Helping an early-stage company set up a lead generation campaign

Last month, I helped an early-stage company set up a lead generation campaign using paid traffic.

Here’s the 4-step approach we took—and how we tried to shortcut our path to traction.

1. STARTING WITH BUSINESS FUNDAMENTALS

Before writing a single ad, we clarified a few basics:

→ Who are we targeting?
→ What pain point are we solving?
→ What product or offer are we promoting?
→ What specific action do we want the audience to take?

2. STUDYING THE COMPETITION

Rather than starting from scratch, we looked at what others in the space were already doing.

→ We built a list of competitors using Google, LLMs, and business databases.

→ We reviewed their live ads using public ad libraries (e.g. Facebook Ads Library, Google Ad Transparency etc) and ad spy tools.

→ We looked for signs of success—it's rare for platforms to give performance data directly, but proxies exist:

A. Are they running lots of ads?
B. Are they testing multiple variations of the same ad?
C. Have the ads been running for a long time?

3. REVERSE ENGINEERING THE WINNERS

Once we’d identified “working” ads, we broke them down to understand what might be driving performance.

→ What audience are they speaking to?
→ What’s the copy style?
→ What kind of creative are they using (video, image etc)?
→ What’s the CTA?
→ Any patterns in headline structure?

The goal wasn’t to copy, but to understand the constituent drivers of success so that we could model.

4. BUILDING AND LAUNCHING

Using what we’d learned, we built several variations of our own.

From there, we launched with a small budget, and will be paying attention to early data signals, so that we can then iterate based on performance.

I hope this short (and somewhat oversimplified!) guide helps another business exploring paid media.