Scroll through LinkedIn for five minutes and count the B2B SaaS ads. Most of them look the same. A headline that starts with "We," a screenshot of the dashboard, and a button that says Book a Demo.
I've spent a lot of the last year making ads for SaaS companies, and I'll admit our team did some of that too before we got more deliberate about it. The problem usually isn't talent. It's that every new campaign starts from a blank page. Someone has a clever idea, it either works or it doesn't, and nobody can say why. Then the next campaign starts from a blank page again.
If you run a SaaS company that grew on founder-led sales and referrals, this matters more than it sounds. At some point marketing has to carry part of the pipeline, and paid creative is usually one of the first places you find out whether it can. Ads that look like everyone else's get scrolled past, and the spend shows up in the board deck with nothing to show for it.
B2C brands figured this out years ago. They don't reinvent the ad every time. They work from a small set of patterns that keep working, and they test variations inside them. I recently put together an internal masterclass for the Kalungi team on eight of those patterns and how they translate to B2B SaaS. This post is the written version, with the parts of the discussion I found most useful.
Before any of the frameworks are useful, you need to know what job your buyer is trying to get done. People don't buy software because of what it is. They hire it to fix something specific in their week.
The example I used in the session: say you're a doctor and you show up late to the hospital every day. You're weighing the bus, the subway, driving yourself. Then you see an ad for a bike that says you'll skip traffic and get there faster. That ad works on you because it speaks to your exact problem, which is being late. It didn't need to explain how the gears work.
B2C ads lean hard on emotion. B2B ads tend to be all function. But the person approving a software purchase is still a person, and they're usually worried about something real: missing the number, losing visibility, looking bad in front of the board. A B2B job usually has both parts. "I need visibility" is the functional half. "So I can lead with confidence" is the emotional half, and that's often the half that gets someone to act.
A few ways to find the job if you don't already have it written down:
If you've done proper persona work, most of this is already sitting in that document. Use it. Once the job is clear, the right framework is usually pretty obvious.
Think of these as patterns, not formulas. You'll bend each one to fit your product and your buyer. The B2C versions are the ones you see every day, and that's the point: the principle is proven, and very few B2B companies are using it well.
Put two options side by side and show why one wins. Consumer brands do this constantly, sometimes naming the competitor outright.
In B2B SaaS, I'd skip the competitor. "Us vs. Monday" turns into a feature checklist nobody remembers. The stronger comparison is against the old way of doing things: spreadsheet chaos vs. one source of truth, guessing vs. knowing, busy vs. productive. Pick the one pain your buyer cares about most and own it. Make the problem side feel real, and don't hedge on the other side.
Show where the buyer is now, then where they'll be. Skincare brands live on this because nobody needs to read the copy to get it.
It works in SaaS too, with a catch. A lot of the before-and-after ads out there say the same thing (manual work vs. automated platform), so it's worth pushing for a fresher take. Make the before state frustrating, not just inconvenient, and keep the transformation believable.
One of our strategists shared a good example from a logistics software client. The best-performing creative was almost embarrassingly simple: an illustrated character buried in boxes on one side, the same character holding more money on the other, and a headline with one number about fuel cost savings. The emotional before plus a hard number in the after did better than the more creative concepts we tested.
Name the problem, make it sting, then offer relief. It's a cousin of pain-claim-gain, except you spend most of the ad on the pain before you show the fix.
B2C versions get dramatic fast. In B2B you have to be more careful, or it comes across as negative or manipulative. The trick is to agitate with numbers instead of drama. "You're losing time" is the problem. "That's this much revenue every quarter" is the agitation. Then show a path forward that feels proportionate, not a miracle. Use it when your buyer recognizes the problem instantly.
Compare your product to something from a different world so it makes sense instantly. "Our analytics tool is your flight deck. You don't fly blind."
The risk in B2B is time. Metaphors make people stop and think, and your buyer is scrolling between meetings. If it takes more than a second to get, it fails. Pull the metaphor from your buyer's world, not your industry's, and don't explain it. This one works especially well on video, because "think of it like..." is how people already talk.
Show that others already succeeded. Logos, expert validation, numbers, customer quotes. This is the one B2B is already pretty good at, and it's the easiest place to start because you probably have the material.
The lesson we keep relearning: simple wins. When we got experimental with creative for one client, some of the bolder ideas landed, but the consistent top performers were plain ads with a big, specific number at the top. Make the proof specific and recognizable. Generic praise does nothing.
A colleague brought up Clay here, and it's a good example. A few years ago they barely had a website. What they had was a lot of people publicly using the product and getting results, and that crowd effect did a lot of the selling for them.
Show the product solving one real problem in real time, so the buyer pictures themselves doing it. The B2C version is a waterproof shoe standing in a puddle.
In SaaS, this is where most teams overdo it with a full platform walkthrough. Don't. Pick one use case your buyer recognizes immediately, walk through three to five steps, and stop. The demo should answer one question: how would I use this in my day? A real person narrating their screen works better than a polished product tour.
Real customers explaining what changed for them. Peer voices beat brand voices every time.
For one client, the ad that drove the most qualified leads for a long stretch was a customer testimonial video with rough audio and low resolution. It worked because the customer spoke about the product with real conviction. Pick the best 20 seconds of a customer call and let them talk. A strong quote on a static ad works too.
User-generated content: someone talking to their phone camera about a product they use. It's everywhere in B2C and almost nowhere in B2B, which is exactly why it's worth trying.
Our CMO recorded one for a client that sells to sales teams, just himself talking through the platform on camera, and it held up well. He made an important point in the session: the person on camera should look and sound like your ICP. He fit an audience of younger SDRs. When one of our team tried the same format for a client selling to contractors, she quickly found that the face on screen has to match the buyer.
You probably noticed video showing up in almost every framework. That's on purpose. A person talking to camera works with all eight: narrating a comparison, describing their before and after, saying "think of it like...", walking through their screen.
And it doesn't need to be polished. Most of the talking-head ads that perform are rough. People care about the story, not the lighting. I could record 30 seconds on my phone with my laptop screen in the shot, and that could be a perfectly good ad.
Our CEO shared an ad from a construction software company during the session that shows this well. The founder, filmed on a job site, talks about growing up as the son of a contractor who worked his whole life while bigger companies had consultants and better tools. Then he says, basically, I built the tool so your family gets the benefit of your work. The pain is personal, the setting matches the buyer, and the story does the selling. Founder stories are some of the strongest ads in B2C, and B2B companies barely use them.
If you want to try this, a few things help:
At the end of the session someone asked the question I think most founders would ask: if I'm making my first ad tomorrow, what should I avoid?
Talking about yourself. The most common B2B ad says "we" and shows a random product screenshot. Flip it to "you." What does the buyer get, and what problem goes away?
Leading with features. "Our features are amazing" is the default. Nobody cares about the feature until they see the problem it solves for them.
Running ads without a next step. Decide what you want the viewer to do after the ad. Visit a page, download something, book a call. If it's just awareness, that's fine, but plan the follow-up around it.
Expecting one perfect ad. This one came up when a teammate asked how much luck is involved. Some of it, yes. The ad you're sure will win can end up your worst performer, and a quick one you almost didn't ship takes off. B2C brands test constantly for the same reason. The answer isn't to wait for luck. Commit to a steady volume, maybe a handful of new variations every couple of weeks, and use the frameworks to stack the odds. For most SaaS products the timing of a launch matters much less than showing up consistently.
If you're not sure where to begin, start with social proof, because you already have customer results to work with. Then run every ad, email, and landing page through problem-agitate-solve before it goes out. That lens alone fixes a lot of weak copy.
None of these frameworks are new. They've worked thousands of times in consumer marketing, and they'll keep working. Your job isn't to invent a new one. It's to know your buyer's job, pick the pattern that fits it, make it, and see what the data says.
That's also why ads alone rarely fix a stalled pipeline. A great creative still needs the right audience, a page that converts, and a sales team that follows up fast. If your growth still depends on founder-led deals and you're not sure which marketing moves come next, that's the bigger question to answer first.
It's what we dig into in our free growth workshop. We look at your current growth motion, find the gaps with the most upside, and leave you with a prioritized plan. Book a growth workshop.