Should you provide ad copy and creative for your clients when you’re managing their Facebook ads? It’s a great question and I’m diving into it in this episode of Online Confidential, where I take you behind the scenes to talk about ‘Secret Ad Manager’ business.

“Should I include copy and creative as part of my ad management services?”

This a question ad managers often ask me.

Ultimately, this is up to you. It’s your business.

You’ll find a lot of clients may expect it and anticipate it. If that’s the case in your situation, then you’ll want to add the service in to your retainer price. If you don’t, it can cost you a lot of missed opportunity while you’re busy writing copy for your clients’ ads.

Here’s what you need to do if you want to provide ad copy 

Writing a great ad takes a lot of skill. I have ad copy templates in several of my trainings, which help to provide a framework for ad copy that converts. For example, there’s the PAS formula, Pain-Agitate-Solution, or AIDA Attention-Interest-Desire-Action.

While there are copy frameworks you can follow, you need to have great information about the offer and the target audience to start with.

Your client should be able to give you this information when you bring them on board. I give my ad managers an Avatar Workbook to give to their clients so the clients can fill them out, and it makes sure they really know,

• Who their avatar is,
• What their pain points are,
• What they’ve actually said about why they purchased, or
• Why they took action

This is all the great information that can come into the ad copy because there’s only so much you can do if you don’t have that information. Maybe you could still write some great copy. But if it doesn’t resonate with the ideal client, it’s not going to convert.

Your client really needs to provide you with great information about their avatar, and show that they know who they’re talking to, and they know that their offer and their messaging is on point to attract their ideal clients.

So if your client provides all this information, then writing the ad copy can be a service you provide. But there’s an opportunity cost in doing that. If you’re sitting and writing clients’ ad copy for three hours a day, what will that stop you from doing?

Does it mean you won’t have time for networking and getting more leads into your pipeline?

Are you unable to spend as much time on other client campaigns?

Are you giving up time with your family because you need to make up that two hours at night where you have to go in and load up campaigns.

With all that said, if you do offer to do the copy as part of the service, you will need to do some training so that you know what great copy is and what is likely to convert.

Or you can outsource it.

How you’ll know when outsourcing ad copy makes sense

There are a lot of copywriting agencies that provide Facebook ad copy, and it might cost $50 per ad. That could be a great option. So rather than spending a few hours of your time every day writing ad copy. You just outsource it.

You send it off to a professional and it comes back all done. When I outsource ad copy I typically order two lots of long form copy, not the short copy. With the longer ad copy you can pick out and edit it to make more variations of the ad copy.

You could also use an Ai tool like Jarvis, where you put that ad copy into Jarvis and get a shorter form version or something that’s reworked so it can be re-used and tested in a number of different ways. You can pay for services to do that for about $50 per ad copy. Just make sure you bake that cost into your retainer.

So if you include ad copy and you would normally charge $2,000 for ads management, add another $200 for the ad copy and charge $2,200.

You might balk at asking your client for the extra $200 a month, but think about how many sales that might turn into for your client. It’s only one or less than one sale. If it’s a SLO, then maybe it’s four or five sales. Just be sure to bake that cost for outsourcing the ad copy into your retainer so it doesn’t come out of your pocket.

On the other hand, if you have a client who’s more established, they may have a copywriter or people on their team who write their ads. While that’s great it doesn’t mean you need to charge any less. I know ad managers who charge clients $3,000, $4,000 or more per month, but they’re not doing any copy or creative. All the copy comes from the client’s team.

That’s the benefit of having your own business. You get to decide what services you offer and what you want to do. If there’s a common theme where clients say, ‘yes, I want you to write the copy’, then bake it into your retainer and outsource it. Leave it to the professionals while you do what you’re good at. Ideally, you might have someone else on your team who’s also learning so you’re not on the tools all the time.

In another situation you might have a client who wants to provide the ad copy but they may not be a very good copywriter, and they have no idea about Facebook ad policies, and they may be adamant that they want their ads to be written a certain way.

If you have a client who insists on writing the copy but you know it won’t comply with Facebook policies, you’ll need to have a conversation with them to explain that as per Facebook’s policies you can’t use the copy because it could get the ad account shut down.

If you’re not writing the ad copy for the client, this is when you could otherwise refer them to a copywriting service they can use to have their copy written and get it back to you.

If you want to offer copy as part of your service, absolutely go for it! But unless you know great copy and you love writing copy, then really consider increasing your retainer so you’re able to outsource the ad copy.  This way you’ll have great copy for your client and you won’t be juggling and wearing all the hats, having to do copy and ads and all the things.

There are other people who are better at these kind of things so just bake it into your costs so that you’re not losing out.

I hope you found that valuable today. I’d love to know what you think?

Do you include copy in your ad management services or do you outsource it?

Send me an email at success@socialcharlie.com. I’d love to hear your thoughts. That’s all for today’s episode.