyers based on past data. It sounds terrifying, but for scaled accounts, it can be the best performing "audience" of all.

MoFu (Middle of Funnel - Retargeting the Interested):

-> All website visitors in the last 30-60 days (excluding anyone who purchased or reached the final checkout page)
-> People who viewed 50% or more of your video ads
-> People who engaged with your Facebook or Instagram page

BoFu (Bottom of Funnel - Closing the Sale):

-> People who added a product to their cart in the last 7-14 days (but didn't buy)
-> People who initiated checkout in the last 7-14 days (but didn't buy)
-> People who viewed your checkout page

BoFu - Previous Customers (Driving Lifetime Value):

-> All previous customers (for new product launches)
-> Highest value previous customers (for exclusive offers)

When you're starting out with a small budget, you might need to combine some of these. For example, you could group all your MoFu and BoFu retargeting audiences into a single ad set to ensure it has enough people to run effectively. A common issue new advertisers face is the audience fragmentation warning, which happens when you create too many tiny audiences that overlap. Combining them is often the answer.

The key is to test methodically. Set up separate long-term campaigns for each stage of the funnel (e.g., one for Prospecting, one for Retargeting). Inside your Prospecting campaign, create different ad sets to test your best interest-based audiences against your best lookalike audiences. Let them run. An audience might need to spend 2-3 times your target Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) before you have enough data to make a call on whether it's a winner or a dud. Don't be impatient.

What if My Targeting Is Perfect But My Ads Still Fail?

This brings us to the most common point of failure in all of advertising. You can have the most perfectly targeted audience in the world, but if you show them a terrible offer, they will ignore you. The offer is the missing piece of the targeting puzzle.

And the single worst offer in all of B2B marketing is the "Request a Demo" button. It's the most arrogant, high-friction, low-value Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor and kills any momentum your ad created.

You need to delete it. 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.

This is about transforming your value proposition into something tangible and immediately useful. I remember one client who sold complex "brand film" services. It was a hard sell. They changed their offer to a "1-Day Filming Process" with a clear name, defined deliverables, and a fixed timeline. Suddenly, the complex service felt simple, tangible, and less risky. Their leads skyrocketed.

Here’s how this looks for different businesses:

-> For B2B SaaS Founders: The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan, with no credit card required. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. I worked with a client that saw low signups on their new SaaS until they made their freemium tier more generous. Once the product itself proved its value, sales became a formality.

-> For Agencies/Consultants: You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset that provides instant value. A marketing agency could offer a free, automated SEO audit. A data analytics platform could offer a free 'Data Health Check'. For our agency, it’s a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. You have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the bigger one.

-> For High-Ticket Products: Don't just list a feature; state its consequence. "Our new mass spectrometer has a 0.001% margin of error." So what? "So your lab can publish results with unshakeable confidence, securing more funding and attracting the top talent that other labs can only dream of." You sell the outcome, not the object.

A great offer makes your targeting ten times more effective because it acts as a filter. The right people will be irresistibly drawn to it, and the wrong people will ignore it. Your ad creative and offer work together to pre-qualify your audience before they even click.

How Do I Know What I Can Afford to Pay for a Customer?

This is the final, critical piece of the puzzle. The question you should be asking isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

This simple bit of maths will change your entire perspective on ad spend. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap, low-quality leads.

Here's the basic formula:

LTV = (Average Revenue Per Account * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's run an example for a hypothetical SaaS business:

-> Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): £500/month
-> Gross Margin %: 80% (your profit on that revenue)
-> Monthly Churn Rate: 4% (the percentage of customers you lose each month)

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

In this example, each customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. A healthy ratio of LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is at least 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer.

Now, let's say your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer. That means you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't look so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. Without it, you're flying blind, optimising for vanity metrics instead of profit.

Putting It All Together: Niche-Specific Blueprints

The principles are universal, but the application varies. Here’s how these concepts come together for different types of businesses.

The B2B SaaS Playbook
Your world revolves around the 'Nightmare ICP' and LinkedIn/Google Search. You're hunting for needles in a haystack. Your focus should be on getting prospects into a free trial or onto a demo (only if the product is too complex for a trial). The entire funnel is about education and demonstrating value before asking for money. We recently took a medical job matching SaaS client from a £100 CPA all the way down to just £7 by refining their Meta and Google targeting to focus on very specific user pain points. For any founder in this space, our complete guide to paid acquisition for B2B SaaS is essential reading.

The eCommerce Playbook
Your best friend is the Meta pixel and your product catalogue. Your strategy is heavily weighted towards retargeting and lookalikes of your best customers. MoFu and BoFu are your profit centres. You should be running Dynamic Product Ads to show people the exact products they viewed or added to their cart. For a subscription box client, we focused heavily on lookalikes of their highest-value subscribers and hit a 1000% Return On Ad Spend. For an apparel brand, we used a mix of Meta and Pinterest ads to hit a 691% return. The engine is always the same: feed the algorithm purchase data and let it find more buyers.

The App Marketing Playbook
Getting downloads is easy; getting valuable users is hard. Your initial push might come from places like Product Hunt or Betalist, but for scalable growth, you'll turn to paid channels. Apple Search Ads are fantastic for capturing high-intent users searching directly in the App Store. Meta and TikTok are powerful for driving volume, but you MUST optimise for in-app actions (e.g., level completion, subscription start), not just installs. We helped one app grow to over 45,000 signups at under £2 per user by combining Apple Search Ads with conversion-optimised Meta campaigns. There's a whole methodology to this, which we've outlined in our ultimate user acquisition playbook for apps.

The Local Service Business Playbook
Your game is all about proximity and urgency. Google Search Ads and Local Service Ads are your bread and butter. You're targeting keywords like "plumber in Islington", "best hairdresser Clapham", or "emergency roof repair". Your ads need phone call extensions and location extensions. Your landing page needs to scream "local, trusted, and available now" with local reviews and a local phone number. We're currently running a campaign for an HVAC company in a competitive area, and they're seeing leads at around $60. Conversely, we ran a campaign for a home cleaning company that got leads for just £5. Your cost depends entirely on the urgency and value of your service. We've compiled all our learnings into a complete lead generation guide for local businesses that covers this in detail.

This is the main advice I have for you:

Targeting isn't a "set it and forget it" task. It's a continuous process of research, testing, and refinement. Below is a table summarising the core approach for different business models.

Getting this right takes time, expertise, and a willingness to be wrong. You have to test, analyse the data without emotion, and constantly refine your understanding of who your customer is and what they truly want. It's a challenging process, but it's also the single most powerful lever you have for sustainable growth.

If you're tired of guessing and want to implement a professional, data-driven targeting strategy that actually finds customers, it might be time to get some expert help. We can audit your current campaigns, identify the biggest opportunities for improvement, and build a roadmap for growth. We offer a completely free, no-obligation initial strategy session to see if we can help. It's often the fastest way to see what's truly possible when you stop targeting demographics and start targeting customers.