The short answer
Awareness runs for a defined stretch, then the budget shifts toward response
Run brand awareness ads for a defined stretch, not indefinitely: long enough for people to see your name and face repeatedly, then shift the bulk of the budget toward ads that ask the reader to do something. Awareness never has to hit zero, but it should shrink from the main event to a background presence once recognition is established. Treat it as a proportion that changes over time, not a switch you flip off.
How long should you run brand awareness ads
Brand awareness earns its place at the very start, when nobody in your market has any reason to recognize your name or your face yet. People need to see you enough times before recognition sets in, and that takes a stretch of sustained, unglamorous repetition, not a single push. That's the moment awareness is doing exactly what it should.
The mistake is treating that starting phase like a permanent home. Awareness is a phase, not a destination. Once your name is familiar, the job changes from getting seen to getting a response, and the budget needs to follow that change instead of sitting still out of habit.
When do you know it's time to shift the budget
You shift when recognition is doing its job, not on a fixed schedule. If a seller or buyer in your market already knows your face when they see it, pure awareness has done its work and the marginal value of more of it starts to fade. That's the cue to move the bulk of the spend into ads that tell your story in a way that asks the reader to actually do something, click through, reach out, book a call.
This is a shift in proportion, not an on-off switch. Awareness never drops to nothing, since a background level keeps your name from going stale in a market that keeps meeting new buyers and sellers. But it stops being the main event. The response-driven work, the kind that sits in Growth, Scale, or Advisory brand ad packages, becomes where most of the effort and most of the budget live.
Plan the year in quarters instead of guessing
The fix Hugo gives agents on this is simple: plan in quarters, not in one long undifferentiated stretch. Pick a focus for each quarter, whether that's a heavier awareness push in a new area or a harder swing toward response work in a market you already own. Try things cheaply before committing real money to them, and be willing to shut off whatever isn't landing instead of letting it run on inertia.
The scarce resource here isn't dollars, it's attention. A seller or buyer only has so much room in their head for the agents they notice, and every quarter you spend holding their attention without asking for anything back is a quarter you could have spent turning that attention into an actual conversation. Plan for that trade-off on purpose instead of discovering it a year later.
Should you ever stop running brand awareness ads completely?
Not completely, but it should stop being the main thing. Once people recognize your name and face, the job of pure awareness is mostly done, and holding most of the budget there stops paying its way. A small amount stays on to keep recognition from fading. The rest moves to ads that ask for a response.
How do you know it's time to shift budget away from awareness?
Recognition is the signal, not a date on a calendar. When your name and face stop being new to the people seeing them, awareness has done its job and the story needs to start asking for something back, a click, a call, a form filled out. Waiting for a fixed number of weeks to pass misses the point, since the real marker is whether people already know who you are. Watch for recognition, not the calendar.
What happens if an agent stays in brand awareness too long?
A lot of spend with nothing to show for it. Twelve months of pure awareness leaves an agent able to say people saw their name, but not able to say what that turned into, since awareness by itself was never built to produce a response. That gap between spend and a clear result is exactly the trap Hugo warns agents about. You end up unable to say what you got.