Imagine trying to fill a bucket with water, but there’s no faucet. You’re frantically scooping drops from a puddle while your competitor next door has a fire hose.
That’s exactly what happens when you try to run conversion campaigns without feeding the top of your funnel first.
The conversion campaign trap every marketer falls into
Your Google Ads conversion campaigns are humming along nicely. ROAS looks good. Your retargeting is performing. Everything seems fine until you notice something unsettling.
Your audience sizes are shrinking. Your CPMs are climbing. The same campaigns that delivered 4x ROAS last quarter are barely hitting 2.5x now.
So you do what every marketer does: optimize harder. New creative. Tighter targeting. Different bid strategies.
But here’s the thing—you’re trying to solve a supply problem with demand tactics. You’re running out of people to convert because you stopped creating new people to convert.
The second law of marketing
If you don’t spend enough on the top of the funnel, you won’t have a bottom of the funnel.
Your conversion campaigns need a constant stream of new, aware prospects to work effectively. Without awareness spend, you’re eventually converting the same small pool of people over and over until they stop responding.
And, yes, this law is make-or-break for sustainable growth.
Your conversion campaigns are starving
Think of your marketing funnel like a restaurant. Your conversion campaigns are the kitchen—they’re incredibly efficient at turning ingredients (aware prospects) into meals (customers). But if nobody’s bringing in fresh ingredients, even the best chef can’t cook.
We see this pattern with our new clients constantly. They’ll come to us wondering why their “proven” conversion campaigns suddenly stopped working. When we dig into their data, it’s always the same story: they cut awareness spend six months ago to “focus on performance.”
Their conversion campaigns didn’t get worse. They just ran out of people to convert.
Your retargeting campaigns need people who’ve visited your site. Your lookalike audiences need new customers to model from. Your search campaigns need people who know your brand name exists.
All of that requires top-of-funnel investment.
The audience depletion death spiral
Here’s how the death spiral typically unfolds:
Month 1: Cut awareness spend, redirect budget to “high-performing” conversion campaigns
Month 2: Conversion campaigns still look great (you’re living off past awareness efforts)
Month 3: Performance starts to dip slightly, but you blame seasonality
Month 4: ROAS drops noticeably, audience sizes shrink
Month 5: You’re in panic mode, testing everything except the real problem
Month 6: Performance has cratered and you’re wondering what happened
Sound familiar?
The cruel irony is that by the time you notice the problem, it takes months to fix. Building awareness doesn’t happen overnight. Those prospects need time to move through your funnel.
The platform lie you’ve been believing
Facebook, Google, and TikTok will happily let you spend your entire budget on conversion campaigns. Why wouldn’t they? You’re paying premium prices to compete for a shrinking pool of ready-to-buy prospects.
But here’s what they don’t tell you: their algorithms are optimized for immediate conversions, not sustainable growth. They’ll find every person in your target audience who’s ready to buy right now, charge you top dollar for them, and leave you with diminishing returns.
The platforms benefit when you focus solely on conversions. You get addicted to the immediate gratification of direct ROAS while slowly depleting your future pipeline.
Why this should make you greedy for more prospects
Picture this: while you’re fighting over scraps in the bottom-funnel auction, your competitors who understand this law are building massive prospect pools. They’re creating new demand instead of just capturing existing demand.
Those awareness campaigns you think you can’t afford? They’re the only thing standing between sustainable growth and audience depletion.
Every day you delay top-of-funnel investment is another day your conversion campaigns get more expensive and less effective. Your competitors are literally building the audience pools you’ll wish you had six months from now.
Think about the confidence you’d have knowing your conversion campaigns will never run out of fresh prospects. Imagine having so many aware customers that your retargeting audiences keep growing instead of shrinking.
The missing pipeline in your marketing machine
This is why our MMM tracks the relationship between your awareness spend and your bottom-funnel performance over time. We can show you exactly how awareness campaigns from three months ago are still feeding conversions today.
Because here’s what most attribution models miss: the person who converts from your retargeting ad today might have first discovered you from a YouTube campaign last quarter. Without that initial awareness touchpoint, they never would have entered your funnel.
When you can see these long-term connections, you stop making short-sighted budget decisions. You start investing in awareness not as a nice-to-have brand exercise, but as the fuel that powers your entire conversion machine.
Understanding Law #2 protects you from the conversion-only trap, but there’s another side to this equation. Because if you build massive awareness but don’t capture it with bottom-funnel campaigns, you’re basically gift-wrapping customers for your competition.
Next week, we’ll explore Law #3 and why your competitors are probably profiting from your awareness spend right now.
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