One product, five ads: what your persona’s level of awareness changes

Before you start: what this guide assumes

A first clarification. The awareness funnel is a model. It takes up the five levels described by copywriter Eugene Schwartz in Breakthrough Advertising (1966): a person is not assigned to a stage forever, and nobody wears a label. The model is there to help you think about the message.

Second clarification: on Meta, the delivery algorithm, Andromeda, decides who sees each ad, based on what the ad contains. The only way to speak to someone who doesn’t know they have a problem, or to someone ready to buy, is therefore to put in the creative what speaks to that particular person. The level of awareness is played out in the creative.

Third clarification: the personas detailed stage by stage in this article are examples built to illustrate it. They start from the two personas I use to explain what a good persona is, then imagine what the same person goes through at each level of awareness. They don’t describe the customers of any particular brand.

Finally, this guide assumes your personas already meet the first two criteria of a good persona: being stand-alone (they have their problem before they know you) and specific (you can tell their story). The third criterion, their place in the funnel, is the subject of this article: knowing which stage the persona is at completely changes how you speak to them.

In short

• They don’t know they have a problem (unaware). This is the largest part of the market and the one that converts the least. The ad wakes up the problem, often with a contrarian truth, a statement that shakes up what the person believes is normal.
• They know their problem (problem aware). The ad puts words and images on the pain, without talking about the product.
• They know solutions exist (solution aware). They have settled for a compromise. The ad compares and shows what that compromise really costs.
• They know your product (product aware). They hesitate. The ad removes the hesitation with social proof, or by making the risk of changing nothing concrete.
• They are ready (most aware). This is the smallest part of the market and the one that converts the most. The ad explains how the purchase works, and at what price.

The same starting profile thus gives five personas and five ads that have almost nothing in common. Meta then optimizes delivery by sequence of creatives, which explains why a top-of-funnel ad can show a ROAS of zero and still be useful.

Why the level of awareness decides the message

The awareness funnel cuts your target market into five slices. At the very top, the people who are not aware of the problem your product solves; at the very bottom, those who, to use my image, have the credit card burning a hole in their pocket. In between, awareness of the problem, awareness that solutions exist, then knowledge of your product.

Two properties of this funnel change the way you design creatives.

The first has to do with distribution: the share of the market ready to buy right now is very small. The vast majority sits in the upper stages.

The second has to do with conversion: the conversion rate of each slice rises as you go down. It is very low among those who don’t know their problem, a little less low among those who know it, still low among those who know solutions exist without knowing your brand, more interesting among those who are starting to know your product, and clearly higher among those who know its features, its benefits and its price.

Add to this the way a person becomes a customer. There are many estimates; the order of magnitude I keep in mind is about 17 touchpoints, on average, between the moment a person knows nothing and the moment they convert. An ad seen on Meta, a search for the brand on Google, a direct visit to the site, another ad, then the purchase. Meta takes this journey into account: its algorithm optimizes by sequence, chaining several different creatives for the same person until the conversion.

Put these three elements end to end and you get the following consequence. A creative that only speaks to people ready to buy is addressing the smallest part of the market. And the same creative, repeated, ends up wearing people out: you need to repeat for a long time to convince, but repeating the same thing drives people away. The 17 touchpoints are varied, with different messages and angles. That is what a creative system makes possible: producing a large volume of new, varied messages without talking about yourself, since in 90% of cases, in my experience, the brand has nothing to sell to the person who sees the ad. The five stages of the funnel give these messages their structure.

The two starting personas

When I asked a lingerie brand and a mattress brand I know well to describe their target, the answer came down to a few words. For the lingerie: “women aged 25 to 60 who want more comfort.” For the mattress: well-off urban couples living downtown. Both descriptions talk about the brand. The first points to its organic cotton and how it is made; the second to its price positioning, that of an expensive mattress made in France.

Rewritten to describe a person living with a problem, they become:

1. 1Lingerie. A woman aged 30 to 40 who, when she gets home in the evening, first takes off her bra and changes into pajamas. Her underwear leaves marks, hurts her and has bothered her all day; pajamas are the moment she finally feels good.
2. 2Mattress. A man over 35 who wakes up every morning with his back in bad shape. He just had a child and struggles to carry his 22-pound daughter. At the office, he can’t stay seated for thirty minutes anymore; he has bought a walking pad and a standing desk.

