Have you set yourself up for success for your ad management business by working with the right clients? That’s what we’re diving into today. In this episode of Online Confidential, where I take you behind the scenes to talk about “Secret Ad Manager business”.

You’re an ad manager and you provide an amazing service to business owners, but the question is, are you working with the right clients? Working with the right clients will set you up for success as an ad manager, not just for your business, but also mentally!

How to spot the ‘wrong’ clients for your ad management services

When you work with the wrong clients, it’s going to have an impact on your mindset because you’ll feel like you’re always struggling which will lead you to question your skills and abilities as an ad manager.

You’ll find yourself in a downward spiral and working with lesser and lesser quality clients, wondering if you can do this after all because no one’s getting results.

When, in fact, it’s likely not you. It’s the clients you’re working with. Even though they’re great clients, some of them are just not ready for Facebook ads.

I help a lot of ad managers identify this upfront, and instead of taking on the ad management, they offer to provide coaching and consulting. If people are not ready for an ad manager, then you can offer them some coaching support. It still gives them access to your valuable expertise when they’re not ready for your done-for-you ad management services.

If you have someone who comes to you and they want you to run their Facebook ads, here’s how to make sure you’re working with the right kind of clients.

• Is the client’s product or offer validated?

First of all, find out if they have a validated offer.  Have they been selling their product organically by word of mouth or by posting on their page, and have they sold their offer to people they know and have built a warm audience?

If they have an offer that’s been selling organically or they’ve been playing around with ads themselves and had some success in getting sales, then they’ve got a couple of ways they can show they have a validated offer and it’s a product that people are interested in.

You’ll be able to tell they’ve done some work and because their offer has been selling, it’s a good indication you can help them with your specialized ad management services.

Otherwise, if you’ve got a client who’s just come to you and they say “I’m launching this offer” or “I’ve just created this offer” and they haven’t sold it, then you don’t know if people want it.

If they’ve got a validated offer, then that’s a good sign for you that they’ve done their research and they know what people want, and people are buying it.

Therefore, putting Facebook ads behind the offer and amplifying it even further should get more sales for them. Now, it may take work. It’s very different to sell offers organically or to warm audiences versus finding sales from a cold audience, which is what we do with Facebook ads.

We’re amplifying it by getting the offer out to people who have never heard or seen this person before. It requires a bit more tweaking, a bit more dialing in, but at least the bones are there and it’s a validated offer.

So you may be thinking “but someone’s come to me and they’re brand new; they’re not used to running Facebook ads” what do I do then?

• Do clients have realistic expectations?

To decide if they may be a worthwhile client, you would want to hear what their expectations are and how much ad budget they’ll spend.  If they tell you “I’ve heard I can spend a hundred dollars and get $10,000 back with Facebook ads, and in a week!” then they don’t have realistic expectations. You would need to course correct them so their expectations don’t set them up for disappointment.

You’ll need to tell them it’s going to take time and it’s going to take money to get data so that you have information, and Facebook ads are also a long game. While it’s ideal if they make sales within a week more often than not, there will be some effort to make it work. There needs to be some dialing in with the campaign. Audiences need to be tested, copy needs to be tested, the landing page needs to be optimized, the sales page needs to be optimized, it’s a huge process and… it takes time.

So when a potential new client comes to you, make sure they have the correct expectations because it will be essential to your success.

Find out if they have a validated funnel and that they have right expectations because if they’re new and they don’t have realistic expectations or even the experience of making sales, you want to set their expectations upfront.

Make certain they’re clear about what to expect from Facebook ads and you’re not in a position of going out the gate with the pressure of needing to get a sale straight away.

• What is the pricing formula of offers in your client’s funnel?

Is their offer priced at $1,000 or is it a $30 price point? $500 or $15,000 price point? That matters because if they’re selling one product and it’s $30 or a low price point, or even under $100, like a $97 offer, it’s not likely to be profitable if they only have the one low priced offer.

For example, the cost per acquisition might be $60 to get a $30 sale, that’s a loss of $30 for every sale. That’s why for low ticket offers, with the front end $37 offer they want to have an order bump offer, and ideally they should also have an upsell of a one time offer, an OTO, to make acquiring that lead profitable with Facebook ads.

Upsells are typically $37, $27, $77 or $97 and the combined order value customers spend from making the decision to get the first offer, then with the order bump and the upsell offers it allows your client to spend more to gain a sale.

If your client just had a $30 dollar offer without the order bump and the OTO, you have no wiggle room because there’s no increased order value to make the lead generation profitable. In that case, ideally, the most you would want to spend to get a sale would be $30 to get a $30 sale.

Obviously, that’s not a profitable outcome either.

So it makes sense for your client to have additional offers in their funnel. The additional offers after the low ticket front-end offer, where there’s an order bump and a one-time offer, are ‘ascension offers’.

They may have a $1,000 offer or they may have a $10,000, 12-month membership. While they may have an ongoing monthly membership, in reality, in order to be profitable, they need to have additional offers.

That low ticket offer they sell out front is a lead generator, a self-liquidating offer (SLO). It pays for itself and it lets them build a list of hot buyers. A self-liquidating offer is not actually designed to be profitable, but I have seen some that are hugely profitable. I’ve had clients that have made millions of dollars from a $27 offer. I’ve personally made multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars from a $37 offer with the Client Attraction Code and it’s brought additional clients into my memberships and my done-for-you services.

You see, that’s what your client’s offers need to do. Bring in ideal clients who essentially pay to get on their list, and although they may be out of pocket if that’s all they buy, even if it might cost $10 to get that person on the list, they’re a buyer and buyers buy again.

If you have a client who has a product that’s under $100 or even under $500, then they need to have ascension offers to increase the lifetime value of a customer to make the ads and marketing worthwhile.

Even if it’s a $1,000 offer, they need to look at the customer lifetime value. So if they’re selling a $1,000 offer, ideally they will have another offer for their customers afterwards so they can increase the lifetime value which increases the return on their ad spend.

So that’s another thing to consider when choosing the right customer for your success. They have ascension offers and they have a good lifetime value for their clients.

• What will their budget allow for?

If you do have someone who’s just starting out, how can you best serve them? Even if you’re starting out and you’re new to Facebook ads management, how can you best serve people?

This is where the Client Attraction Code ad strategy can be used by any business. And it’s a strategy that you, as an ad manager, can set up and maintain. It’s perfect for any business owner who needs to build brand awareness. Clients that are new to Facebook ads need brand awareness and they need to build up an audience.

The Client Attraction Code does both, and it’s a very cost-effective Facebook ads strategy.

It gets their business in the newsfeed and keeps them front and center of mind, plus you can layer in their lead generation campaign. If you have a client that doesn’t have a big ad spend budget for lead generation, say they’ve only got $10 per day, there’s a limit to what you can do with an ad spend of $10 per day.

The most you could do with a budget of $10 per day is run a lead form campaign and target one audience. Or you could run an audience building strategy and start building up their audience for $10 per day.

If your client or potential client doesn’t have a big ad budget, and when it comes to an appropriate ad budget, I would recommend a minimum budget of $1,500 per month. That’s $50 per day. Especially if they want to do lead generation campaigns, you’re going to need a decent budget to work with. In a pinch, an absolute minimum budget would be $30 per day.

With $50 per day, you could split the budget so you have one $20-per-day audience for some audience building and then allocate the remaining $30 for retargeting. Or you could have two $20 audiences which will let you get that data in a bit faster.

If they don’t have $50 per day to spend on their ads, then you can offer them coaching support instead because that’s what they need. They may not want to run Facebook ads themselves, but they’re at a stage with their business where they need to roll up their sleeves, get in, learn how to run their ads, start getting results, and then they can afford to outsource.

There are businesses that are established and just want to include Facebook ads in their marketing strategy. They can afford to outsource, so you can certainly help them with their ads management.

Decide what works for you

Now, if you’re new to managing Facebook ads, you might feel comfortable with $30 per day ad campaigns, and that’s absolutely fine. It’s your business.

Remember, you can choose who you work with and who you don’t work with. If you’re newer and you like working with people who are new to Facebook ads, just be sure to have the expectations and the awareness that working with smaller ad budgets, unvalidated funnels, or a single $30 offer is going to be very tricky for you.

Firstly, it’s going to take a while for the data to come in. For example, if they’re selling a $30 offer and they’ve got $30 per day in ad spend, if you just have one ad set, it will probably take you two to three days to get a sale, depending on the niche. That is what I would benchmark.

If you could get sales at $5, that’s brilliant. I see it happen. Especially if your client has an established audience. But if you’re going out to cold traffic and they’re just starting out, then a sale could come in at $90, and that’s taken three days before you may close the sale or may get some data to make decisions about the campaign.

Just be aware that if you’re working with lower budgets, or if you’re working with a lower price point. It’s going to take time to get enough data in and the conversions may not be very profitable. Just make sure you’re aware of this and your client is also aware.

This sets you both up from the start to have the right expectations and the right mindset to understand there’s an investment of time and money to get the data that’s needed to make informed decisions about the campaigns. It’s not to say those people are the wrong clients to work with at all; they just may not be the right fit for you. But if you decide to take them on as clients then you have that knowledge and awareness of what it will take to get results.

If you want to work with established and successful clients, or you want to hit the ground running, or you’ve got years of ad manager experience behind you, then you know the right clients for you will already have an ascension ladder of offers in their funnel.

For ads to be a worthwhile return on investment, they won’t have just one low ticket product or even one thousand-dollar product. There must also be other ascension offers which means they can afford the cost per lead, as well as your agency fees, and they can afford all the other business expenses they have. An ascension offer is essential.

Here’s a quick recap of what to look for when you’re deciding to work with clients:

Firstly, do they have a validated offer? Secondly, has the offer been selling already to warm audiences and organically? And also, do they have realistic expectations of Facebook ads as a long game strategy? They know it’s not about getting quick results, and it’s not expecting to put in a hundred dollars and get $10,000 back instantly on the first day they launch their ads. They also know they need to allocate a decent budget to get the data in quickly.

To wrap up, have you been working with the right clients? Has this episode brought any issues to mind? Has it helped you see what you need to think about when choosing clients in the future? Or has it identified things that you maybe haven’t been doing? I don’t want to say wrong, but maybe not a hundred percent right? I’d love to know. Email us success@socialcharlie.com or comment here.

I’d love to hear from you.