TLDR;
- Stop thinking about "brand awareness." It's a trap that makes you pay to reach people who will never buy from you. True awareness is a byproduct of making sales to the right people.
- Your campaign objective should almost always be set to a conversion goal (leads, sales, trials), not 'Reach' or 'Awareness'. This forces the ad platforms to find users who actually take action.
- Define your ideal customer by their urgent, expensive pain point (their "nightmare"), not by their age, gender, or location. This is the only way to create ads that resonate.
- Your offer is everything. Ditch the high-friction "Request a Demo" and create something that provides immediate value for free, like an automated tool, a high-value resource, or a free trial.
- This letter includes an interactive LTV (Lifetime Value) Calculator to help you understand how much you can truly afford to spend to acquire a customer, freeing you from chasing cheap, low-quality leads.
Hi there,
Thanks for reaching out! Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and guidance on your situation.
You’re asking about the most effective top-of-funnel strategies in the UK to build brand awareness. It's a common question, but honestly, I think it’s the wrong one to be asking. Chasing "brand awareness" as a primary goal is one of the fastest ways for a business to burn through its advertising budget with very little to show for it. I'm going to suggest a completely different way of looking at the problem, one that focuses on attracting actual customers from day one.
We'll need to look at what 'Top of Funnel' really means...
Most people think 'Top of Funnel' or ToFu means casting the widest net possible to make as many people as possible aware of their brand. They set up campaigns on Facebook or Google with the objective set to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," hoping that if enough people see their name, some will eventually trickle down and become customers. This is a fundamental, and costly, mistake.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: when you tell an ad platform like Meta to optimise for "Awareness," you are giving it a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of eyeballs for the lowest possible price." The algorithm is brilliant at this. It goes out and finds all the users within your target demographic who are the least likely to click, the least likely to engage, and definitely the least likely to ever buy anything. Why? Because their attention is cheap. Nobody else is bidding for them. You are actively paying the world's most sophisticated advertising machine to find you the worst possible audience for your business.
Real, valuable brand awareness doesn't come from blanketing the internet with your logo. It comes from a competitor's customer switching to your product and telling their friends about it. It comes from solving a real problem so effectively that people talk about you. Awareness is a byproduct of a great product and effective, conversion-focused marketing, not a prerequisite for it. From our experience running campaigns for everything from SaaS to eCommerce, the campaigns that generate the most profit are always, without exception, optimised for a conversion event like a lead, a trial, or a purchase. I remember one campaign for a software client where we generated 5,082 trials at just $7 a pop on Meta Ads—we did that by completely ignoring 'awareness' and focusing only on getting people to sign up.
I'd say you need to define your customer by their nightmare, not their postcode...
So if we're not just spraying ads at everyone, who do we target? This is the next place most businesses go wrong. They create a generic Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) that looks something like "Managers, aged 30-50, living in London, interested in business." This is utterly useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to bland, generic ads that get ignored.
To stop wasting money, you have to define your customer by their pain. Their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.
For example, if you sell a project management tool, your ICP isn't "a project manager." It's a Head of Engineering who lies awake at 3 AM terrified that her best developers are about to quit because they're so frustrated with the company's chaotic workflow. She's not browsing Facebook looking for "project tools." She's desperate for a solution to her retention problem.
Once you've identified that nightmare, your job is to find out where that person looks for solutions. What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute? What industry newsletters do they actually read? What software tools do they already pay for? This intelligence is the blueprint for your targeting. Targeting people who like "HubSpot" or are members of specific SaaS-focused groups on Facebook is infinitely more powerful than targeting people who like "business." You must do this work first.
The Wrong Way: Demographic Targeting
Managers, 30-50, UK
"Business" or "Technology"
"The Best Project Management Tool"
The Right Way: Pain-Point Targeting
Losing top engineers due to chaotic workflows
Listeners of 'Acquired' podcast, users of GitHub
"Stop losing your best devs to workflow chaos."
You probably should fix your offer before you spend a penny...
Even with perfect, pain-point targeting, your campaigns will fail if your offer is weak. And the most common point of failure I see in B2B advertising is the offer itself. The "Request a Demo" button is quite possibly the most arrogant, high-friction Call to Action ever invented. It assumes your prospect, a busy decision-maker, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It instantly positions you as a commoditised vendor and kills any momentum you might have built.
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 must solve a small piece of their problem for free to earn you the right to solve the whole thing later.
What does a good offer look like?
- For a SaaS business: The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan (no credit card required). Let them use the actual product. Let them experience the transformation. When the product proves its own value, the sale becomes a formality.
- For a service business: You must bottle your expertise into a tool or asset. For a marketing agency, it could be a free, automated website audit. For a data analytics firm, a free 'Data Health Check' that finds the top 3 issues in their database. For a consultancy like ours, it's a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a prospect's failing ad campaigns and give them actionable advice.
Your ad copy needs to reflect this value-first approach. Instead of selling a feature, you sell the transformation. Use a framework like Problem-Agitate-Solve. "Are your cash flow projections just a guess? (Problem) Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis? (Agitate) Get expert financial strategy that turns uncertainty into predictable growth. (Solve)". This is how you get the right people to click.
You'll need to know your numbers to scale properly...
So, you’ve defined the nightmare, you've created a high-value offer, and you're running conversion-focused campaigns. The leads are coming in. But how do you know if it's working? How much should you be paying for a lead? The real question isn’t "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?"
The answer lies in calculating your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This single metric is the key that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth and frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads. Most businesses have no idea what their LTV is, so they operate in the dark, scared to spend what's necessary to acquire the best customers.
Here’s the basic maths:
LTV = (Average Revenue Per Account Per Month * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate
Let's use an example. Say you have a subscription business where the average customer pays you £500/month (ARPA), your gross margin is 80%, and you lose 4% of your customers each month (churn).
LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04
LTV = £10,000
This means every new customer is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. A healthy LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio is typically 3:1. This means you can afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single customer and still run 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 per qualified lead.
Suddenly, that £250 lead from a LinkedIn campaign targeting a CTO doesn't seem expensive anymore, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the maths that separates businesses that stagnate from those that scale.
This is the main advice I have for you:
Putting it all together, the path forward becomes much clearer. It's not about finding a magic "top of funnel" strategy. It's about building a systematic, customer-focused acquisition engine. A lot of our work with new clients involves undoing the damage caused by chasing awareness and rebuilding their advertising from the ground up based on these principles. I've detailed my main recommendations for you in the table below which summarises the approach.
| Area of Focus | The Common (Costly) Mistake | Our Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|
| Campaign Objective | Using "Brand Awareness" or "Reach" objectives, paying to reach non-buyers. | Always use a Conversion objective (e.g., Leads, Trials, Sales). Force the algorithm to find people who take action. |
| Audience Targeting | Using broad demographics (age, gender, location) that lead to generic ads. | Define your customer by their specific, urgent "nightmare" and target them in the niche channels they use to find solutions. |
| The Offer | A high-friction "Request a Demo" or "Contact Us" that provides no immediate value. | Create a high-value, low-friction offer: a free trial, a freemium plan, an automated tool, or a valuable resource. Solve a problem for free first. |
| Key Metric | Obsessing over low Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Lead (CPL) and attracting low-quality prospects. | Calculate your LTV and focus on maintaining a healthy LTV:CAC ratio (e.g., 3:1). This empowers you to spend what's necessary to acquire great customers. |
While I've laid out the strategy here, the execution is where the real work lies. Continuously testing new audiences, writing compelling ad copy that speaks to different pain points, optimising landing pages, and managing budgets across platforms is a full-time job that requires deep expertise. This is the difference between knowing the path and walking the path.
If this way of thinking about customer acquisition resonates with you and you'd like an expert eye on your specific business and challenges, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy consultation. We can take a look at what you're doing now and provide some concrete, actionable steps you can take straight away.
Hope that helps!
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
