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The Founder's B2B Ad Playbook: Stop 'Requesting Demos,' Start Getting Customers.
- Lukas Holschuh
- July 17, 2025
- 12:21 pm
Inside this article, you’ll discover:
The definitive playbook for B2B ads that actually generate profitable customers, not just vanity leads.
- A step-by-step guide to defining the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) you should actually be targeting, with detailed examples.
- An exact, step-by-step calculation to determine your customer Lifetime Value (LTV), the only metric that truly matters.
- Detailed guidance on crafting "no-brainer" offers, from free SaaS trials to high-value lead magnets, that get prospects to sell themselves.
- Real ad copy examples for SaaS, service, and high-ticket product businesses, designed to speak to your ideal buyer's most urgent problems.
This isn't a list of tips. This is a new operating system for B2B growth. If you're tired of burning cash and ready to build a predictable client acquisition machine, this is for you. And when you’re convinced, book a free strategy call to see how we can build it for you.
We can help you with all types of digital ads:
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Team @ Lukas Holschuh
Founder, Growth & Advertising Consultant
You’ve done everything the B2B marketing playbook told you to. You’ve identified your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), targeted their exact job titles on LinkedIn, written ad copy about your "synergistic, end-to-end solutions," and pointed it all at a landing page with one big, hopeful button: "Request a Demo."
And your calendar is empty. Your pipeline is dry. You’re spending a founder's salary on ads and getting ignored. Why?
Because your entire strategy is built on a myth. It’s a myth propagated by lazy marketers and outdated agencies. The myth is that the goal of a B2B ad is to get a meeting. It’s not.
The goal of a B2B ad is to find someone with an urgent, expensive problem and make them product-qualified by giving them a free, instant taste of the solution.
You are asking for their most valuable asset—an hour of their time—in exchange for a sales pitch they don't want, from a company they don't trust, to solve a problem they might not believe you understand. You’re stuck in the "Demo Trap," and it’s the single biggest reason B2B advertising fails.
This isn't a guide about getting more leads. It's a guide for founders on how to get more customers by fundamentally changing how you think about advertising. Let’s burn the old playbook.
Part 1: Your ICP is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic
Let's destroy the idea of the traditional ICP. Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you nothing of value and leads to generic ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain.
You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing document management'; it's 'a partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a malpractice suit.' Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.
Once you've isolated that nightmare, you must become an anthropologist. You need to discover their digital watering holes—the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute, like 'Acquired'; the industry newsletters they actually open, like 'Stratechery'; the SaaS tools they already pay for, like HubSpot or Salesforce. Are they members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group? Do they follow people like Jason Lemkin on Twitter? This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads.
Part 2: Math That Sets You Free
One number seduces every founder and derails most campaigns: the Cost Per Lead (CPL). Marketers love to celebrate a low CPL because it's an easy, immediate number to put in a report. But a low CPL, in isolation, is one of the most dangerous vanity metrics in your business.
A £20 CPL feels great, until you realise it’s generating leads from students and tire-kickers 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).
You must calculate this. Here’s how:
How to Calculate Your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month? Let's say it's £500.
Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? Let's say it's 80%.
Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? Let's say it's 4%.
Now, the calculation:
LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
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.
Now you have the truth. With a £10,000 LTV, a healthy 3:1 LTV:CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) ratio means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.
Suddenly, that £250 lead from a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the math that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads.
Part 3: A Message They Can't Ignore
Armed with your ICP's nightmare and the freedom of knowing your numbers, you can now craft a message that they simply cannot ignore. Stop writing ad copy that sounds like it was generated by a corporate committee. Your ad needs to speak directly to the problems of your ideal customers.
For a high-touch service business, you deploy Problem-Agitate-Solve. You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad would say, "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."
For a B2B SaaS product, you use the Before-After-Bridge. You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief. Your ad would say, "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out. Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated. Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."
For high-ticket physical products, like lab equipment, you attack the feature-obsession head-on. Don't just state the spec; 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 top talent that other labs can only dream of."
It's All About The Message.
When prospects land on your site and don't get what you're selling, you need a copywriter. That's exactly what saved this client's ads. We focused their strategy on LinkedIn to reach the right decision makers with a clear value proposition.
Part 4: Delete the "Request a Demo" Button
Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising: the offer. The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, usually a busy C-level decision maker, has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It is high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor.
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.
For SaaS founders, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (no card details) or a freemium plan (no card details either). Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. You aren't generating MQLs for a sales team to chase; you are creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced.
If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a data analytics platform, it could be a free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' for new managers. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free. You must solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.
An Offer That Works.
If you're competing with the likes of Trello and Asana, you need an offer people can't decline to stand out. See how we used a one-time purchase strategy to drive $30,000 for this SaaS product.
Part 5: Go Where Your Audience Is
Stop asking "Should we be on LinkedIn?" and start thinking like a strategist. Don't choose an ad platform, choose an audience. Where can you reach your primary ICP? Where do people hang out that have the problem state you identified for your ICP in Part 1. You must meet your buyer where they are in their journey.
For the buyer with Active Intent, you should dominate Google Ads. This is the lowest-hanging fruit in all of marketing. These people are actively searching for a solution to their problem. They are typing "erp for medical device manufacturers" into Google. To not be there is to be invisible. Your strategy here is precise keyword targeting. Use high-intent, long-tail keywords and a long list of negative keywords to filter out students and job-seekers. Your ad copy should be a direct mirror of their search query, making your ad feel like an answer, not an advertisement. A good way to do this is with Dynamic Keyword and Location Insertion tags (DKI) that go directly into your ad copy to show the exact keywords people search for in your ad. It's technical, yes, but our clients see much higher click-through rates this way.
For the Passive Sufferer, you should master LinkedIn Ads. No other platform lets you target a "VP of Operations" at a "logistics company with 500-1000 employees" in the "Midlands". This precision comes at a premium—LinkedIn has the highest ad costs in the business. But your LTV calculation from Part 2 gives you the confidence to pay £15 per click, knowing it's from a perfect-fit prospect who could be worth £50,000. Because you have so much context, your ad should be hyper-relevant. You can open with, "As a VP of Ops in logistics..." because you know who you're talking to. This is about interrupting their scroll with a message that feels like prophecy.
If your ICP is not problem aware and not specific, for Broader Reach and Retargeting, you should leverage Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram/Threads). Forget the myth that it's "just for B2C." Its true power lies in its Lookalike Audiences and the sheer volume of its users base. Everyone is on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Threads. Upload a list of your 100+ best customers and command Meta's AI to "find me one million more people who behave exactly like these ones." It’s also your most profitable retargeting machine. Any executive who clicked your LinkedIn ad or visited your pricing page should be met with a calm, confident reminder that you noticed them in their Instagram feed that evening.
For smaller budgets, pick one platform to focus on so you don't spread yourself too thin. For larger budgets, a truly sophisticated strategy doesn't choose one platform; it orchestrates all three. It captures active intent on Google, creates new demand with precision on LinkedIn, and uses Meta to scale its winners and close every open loop through retargeting.
Choose Your Audience.
What's the right platform for a B2B software to reach a broad audience of Amazon sellers? Find out in this case study. Hint: It's not Amazon.
This is The Path. You Will Need a Guide.
This playbook is the truth. It's how high-growth B2B companies are being built right now. Define your customer by their nightmare. Measure success with LTV:CAC. Speak to their pain. Make an irresistible, value-first offer. And reach them where they are, on the right ad platform.
But let's be clear: this is not easy. It requires deep expertise, strategic thinking, and relentless execution across multiple complex funnel stages and ad platforms. It requires you to unlearn years of bad marketing habits. It requires a level of focus and advertising experience that most founders, busy running their actual business, simply do not have.
This is the path to predictable, profitable growth. If you want to walk it faster and avoid the costly mistakes that sink most businesses, you need an experienced guide.
If you’re ready to stop gambling and start building a real client acquisition machine, let's talk.
Book a free, no-obligation strategy session at holschuh.co.uk.
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