Solved: Stop Awareness Campaigns, Start Conversion Ones

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your campaigns. I had a look at the screenshot you sent over, and it's a common situation I see a lot.

You've asked if you've done the right job, and my honest answer is that you've probably been asking the wrong question of the advertising platform. You're focusing on 'awareness' and 'engagement', but these are often just vanity metrics that don't translate into actual business growth. You're right to question the results, because they likely feel a bit hollow.

The good news is there's a much more effective way to approach this. We need to shift your entire strategy away from chasing cheap eyeballs and towards acquiring actual customers, and it all starts by telling the ad platforms what you really want. Let's get into it.

We'll need to look at the 'Awareness' trap you've fallen into...

Right, let's be brutally honest. Running 'Awareness', 'Reach', or 'Engagement' campaigns is, for 99% of businesses, like setting a pile of money on fire. I know the platforms push these objectives, but you have to understand what you're actually telling the algorithm to do.

When you select 'Brand Awareness' as your goal, you give the algorithm a very simple command: "Find me the largest number of people, inside my targeting, for the absolute lowest price."

The algorithm, being a ruthlessly efficient machine, does exactly what you've asked. It scours its user base and identifies the people whose attention is the cheapest. And who are these people? They are the ones who endlessly scroll, never click, rarely engage meaningfully, and almost certainly never, ever pull out a credit card to buy something. They are not in demand by other advertisers, so their eyeball-time is sold at a discount. You have quite literally paid the world's most powerful advertising machine to build you a custom audience of non-customers.

The same goes for 'Page Likes'. A page like is a worthless vanity metric. It has almost no correlation with someone becoming a paying customer. Many of these likes come from click farms or disengaged users who will never see your organic posts anyway, thanks to dismal reach. You're building a rented audience on a platform you don't control, and the currency you're using (likes) is worthless.

The best form of brand awareness isn't getting your logo seen by a million indifferent people. The best form of awareness is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it to their network. That only happens through one thing: a conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. You need to compleetly reframe your thinking here.

I'd say you should stop chasing likes and start chasing customers...

So, what's the alternative? It's simple. You need to change your campaign objective to 'Conversions' (or 'Leads', 'Sales' depending on the platform). This is the single most important change you will make.

When you tell the algorithm you want conversions, its entire mission changes. It's no longer looking for the cheapest people; it's looking for the people who look and act like your existing customers. It analyses trillions of data points—what people have bought, what websites they've visited, what forms they've filled out—to find users who are exhibiting buying behaviour *right now*. You are now aligning your goal with the platform's financial incentive. The platform makes more money when advertisers get results and keep spending, so it's highly motivated to find you people who will actually convert.

This is how we see such dramatic results for our clients. I remember one campaign for a medical job matching SaaS company where we took their Cost Per User Acquisition from £100 all the way down to just £7. We didn't do it with awareness campaigns. We did it by optimising for conversions, creating a compelling offer, and letting the algorithm do the heavy lifting of finding qualified candidates.

To do this properly, you need to think about your marketing in terms of a funnel. This isn't just jargon; it's a practical way to structure your campaigns and messaging.

You run separate campaigns targeting each part of this funnel. Your 'Top of Funnel' (ToFu) campaign will target cold audiences, people who don't know you exist, using detailed targeting or lookalike audiences. Your 'Middle of Funnel' (MoFu) will retarget people who visited your website or watched a video. Your 'Bottom of Funnel' (BoFu) will target people who added a product to their cart but didn't buy. All of them, however, will be optimised for the final conversion. This structure gives you clarity and control, allowing you to tailor your message to how familiar someone is with your brand.

You probably should define your customer by their nightmare, not their postcode...

Running conversion campaigns is pointless if you're targeting the wrong people. And this is where most businesses get it completely wrong. They create a sterile, demographic-based "Ideal Customer Profile" that looks something like this: "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees, located in London."

That tells you absolutely nothing of value. It leads to generic, boring ads that speak to no one because they try to speak to everyone. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. Not just any pain, but their specific, urgent, expensive, and potentially career-threatening nightmare.

Your Head of Sales client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of missing her quarterly target and having to explain it to the board. Your Head of Engineering isn't just a tech guy; he's constantly stressed that his best developers will quit out of frustration with a broken, inefficient workflow. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. It's a moment of acute professional pain.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, your entire strategy becomes clear. You find the niche podcasts they listen to on their commute. The industry newsletters they actually open. The SaaS tools they already pay for. The influencers they follow. This intelligence is the blueprint for your targeting. It allows you to get hyper-specific. For one B2B software client, we targeted decision-makers on LinkedIn. The result was a Cost Per Lead of just $22 for highly qualified B2B decision-makers—a platform where leads can easily cost hundreds of dollars.

You need to do this work first. Before you spend another pound on ads, sit down and map out the nightmare. What keeps your ideal customer awake at 3 AM? If you can't answer that, you have no business advertising to them.

You'll need to understand the only numbers that matter...

Okay, so you've switched to conversion campaigns and you're targeting the right people based on their pain. The next question is, how much should you be paying for a lead or a sale? Most people try to get their Cost Per Lead (CPL) as low as possible. This is a trap. It leads you to optimise for cheap, low-quality leads that never turn into customers.

The real question isn't "How low can my CPL go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer lies in its counterpart: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

You absolutely must know this number. Without it, you're flying blind. Let's break it down simply:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's the average amount a customer pays you per month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after deducting the cost of goods sold?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The calculation is straightforward:

LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let's use an example. Say your ARPA is £500, your gross margin is 80%, and your monthly churn is 4%.

LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04

LTV = £400 / 0.04 = £10,000

In this scenario, each customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. This number changes everything. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. This means for a £10,000 LTV, you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer and still have a very profitable business. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 for each one of those qualified leads.

Suddenly, that £50 lead from Facebook or that £250 lead from LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like a bargain. This is the maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent scaling. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and allows you to focus on acquiring high-value customers. Use the calculator below to get a feel for your own numbers.

You probably should delete the "Learn More" button...

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of online advertising: the offer. You can have the best targeting and the most compelling ad in the world, but if it leads to a weak offer, you've wasted your money.

The "Learn More" button, which typically leads to a generic homepage, is a conversion killer. So is the "Request a Demo" button, perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commoditised vendor begging for their time.

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. It has to solve a small, real problem for them, for free, right now.

If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial (no card details required) or a freemium plan. Let them use the actual product. Let them feel the transformation. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality. One software campaign we worked on generated over 5,082 trials from Meta ads alone. The offer was simply: "Try it for free". No friction.

If you're not a SaaS company, you are not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool, content, or an asset that provides instant value.

• For a marketing agency: A free, automated SEO audit that shows their top 3 keyword opportunities.
• For a data analytics platform: A free 'Data Health Check' that flags the top issues in their database.
• For a corporate training company: A free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations'.

For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, it's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free of charge. We solve a real problem (wasted ad spend) and demonstrate our expertise. You must give value to get value. You must solve a small problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

So, to bring this all together, you need to move from a vague, awareness-based approach to a sharp, conversion-focused strategy. It requires more thought up-front, but the results are incomparably better. Here is a table outlining the strategic shift I'm recommending. This is the exact framework we use to scale our clients' businesses.

I know this is a lot to take in, and it represents a fundemental shift from what you've been doing. It's the difference between treating advertising as an expense and treating it as a predictable, scalable engine for growth. This is what we specialise in. It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best; it's about building an entire customer acquisition system, from defining the audience to crafting the offer and optimising the maths behind it.

Implementing this framework takes expertise and constant attention. You need to be testing new audiences, writing new ad copy, and analysing the data to make intelligent decisions. Many business owners simply don't have the time or the deep platform knowledge to do this effectively, which is why they often turn to expert help.

If you'd like to go over how this strategy could be specifically applied to your business, I'd be happy to offer you a free, no-obligation 20-minute consultation. We can look at your current setup in more detail and map out a clear, actionable plan to start getting you the results you're looking for.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh