Solved: Brand Awareness on Social Media Without Big Budget

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on this. It's a common question, and honestly, most of the advice out there about 'brand awareness' is a load of rubbish, especially when you're just starting out and don't have a massive budget to play with. I'll walk you through a different way of thinking about it that'll actually get you results instead of just 'views'.

Why Chasing 'Brand Awareness' is a Surefire Way to Burn Your Cash...

Right, let's get this out of the way first because it's the biggest mistake I see people make. You said you want to grow 'brand awareness' on social media without spending much money. The hard truth is, that's like trying to boil the ocean with a tea candle. It’s not going to happen, and you'll just waste what little budget you have.

Here’s the dirty secret of ad platforms like Meta (Facebook/Instagram). When you create a campaign and choose an objective like "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving their algorithm a very specific, and very unhelpful, instruction: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."

The algorithm, which is brilliant at following orders, does exactly that. It scours the billions of users and finds the ones whose attention is cheapest. And why is their attention cheap? Because they are the least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card and buy something. They're the digital equivalent of window shoppers who never go inside. You are literally paying the world's most sophisticated advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product. It’s a mugs game, designed to make you feel good about big 'reach' numbers while your bank account quietly empties.

I remember one campaign we worked on for a luxury brand launch. They'd spent a fortune on these glossy 'awareness' campaigns and got loads of views but hardly any sales. It was only when we switched their entire strategy to focus purely on conversion objectives that things took off. We ended up getting them over 10 million views that actually led to sales, not just empty impressions. The awareness came as a result of making sales, not the other way around.

So, What Should You Do Instead? Get Customers...

The best, most powerful, and most cost-effective brand awareness you can possibly get is a happy customer telling their friends about you. It's a competitor's client switching to your service and raving about it on LinkedIn. It's a positive review, a case study, a referral. All of this starts with one thing: making a sale.

Your goal isn't to be 'known'. Your goal is to be 'chosen'. And to be chosen, you need to stop thinking like a marketer and start thinking like a problem solver. Your entire focus, especially with a small budget, should be on performance marketing—actions that lead directly to a measurable result, like a lead or a sale. Awareness is the happy side effect, the ripple in the pond after you've made the splash of a sale. So, how do we do that? It starts with getting brutally specific about who you're selling to.

First things first: Your Ideal Customer isn't a Demographic, it's a Nightmare...

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" or "Women aged 25-40 who like yoga" tells you absolutly nothing of value. It's lazy, and it leads to generic ads that speak to no one and get ignored by everyone.

To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. You need to become an obsessive expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, and maybe even career-threatening nightmare. Your customer isn't a job title; they are a person stuck in a problem state.

• A Head of Engineering isn't just a 'tech leader'; she's a manager terrified of her best developers quitting out of sheer frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow.
• A law firm partner isn't just 'looking for document management'; he's having sleepless nights about a junior associate missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a multi-million-pound malpractice suit.
• A founder of an eCommerce store isn't just 'interested in marketing'; she's staring at a rising ad spend and flatlining revenue, wondering if she'll have to lay off staff next month.

See the difference? One is a bland description. The other is a story filled with emotion, risk, and urgency. When you understand the nightmare, you can craft a message that feels like a life raft in a storm. Your entire targeting strategy flows from this. Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find out where these people congregate online. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute? What industry newsletters do they actually open and read? What software tools do they already pay for? Are they members of specific Facebook groups or subreddits? Who do they follow on Twitter/X?

This intelligence isn't just data; it's the blueprint for your entire strategy. Do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. It's the difference between shouting into a void and whispering a solution directly into the ear of someone who desperately needs it.

Next up, you'll need to build an offer they can't ignore...

Now we get to the most common failure point in all of advertising: the offer. An amazing ad that points to a weak offer is like a brilliant film trailer for a terrible movie. People will be interested, click, and then leave disappointed. You'll pay for the click, but get nothing in return.

The single most arrogant and ineffective Call to Action ever conceived is "Request a Demo". Think about it. You're asking a busy, important person to book a slot in their calendar to be sold to by a stranger. It's high-friction, low-value, and immediately positions you as just another commodity vendor begging for their time. You need to delete that button from your brain.

Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing for money.

What does this look like in practice?

• For a SaaS product: This is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (no credit card) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation from their current painful process to your smooth, automated one. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality.
• For a service business/agency: You are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or asset that provides instant value. For us, as a paid ads consultancy, it’s a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a company's failing ad campaigns and give them actionable advice. For a marketing agency, it could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations'.

Your message needs to speak directly to the nightmare you identified earlier. You can use proven copywriting formulas for this:

Problem-Agitate-Solve (for services): You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep. Your ad would say, "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

Before-After-Bridge (for software): You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief. Your ad would say, "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out. Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated. Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

The offer is everything. A brilliant offer targeted at the right person's pain point will work even with average ad creative. A weak offer will fail even with the most beautiful ads in the world.

Now for the numbers: How to know what a customer is actually worth...

This is where most people get scared, but it's simple maths, and it's the key to unlocking aggressive, intelligent growth. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a Cost Per Lead can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

LTV tells you the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire duration of your relationship. Once you know this number, you know how much you can spend to get that customer and still be very profitable. Let's break it down.

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What do you make per customer, per month/year?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month? (Customers Lost / Total Customers).

The calculation is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's take an example. Say you run a SaaS business:

• ARPA = £200/month
• Gross Margin = 80% (0.8)
• Monthly Churn = 5% (0.05)

LTV = (£200 * 0.80) / 0.05 = £160 / 0.05 = £3,200

In this example, each customer is worth £3,200 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. A healthy business model aims for at least a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,200 / 3 = £1,066 to acquire a single customer.

Suddenly, that £50 lead from LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to confidently invest in acquiring high-value customers. Use the calculator below to figure out your own numbers.

Okay, how do you actually find these people without a massive budget?...

Now that you know who you're targeting, what you're offering them, and what they're worth to you, we can finally talk about running some ads. With a limited budget, you need to be incredibly efficient. This means fishing in a well-stocked pond, not the entire ocean.

Your strategy will depend on whether your customers are actively searching for a solution or not.

1. They ARE actively searching (High-Intent):
This is the best place to start. These people have a problem, they know it, and they're looking for a fix right now. Your job is to show up as the best option. The platform for this is Google Ads (Search).

• Strategy: You don't target broad keywords like "marketing". You target keywords that express specific user intent. For example, if you sell an outreach tool, you target "software for lead generation" or "contact info finding tool". These people are "pre-qualified" by their own search query. They are in a buying mindset.
• Why it's good for low budgets: While clicks can be expensive, they are incredibly high quality. You pay to get in front of people who are already raising their hand for help. One conversion from a high-intent search can be worth more than 100 from a passive social media scroller. For one client, a medical job matching SaaS platform, we saw this in action. They came to us with a cost per user acquisition of £100. By focusing their budget on high-intent keywords on Google Ads and optimising their Meta Ads, we reduced that cost down to just £7.

2. They are NOT actively searching (Problem-Aware):
These people have the problem you solve, but they aren't actively looking for a solution yet. Maybe they don't know a solution exists, or it's not a top priority. Your job is to interrupt them, educate them, and show them a better way. The platform for this is Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram) or LinkedIn Ads for B2B.

• Strategy: Here you use the pain-based ICP you developed. You target interests, behaviours, and job titles that are highly correlated with the problem. For that outreach tool example, on LinkedIn you'd target 'Head of Sales' at specific companies. On Meta, you might target people who are 'business page admins' and also have an interest in 'Salesforce' or 'HubSpot'. Your ad then calls out their specific pain point ("Tired of your sales team wasting hours on manual prospecting?") and presents your low-friction offer.
• The Funnel: With a low budget, you can't afford a complex multi-stage funnel. But you can prioritise. My advice is to always start with retargeting. This means showing ads to people who have already visited your website. They are your warmest audience. Then, you can test 'lookalike' audiences based on your existing customers or website visitors. Only then would I move to broader interest-based targeting. This ensures you spend your first pounds on the people most likely to convert.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

This might all seem like a lot, but it's a logical process. It's about being strategic and disciplined instead of just 'doing marketing'. This is the main advice I have for you, laid out as a simple process to follow.

This framework is about doing less, but doing it better. It's about being focused, strategic, and ruthless with your time and money. It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's about building a system where you understand your audience deeply, create compelling offers, and optimise your campaigns based on real data.

That's where professional help can make a huge difference. With years of experience and a deep understanding of the advertising landscape, an expert can help you identify the best strategies and avoid costly mistakes. We can provide insights you might not have thought of and take over the implementation of the entire process for you, ensuring that every pound you spend is working to grow your business.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can look at what you're doing and give you some tailored advice. It's a great way to get some clarity and a clear path forward.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh