Get your free personalized podcast brief

We scan new podcasts and send you the top 5 insights daily.

Lemlist used paid ads to enter the German market and quickly learned their standard messaging failed due to cultural differences around cold emailing. This allowed them to pivot their positioning, proving ads are a powerful tool for fast market validation and de-risking expansion.

Related Insights

Stop spending money to test ads. Instead, publish a high volume of organic social content and identify what naturally gains traction. Then, convert only those proven, high-performing pieces into paid ads. This model dramatically lowers customer acquisition costs by ensuring ad spend only scales winners.

Before finalizing an offer, create and promote two distinct lead magnets. The one that outperforms reveals your audience's true pain point and can pivot your entire business strategy. This approach transforms a list-building tactic into a powerful market research tool for finding product-market fit.

Lemlist outsourced the technical execution of paid ads (bidding, platform specifics) to a freelancer. This de-risked hiring for a new channel and allowed the in-house team to focus on high-impact work like positioning, messaging, and linking campaigns to major GTM moments.

Instead of concentrating its sales force in one region, Deel hired individual salespeople in various countries early in its journey. This counterintuitive move, often criticized as defocusing, allowed the company to quickly test and understand multiple markets in parallel. This strategy was key to rapidly ramping up a global go-to-market motion with localized insights.

Don't guess which ads will work. Post content organically and let the platform's algorithm validate it. When a post gets unusually high engagement, you've found a winner. Turn that specific post into a targeted paid ad to de-risk your ad spend.

A founder who found success in a niche market was advised to run low-cost digital ad tests for other potential use cases (e.g., luxury, pet care) in his home market. This data on customer acquisition costs can validate an expansion strategy before investing heavily in US logistics.

To get statistically significant feedback from a paid ad campaign, you must be willing to spend at least twice your target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) just on the test. Spending less provides an insufficient feedback cadence, making it impossible to know if the campaign can become efficient.

When a launch underperforms, the issue is often not the offer or the audience, but stale messaging. Marketers frequently assume they know their customer, but audiences evolve. Continuously refreshing customer understanding is critical for launch success.

Lemlist scaled from $0 to $500K in paid ads to rapidly target mid-market sales teams, a new audience. The goal was speed and control in capturing existing demand and shifting their customer profile, rather than just generating leads from their existing market.

Running paid ads for a new newsletter is a mistake. First, prove you can convert an existing organic audience (e.g., from social media). If your core followers won't subscribe, there's a content or messaging mismatch. Paid ads will only waste money by scaling a message that doesn't resonate.