Taskflow Cut Their Cost Per Click by 60%, Without Touching Targeting or Budget

The challenge

Taskflow helps operations and engineering teams at mid-market B2B companies manage complex cross-functional projects. Their Head of Growth, Marcus Webb, had built a reliable paid acquisition channel on Meta and LinkedIn, but by Q3, performance had deteriorated badly. Cost per click had risen 80% over 6 months. ROAS had dropped to 1.1×, essentially break-even on paid spend.

The targeting had not changed. The offer had not changed. The landing page had not changed. Marcus had optimised every variable he could, bid strategies, audience segmentation, placement exclusions. Nothing moved the numbers. The root cause was the one thing he had not changed: the creative.

Taskflow had been running the same 3 video ads since their paid programme launched. Their target audience, ops leaders and engineering managers at companies with 200–1,000 employees, had seen the same hook, the same opening line, the same thumbnail, dozens of times. Frequency on cold audiences was above 4.2. The creative was dead.

Marcus's internal marketing team was two people, neither with video production capacity. They needed an external partner who could operate fast and sustain a creative refresh cadence long-term, not a one-time production house.

What we did

We started with a 90-minute onboarding call with Marcus and Taskflow's Head of Product. Our brief was to understand the buyer problem at a granular level, the specific workflow frustrations that operations teams experience before they start evaluating tools like Taskflow. We also reviewed 12 months of their sales call recordings to identify the language buyers used to describe their problems.

The core issue with their existing ads: all three opened with product-first hooks. The first 5 seconds were about Taskflow, its features, its interface, its capabilities. B2B buyers do not respond to that in paid environments. They respond to problem recognition. We rebuilt every ad around 4 specific buyer pain points Marcus's sales team heard consistently: project visibility gaps, cross-team accountability failures, status update overhead, and missed deadline patterns.

We produced 12 new video ads in the first 4 weeks, 3 ads per pain point, each with a different hook variation. Every ad was produced in two formats: square (1:1) for feed placements and vertical (9:16) for Reels and Stories. Thumbnails were A/B tested. Scripts were written to hold attention past the 3-second and 10-second drop-off points.

We established a bi-weekly review cadence with Marcus: every two weeks, we pulled performance data, identified the bottom two performing ads by CPL, and replaced them with fresh variations. The creative library stayed permanently fresh, no single ad ran long enough to fatigue.

The results

By week 3 after launching the new creative library, cost per click had dropped 40% from baseline. By week 6, it was down 60%, their lowest CPC in 18 months of running paid. Return on ad spend went from 1.1× to 3×, the best paid performance Taskflow had ever recorded.

The hook rate on the new ads (percentage of viewers watching past 3 seconds) averaged 38%, nearly double the 20% benchmark for B2B paid video. CPL came down proportionally. Marcus was able to increase paid budget by 40% on the back of the improved unit economics, scaling the channel without performance degrading.

More importantly, the system is sustainable. The bi-weekly creative refresh means ad fatigue no longer accumulates. Taskflow's paid channel is predictable, a reliable acquisition machine rather than a quarterly performance crisis.