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You're Not Coca-Cola. Stop Advertising Like You Are.
- Lukas Holschuh
- July 17, 2025
- 02:52 pm
Inside this article, you’ll discover:
Why "Brand Awareness" is the most seductive and dangerous trap for a growing company.
- The algorithmic reason why awareness campaigns are engineered to find you non-customers.
- How to shift your entire advertising philosophy to focus on the only thing that matters: profitable conversions.
- Why you must stop targeting a "prequalified audience" and start finding the "problem-aware" audience.
Plus, for more advice, schedule a free consultation and audit so you’ll know exactly where to improve or launch with confidence. This isn’t theory – it’s actionable insight that you can use immediately, designed to take your ads from wasteful to winning.
We can help you with all types of digital ads:
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Team @ Lukas Holschuh
Founder, Growth & Advertising Consultant
Are you running "brand awareness" campaigns?
Let me ask you a question: Are you Coca-Cola? Do you have a nine-figure advertising budget and a 100-year-old brand that needs to stay top-of-mind for every human on the planet?
If the answer is no, then you need to stop advertising like you do.
"Brand awareness" is the most expensive and seductive trap a startup can fall into. It's a vanity metric that makes marketers feel busy while bankrupting the business. It’s a privilege you haven’t earned yet. This isn't an article about tweaking your campaigns. It's an intervention. We're going to dismantle the myth of awareness and rebuild your entire advertising philosophy around the only thing that creates growth: measurable, profitable conversions.
How to Pay Facebook to Find Non-Customers
Here is the uncomfortable truth about awareness campaigns on platforms like Meta. When you set your campaign objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you are giving the algorithm a very specific command: "Find me the largest number of people for the lowest possible price."
The algorithm, in its infinite wisdom, does exactly what you asked. It seeks out 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.
The best form of brand awareness for a startup or small business is a competitor's customer switching to your product or service 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.
Every Penny Must Have a Purpose
From this moment on, your advertising has one job: to acquire a user or a customer at a profitable cost. The only campaign objectives you are allowed to use are Leads or Sales/Conversions. Full stop.
When you switch your campaign objective to "Conversions," you unleash the full power of the platform's AI. You're no longer telling it, "Show this to anyone." You're giving it a ruthless command: "Analyze the thousands of data points of people who have already signed up for my free trial. Now, ignore everyone else and spend my entire budget finding more people who behave exactly like them in the 24 hours before they converted."
You stop paying for meaningless impressions and start paying for results. Every penny of your ad spend is now an investment in a measurable, profitable action.
Think This Is Just Theory?
We switched over this client's campaigns to conversion optimisation and saw an 80% lower cost per acquisition. That's real cost savings right there.
The "Prequalified" Audience is a Myth.
The next piece of bad advice is to target a "prequalified audience." This term is dangerously vague. What does it even mean? Instead, you must think in terms of your customer's state of awareness. You are not targeting a demographic; you are targeting a problem.
This is how you strategically choose your platforms. If you want to find the Solution-Aware Audience, you go to Google Ads. These are people actively typing their problem into a search bar ("best crm for small law firms"). They have the highest intent, and your job is to meet them with an ad that feels like a direct answer.
If you want to find the Problem-Aware Audience, you go to LinkedIn Ads. These people are feeling the pain but not actively searching for a fix. A "VP of Logistics" is stressed about rising fuel costs but too busy to research solutions. You use LinkedIn's precision targeting to interrupt her day with an ad that reads her mind, making her aware that a solution like yours even exists.
This is a much sharper way to think about targeting. It forces you to align your message, offer, and platform with where your customer is in their actual journey.
The Real KPI
Measure what matters. Don't just track your Cost Per Signup. That is still a vanity metric. A campaign that gets you £5 signups that never convert to a paid plan will lose you money. A campaign that gets you £200 signups that reliably convert to £10,000 customers will make you millions.
You should relentlessly track your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and weigh it against your Lifetime Value (LTV). The LTV:CAC ratio is your source of truth. It tells you if you have a real business or just an expensive hobby. This is the only way to know if your advertising is truly working.
The Proof Is In The Results.
See the exact strategy we've used to drive $115k in sales revenue for this client. Every $ spent on ads brought in 3-4x ROI.
You Are Not Coca-Cola
Look at your ad manager. If you see any active campaigns optimising for "Reach," "Impressions," or "Traffic," turn them off. Right now.
Every pound you spend must be an investment in a measurable, profitable conversion. Your job as a founder or small business owner isn't to be known; it's to be chosen. And that only happens when you stop chasing the phantom of awareness and start demanding results.
If you're ready to implement a strategy that's built for growth, not just for show, let's talk.
Book a free initial consultation at holschuh.co.uk.
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