These two rewrites also meet the second criterion, specificity. An ad “for all women who love comfort” gives the algorithm the portrait of the average woman, and the average woman is who it brings to the site: traffic the brand pays for and that converts very little. The woman who takes off her bra as soon as she gets home forms a smaller audience, one that pays attention to the ad and converts more. The creative system then multiplies these specific personas as much as needed to cover the whole target market.

These are the two people I take down, below, from one stage to the next. I have already done the exercise with a media buyer, the typical customer of a reporting tool. At the top stage, a contrarian truth: his client judges him less on his reporting than on the precision of his answer when the client asks why their cost per acquisition is going up. At the next stage, the problem stirred up: every extra client means one more hour on Sunday evening. Then a comparison table, with a question: what is his time worth? Then social proof, or a fear you stir up, that of losing a pitch. Finally, a how-to in three steps, with the price. The levers stay the same for the lingerie and the mattress; only the situation changes.

Stage 1: she doesn’t know she has a problem

Lingerie. Our customer takes off her bra when she gets home, as she does every evening. For her, that is how a day ends, the way you take off your shoes. The marks on her skin seem normal to her. She is not aware she has a problem, so an ad that talks about lingerie doesn’t hold her attention.

Mattress. Our young father has back pain, and he has his explanation: the baby he carries, the office chair. He has in fact acted on both, with the walking pad and the standing desk. The idea that his nights might play a part has never occurred to him. With regard to the problem a mattress solves, he still doesn’t know he has a problem.

What the ad does. It wakes up the problem. The best-suited tool is the contrarian truth, a statement that shakes up what the person takes as normal. For the lingerie, a creative that stages that evening gesture, the bra taken off before she has even put her bag down, and asks the question: why should the day end with relief? For the mattress, a creative that shows the man doing everything for his back during the day, and suggests that the part that matters may be happening at night. Neither of them talks about the product.

What to watch for. This is the stage with the lowest conversion rate, and on last click this ad often seems to bring in nothing. It prepares the next ones. For a product that touches the body, like the mattress, the contrarian truth suggests a link; it remains a hypothesis.

Stage 2: she knows she has a problem

Lingerie. Our customer has finally put a word on her discomfort. She knows her underwear is too tight, that she thinks about it in meetings, on her commute, and that she waits for the evening to be free of it. She doesn’t know yet that there is another way.

Mattress. He has understood that his nights matter. He wakes up stiffer than when he went to bed, and the first gesture of the day, lifting his daughter, is the most painful. He knows where the problem comes from, without knowing how to fix it.

What the ad does. It stirs up the problem, makes it present and precise. The creative tells this woman’s day through the moments when her lingerie calls her to order, or this man’s morning, from waking up to the moment he takes his daughter in his arms. The goal is for the person to recognize themselves and tell themselves this situation can’t go on. The product stays in the background.

What to watch for. The same ad, repeated, ends up no longer converting: you need to repeat for a long time, but with different messages and angles. A single creative per stage wears out fast; that is what pushes you to multiply the situations, the moments of the day, the angles.

Stage 3: she knows solutions exist

Lingerie. Our customer has already looked. She has gone up a size, tried wire-free styles, worn sports bras all day. She has found a compromise: it is more comfortable, but she doesn’t feel at her best in it, and it is not what she would wear for a workday. She makes do, because she can’t see how to do better.

Mattress. He, too, has looked for solutions: a mattress topper, a new pillow, sessions with a physical therapist or an osteopath, and maybe a trip to a store where he lay down for five minutes on display mattresses. He feels he has done what he should, even if his back reminds him every morning that it isn’t enough.

What the ad does. It compares, often in the form of a comparison table. On one side, the compromise the person has found, with what it really costs them; on the other, a solution designed for their problem. The strongest lever is often the question of the real cost of the compromise. For the lingerie: how many days spent waiting for the evening? For the mattress: how many sessions, how many hard mornings, and how much time with his daughter spoiled by the pain? The proposed solution may cost more than the compromise; the ad makes visible what the status quo costs.

What to watch for. The comparison carries its own weak point: the proposed solution often costs more than the compromise. It is the cost of the compromise, in time, in discomfort, in hard mornings, that tips the scale, and a person who has tried those solutions quickly recognizes a comparison that caricatures them.

Stage 4: she knows your product

Lingerie. Our customer has come across the brand. She knows you make lingerie designed for comfort. She hesitates: the price, the fear of getting the size wrong, and the doubt that often comes with the word comfort, that of lingerie that is comfortable but lacks style.

Mattress. He knows the brand, he may have compared two or three models. He hesitates in front of a major purchase, one you don’t make often and whose result you only know after several nights.

What the ad does. It removes the hesitation, with two levers. The first is social proof: other people, in the same situation, have made this choice and talk about it. The second is to stir up a fear, by making the risk of changing nothing concrete: another season of days spent waiting for the evening, another year of painful mornings.

What to watch for. The person has their habits with the solution they use, and one more purchase to justify. Social proof works if it is real, and fear works if it points to a risk the person already knows.

Stage 5: she is ready to buy

Lingerie and mattress. At this stage, the two personas look alike. They know the problem, the solutions, the product and its benefits. They know it is the right choice. Some of these people also go through search, typing “buy a mattress” or the brand’s name.

What the ad does. Everything has already been demonstrated; the ad explains how the purchase works: choosing your size or model, ordering, getting it delivered, and the price. It is a very bottom-of-funnel ad, centered on how it works, what I call the “no-brainer.” This is also the stage where an offer or a promotion makes the most sense.

What to watch for. This ad is the one that shows the best results in Ads Manager. Yet it addresses the smallest part of the market, and it lives off the work done by the other four. A brand that only runs ads of this kind, along the lines of “buy my product at 20% off,” only speaks to people who are already convinced.

How Meta delivers these ads in sequence

Meta optimizes by sequence: for the same person, it chains several different creatives until the conversion. The creative system draws a consequence from this: planning, within the same sequence, ads that speak to the top of the funnel and others, just as essential, that speak to the very bottom of the funnel, the one that triggers the conversion.

Ads Manager, for its part, presents results on last click. Take a worked example to illustrate it: a sequence of several creatives leads to a $100 sale. The last creative, often the stage 5 one, shows $100 in value for $10 spent, a ROAS of 10; the others, which spent $10 each, show a ROAS of 0. A soccer image helps make sense of it: the striker scores because the defender and the midfielder passed them the ball. Cutting the ads of the upper stages because they don’t “bring in” anything amounts to breaking the sequence that feeds the one at the bottom.

The same reasoning applies to placements and devices. You often see, especially in e-commerce on expensive products, that a person discovers an offer on their phone, in bed, then moves to the computer to pay for a major purchase. It is less and less true, but it still is. Mobile then does the top-of-funnel work, and the computer converts.

What about organic?

The brands that succeed in organic mostly speak to the top stage, by far the most populated. A mattress brand talks about back pain. An inclusive lingerie brand talks about how hard it is to feel at ease with your body. This content talks about prospects’ problems, without talking about the product, which moves some of them down one or two stages, toward awareness of the problem, or even of the solutions.

Organic has a second benefit for this work: it lets you listen. Likes, comments, shares and messages show which content captures attention, and so which personas and which situations really resonate. The personas built stage by stage remain hypotheses; how the audience responds lets you confirm or correct them.

Common mistakes

1. 1A single ad for all five stages. A creative that tries at once to wake up the problem, compare solutions, reassure and give the price really speaks to no one.
2. 2A product-centered persona at every stage. Describing the customer as “the one who wants comfort” at every stage amounts to writing the same ad five times, for all women who love comfort, in other words for everyone. What the person goes through changes from one stage to the next; that change is what gives each creative its subject.
3. 3Judging the top of the funnel on last click. A stage 1 ad shows, by design, a very low conversion rate. Its role shows up in the sequence.
4. 4Confusing stage and audience. On Meta, Andromeda chooses the audience based on the creative: it finds people who resemble the one the creative portrays. The level of awareness you are aiming for is therefore written into the creative itself.

To be precise about the cost of the method: it takes more work upfront, and more creatives to produce, since a single starting profile calls for five ads. Each one reaches a smaller audience than the generic ad. In return, each one speaks to a person in a precise situation, which gives it a much higher conversion rate than a generic ad.

So, which ad for which stage?

Three questions let you place a creative in this grid. Does the person it speaks to know they have a problem? Do they know the solutions that exist? Do they know your product? The answers tell you which stage the creative sits at, and so which argument it carries.

One product calls for one ad per level of awareness.

Source: Eugene Schwartz, Breakthrough Advertising, 1966.