Solved: Social Media Ads - Sales Campaigns for Retargeting Only?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some initial thoughts on your question about 1-step vs 2-step campaigns on Facebook. It's a common query, and tbh the way most people think about it is fundamentally flawed and leads to a lot of wasted ad spend. Let's get into it.

You'll need to forget the 'awareness campaign' myth...

Right, let's get straight to the point. The whole idea of a "2-step" campaign, where you start with an awareness or video views objective and then retarget, is one of the biggest money pits in paid advertising. I see it all the time in accounts I audit, and it's almost always a disaster. It sounds logical on the surface – warm people up, then sell to them. The reality is very different.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about those objectives. When you tell the Meta algorithm your goal is "Brand Awareness" or "Reach," you are giving it a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price." The algorithm, being the efficient machine it is, does exactly what you asked. It goes out and finds the users inside your targeting who are least likely to click, least likely to engage, and absolutely, positively least likely to ever pull out a credit card. Why? Because those users are not in demand. Their attention is cheap. You are actively paying the world's most powerful advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your product.

You end up with huge impression numbers and maybe a decent video view count, which feels good for the ego, but it's a vanity metric. The audience you've "warmed up" is composed of people who passively consume content but rarely, if ever, take action. Retargeting them with a sales campaign is like trying to sell steak to a group of people you've specifically gathered because they're vegetarians. It's an uphill battle from the start and a complete mis-use of your budget.

The best form of brand awareness, especially for a small or growing business, is a competitor's customer switching to your product and raving about it online. That only happens through conversion. Awareness is a byproduct of having a great product that solves a real problem, not a prerequisite for making a sale. So, that leaves us with your "1-step" approach, but we need to make it much, much smarter.

I'd say you need to define your customer by their nightmare...

So, if we're binning the awareness campaign idea, your "1-step" cold sales campaign has to be incredibly sharp. The number one reason these fail is because the targeting is rubbish. And the reason the targeting is rubbish is because the understanding of the customer is too shallow.

Forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire made. "Women aged 25-40 who like yoga and live in London" tells you almost nothing of value. It leads to generic ads that speak to no one. To stop burning cash, you must define your customer by their pain. Their specific, urgent, expensive nightmare.

Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. For an e-commerce brand selling ergonomic office chairs, the ICP isn't "remote workers." It's "the remote worker who just got off a call with their physio about their nagging back pain, terrified they won't be able to work effectively much longer." For a B2B SaaS selling accounting software, the nightmare isn't 'needing to do bookkeeping'; it's 'the founder staring at a spreadsheet at 2 AM, petrified they've miscalculated their runway and might miss payroll next month.' That's the emotional core you need to find.

Once you've isolated that nightmare, you can find them. Where do these people hang out online? What podcasts do they listen to on their commute? What industry newsletters do they *actually* open? What software or tools do they already pay for? Are they members of specific Facebook groups? Do they follow certain influencers? This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. You have to do this work first, or you have no business spending a single pound on ads. It's the difference between shouting into a crowded stadium and whispering a solution into the ear of someone who is desperate to hear it.

We'll need to build a real funnel, not a fake one...

Your question was about a 1-step vs a 2-step campaign. What you actually need is a proper funnel structure, but one where every single step is optimised for a meaningful business outcome, like a sale or a lead. Not "views".

This means your entire account structure should be built around conversion objectives. We seperate campaigns not by objective (awareness vs sales), but by temperature of the audience (cold, warm, hot). But every single campaign's goal is the same: drive conversions.

Here's how I'd usually prioritise audiences for a client, assuming it's an eCommerce store. You can adapt this logic for pretty much any buisness.

You see the difference? We are never, ever running a campaign just for "awareness." Every penny is spent trying to get a conversion. The "retargeting" part of your 2-step idea is still here, but we're retargeting people who showed some level of intent from a campaign that was *already trying to sell to them*. Not people who just passively watched a video because the algorithm flagged them as non-buyers.

For a new account, you start with ToFu. You test detailed targeting audiences based on your ICP research. I usually group them into themes. For instance, if you're targeting owners of eCommerce stores, targeting a broad interest like "Amazon" is a terrible idea. It's full of consumers. Instead, you'd target interests in retail page admins, pages of eCommerce software like Shopify, retail-related job titles etc. Once you get enough data (at least 100 conversions, but ideally more), you can start building your MoFu and BoFu campaigns and also create powerful lookalike audiences from your best customers to feed back into your ToFu campaign.

You probably should focus on a message they can't ignore...

A cold, conversion-focused campaign lives or dies on its creative and copy. You can't just show a product picture and a price. You have to grab them by the collar and speak directly to the nightmare you identified earlier.

We often use a framework like Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You dont just sell a product; you sell a solution to a deep frustration. For a service business selling financial advice, your ad would say something like:

Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

For a SaaS product or even an eCommerce product, you can use Before-After-Bridge. You sell the feeling of relief. Imagine an ad for a high-quality mattress:

Before: "Another morning, another snooze button battle. You roll out of bed with an aching back, dreading the day before it's even started."
After: "Imagine waking up feeling refreshed, energised, and without a single ache. You leap out of bed, ready to conquer your day."
Bridge: "Our mattress is the bridge that gets you there. Engineered for perfect spinal alignment, it turns restless nights into restorative sleep. Try it risk-free for 100 nights."

This kind of direct, emotional, problem-focused copy is what makes a cold audience stop scrolling and actually consider what you're offering. It's what makes the "1-step" approach work.

You'll need an offer that actually converts...

Now we arrive at the final, and perhaps most important, piece of the puzzle: the offer. The number one reason why campaigns fail is a weak offer. An offer that's not providing enough value or, worse, asks for too much commitment too soon.

In the B2B world, the classic "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant Call to Action ever conceived. It presumes a busy decision maker has nothing better to do than book a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction and low-value. In eCommerce, the equivalent is just showing your products at full price with no incentive and expecting people to buy from a brand they've never heard of.

Your offer’s only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value and make it an absolute no-brainer for the prospect to take the next step. You must solve a small, real problem for free (or for a very low cost) to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

For SaaS, this is a free trial (no card details). For a course, it might be a free module or a detailed webinar. For an agency, it's a free audit or a strategy session – like the one we do for potential clients where we review their failing ad accounts. For an eCommerce store, this could be:
-> A compelling introductory offer (e.g., 20% off your first order).
-> A bundle deal that provides overwhelming value.
-> A free gift with purchase.
-> A risk-free guarantee (e.g., "Love it or your money back").

This is what makes people who have never heard of you before take a chance. Without a strong offer, even the best targeting and copy will fall flat. And it's another reason why "awareness" campaigns are so pointless – they typically have no offer at all.

So what results should you expect?

This is always a tricky question, because "it depends." It depends on your industry, your prices, your offer, and the countries you're targeting. But I can give you some ballpark figures from our experience so you're not flying blind. I remember one client selling courses, they were able to generate $115k in revenue in about 6 weeks using this exact conversion-first strategy. Another B2B software client got their Cost Per Registration down to $2.38. These results don't come from awarness campaigns.

Here’s a rough idea of what costs can look like for conversion campaigns in developed countries like the UK or US.

As you can see, the costs can vary wildly. The goal of all the stuff we've talked about – ICP, copy, offer, funnel structure – is to push your metrics towards the left side of that table. Better targeting and copy lowers your CPC. A better offer and website experience increases your conversion rate. Together, they dramatically lower your Cost Per Aquisition.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

To wrap this up, the choice isn't really between a "1-step" and a "2-step" campaign. The choice is between a flawed, money-wasting strategy and a professional, conversion-focused one. Here's the plan I'd reccomend.

As you can probably tell, it's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best. It's a proper system. It's about deeply understanding your audience, structuring your campaigns intelligently, creating compelling ads, and fine-tuning your landing page and offer. It's a lot to get right, and getting any one part wrong can cause the whole thing to fail.

That's where professional help can make a huge difference. With years of experience and a deep understanding of this landscape, we can help you implement this entire process, avoid the common pitfalls, and ensure that every pound you spend is working as hard as possible to grow your business.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a proper look at your ads and strategy. It might be a good next step.

Hope that helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh