Expanda is a B2B company that entered a new market without a warm audience. We launched lead generation from scratch, tested the offer, and created an analytics system. The result was 87 applications with a CPL of $15.37 in a complex B2B niche.
Expanda is a company that helps Ukrainian e-commerce businesses scale to the Polish market. The service is turnkey export: from preparation to operational support. But at the start, Expanda had neither a funnel nor experience launching paid advertising.
“We knew there was demand. But without a transparent customer acquisition system, we were stuck in place. We needed to find a funnel that worked, understand who was responding, and stop relying on random recommendations.” — Volodymyr Chorniy, founder of Expanda
Problem: Applications came in manually through acquaintances. No predictability, marketing data, or understanding of customer value.
According to McKinsey research, most B2B companies worldwide are transitioning to digital sales channels. However, this transition is happening more slowly in Eastern European countries due to limited experience, a focus on offline, and a lack of analytics.
📎 Source: Future of B2B Sales: The Big Reframe
This creates a barrier: even a strong product without a demand test cannot scale. Therefore, in such projects it is important to build a system of hypotheses, analytics, and feedback. That is exactly what we did.
In this project, we took on the task of launching lead generation from scratch: without a separately prepared landing page for advertising, without a customized pixel, without ready-made analytics.
1️⃣ Entrepreneurs with e-commerce businesses in Ukraine respond better to an offer with support, rather than just a consultation.
2️⃣ Interest in Shopify is a good trigger for export intent: users are looking for automation and expansion.
3️⃣ Creatives built on pain (fear of exporting, logistics, risks) work better than rational arguments.
4️⃣ Initial traffic should be directed to the website, not to a lead form, to warm up the user and test behavior.
We first analyzed user behavior, then optimized creatives, and only then gradually increased our budget. This consistent approach provided confidence in each subsequent step.
We conducted a Pain Mapping – a method of structuring barriers to decision-making, especially effective in B2B with a high check.
What we were looking for: fear of not knowing the Polish market, losing money, doubts about logistics. These were the points that formed the basis of the creatives.
📌 The Pain Mapping framework helps structure key audience fears: from functional to emotional. Suitable for high-value offers.
We built a matrix: audience — creative — offer. We set a minimum budget ($20 per day) for testing with rapid iterations.
We prepared creatives in three formats to close different audience triggers:
The combination allowed us to test hypotheses and find the most effective connections for a cold audience.
🔹 created an advertising account
🔹 connected Meta Pixel
🔹 configured basic data capture through tables for analyzing results
This allowed us to gather a complete picture of user behavior on the site, see what actions they take, and correctly assess the effectiveness of each stage of the funnel. Without this solution, we would not have been able to accurately understand what is working and what is not.
Launched 3 audiences, 3 creative formats.
Metrics: CTR, site view depth, interaction with the application form.
We tested not just ads, but the entire “audience – creative – offer” relationship. This approach allowed us to quickly identify which audience responds best and which creatives need optimization.
Every 2 days we reviewed campaign metrics: CTR, number of applications, cost per lead. Based on the accumulated data, we made optimization decisions.
During the testing phase, we also conducted additional experiments with display settings:
The results showed that completely disabling repeat impressions worsened performance: there were fewer applications, and their cost increased.
We concluded: in B2B audiences, the decision is not made on the first touch. People need to see the ad several times to mature into an application.
Returning to a strategy with limited repeated impressions (retargeting) gave a better result in both the number of applications and the cost of acquisition.
We identified working segments and creatives, and prepared recommendations for scaling.
“The most valuable thing was in the first month: we quickly understood which connections worked. Experiments gave us the answers.”
📌 Example: We focused on cost per click, CTR, and number of site interactions. If the metrics were below the benchmark, the test audience-creative relationship was optimized or disabled.
🔷 Number of leads: 87 applications received from the site in 6 weeks. These are the first system applications for the service, without which the product could not scale.
🔷 Average cost per lead (CPL): $15.37. For a B2B niche with a high check, this is 2–3 times lower than the average market indicator.
🔷 Best CTR: 3.1% — on creative focused on fears and risks of export. This is higher than the average rate for Meta Ads (1.5–2%).
🔷 Audience effectiveness: the best results were shown by the e-commerce segments 25–45 years old and the Shopify audience. In these groups, we received 70% of all applications.
🔷 Funnel and scaling: a funnel ready for scaling was built based on data — with customized analytics, segmentation, and ready-made creatives.
“We are no longer afraid of the budget. We understand what we will get in return.” — Volodymyr Chorniy
📎 According to Harvard Business Review, B2B companies that have built systemic marketing grow 1.6 times faster than those that rely on personal connections.
🔹 Conduct a pain analysis and segment your target audience
🔹 Formulate 3–5 hypotheses (audience + offer + delivery)
🔹 Start with $20–30/day — don’t pour the entire budget in at once
🔹 Use a website, not a lead form (at the start)
🔹 Set up analytics before launch
🔹 Iterate every 2–3 days
🔹 Document everything: this is the basis for scaling
B2B companies often face fears: how to test a product without risk, how not to blow the budget, and whether it is worth investing in advertising at all without guarantees of results.
Our experience with the Expanda project has shown: even without a history of previous advertising, you can build a working funnel, test demand, and get system applications at an adequate cost. The key to this is a systematic approach: analyzing audience pain points, properly testing hypotheses, and regularly optimizing based on data.
It is especially important to consider the behavior of the B2B audience: the decision to abandon the application is often made not from the first contact. We experimented with different display scenarios – and proved that repeated contacts with advertising have a critical impact on results. It was through retargeting and careful reminders that the cost of the application was significantly reduced.
Therefore, in B2B, it is important not only to launch advertising correctly, but also to work competently with the audience after the first touch: to give the solution time to warm up and mature.
If you need to not just “launch advertising,” but build a predictive customer acquisition model with clear analytics and controlled costs, we are ready to help.
Олександр Христич | Who is Alex?
