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What do you do If you have a potential client who may not be quite ready for Facebook ads?

So you have a great potential client and they’ve reached out to you and they’re wanting to know how to run Facebook ads or how you can run their Facebook ads for them.

In a previous post I shared strategies that I like to use to look under the hood and determine if someone is going to be a great fit for our Facebook ad services. That’s either via strategy session if they haven’t run any ads before or doing an audit, if they have run Facebook ads. So either of those ways you get a good insight of their business, what assets they have in place and where they’re at, whether they should, or shouldn’t even be running Facebook ads at this stage.

I know a lot of people who have run Facebook ads and they haven’t been entirely ready. They’ve just banged some stuff up and they haven’t had pixels installed. They have just been sending people to whatever random pages and it’s been like a bit of a hot mess.
But if you’ve used either of those strategies and you’ve gone in and you’ve looked at the assets that they have in place, then you need to be honest and give that potential client clear expectations of what you have seen and what results they may expect with their existing setup.

For example, in my elite ad manager program, we recently had a member who had a potential client and they didn’t have the assets set up that you really need to run Facebook ads and didn’t even have the pixel installed.

You need to be able to track conversions on the thank you page so that when you’re running ads for lead gen, you can tell Facebook, go out and find people who are likely to opt in. And if you don’t have that pixel tracking in place, you can’t run the correct objectives and Facebook can’t optimize correctly for you.

So there’s a few things that are not quite ideal in this situation. So what do you do when things like that happen? Well, don’t sugar coat things. Give those real expectations that as you’ve discovered with the potential clients funnel, that here’s an issue, here’s an issue and here’s an issue. And these really need to be resolved before we run Facebook ads.

Because if they’re not resolved, then we cannot do X, Y, and Z. And therefore your ad spend will not be as efficient as it should be. We will not be able to attract conversions and we will not be able to XYZ. So you need to lay that out very clearly. One so that your client is properly informed.
They’re not Facebook ad specialists. They don’t know the ins and outs like you do. So they need to be properly informed of the consequences of their existing tech setup. And also it’s protecting you that if you do take them on board as a client, that you have exactly laid out that you haven’t given any false promises, guarantees, or yeah we’ll be able to get a hundred leads.

So if you do identify situations like this, where it’s like, yeah, they’re using a third party software, we can’t put the pixel on it. So we can’t track our conversions. You need to lay that all out. If the client were to say, yep, that’s fine. Look, I’m happy to give it a go anyway, let’s just see what we can do. Then you have two choices. One, you could either walk away. You could say, well, okay, that’s great but unfortunately, I wouldn’t be the best fit for you because it’s essential to me that I get results for my clients. And therefore I need to be able to track and optimize your Facebook ad campaigns.

So walk away. There’s no harm in doing that. And chances are, when you say no to something, something better comes along or option two is you can do it as a bit of a test if you are needing experience, if you are wanting to launch campaigns and such, you could just do this, but what you need to be very clear on then is that the client is a hundred percent informed of like, here’s where we’re going to have issues because we cannot do X, Y, and Z. So don’t just leave that on a proposal or on a zoom call or on a telephone call, make sure if they are coming on board, that it is in your agreement that you would say, the client has been advised that with their current funnel setup, we cannot do this sort of tracking. We cannot do this. We cannot optimize our Facebook ad campaigns, which may result in inefficient ad spend, you know, lowly generation and XYZ. So it is all there in black and white in that agreement that they sign.

So that if in a month’s time, everything seems to have gone over their head. They forgot you telling them this is what’s going to happen. And they say, we’re not getting any leads, what’s happening. You can say, as it’s noted in our agreement, the issues that were presented to you back when we started X, Y, and Z. And then once they actually see it for themselves and they go, Oh, okay. So, you know, this is what this all actually means.

Then they may say, okay, well how much for a landing page or okay do a landing page for me. And that’s when you would say great I’d be happy to. I’ll just get a price for you. That’s not included in your services and is an additional fee.So make sure that if things aren’t all set up properly and they still want to carry on anyway, you’ve protected yourself. It’s all there in black and white. And therefore, if they decide that they do need to have that funnel, as you have advised them in the past that you charge accordingly for it.

So, that’s a couple of things if they’re not ready and if they’re particularly wanting to get people off Facebook and be generating their leads. Now there are times where a potential client may not have website assets in place. But you can still run ads for them by running some engagement and video view campaigns directly on Facebook. It’s what I share in my $10 a day client attraction code.
And that is where you are building up an audience, you’re doing targeting, you’re drawing in their potential ideal clients, and you’re nurturing them. And you’re creating a bit of a buzz around content pieces that you’re then retargeting to that audience.

Now through that they can have people reaching out to them via messenger. They could be putting up the links that could be to their Facebook page for more information and various other things like that. So they can still be generating leads and sales by starting conversations with people who are engaging with them directly by a messenger.

I wouldn’t have just Facebook as your one and only strategy. We want to ideally get people off Facebook over onto their CRM, over onto their email list, where they can communicate with them at any time so that if Facebook shuts down their page or shuts down their ad account, they can still contact them via email.

But, if they’ve already got that in place, then audience building on Facebook is a great way to combine with it. If they’re building those assets, if they’re getting them in place, you can start running ads for them by running those engagement campaigns and doing audience building. So then when the assets are ready, they’ve got that lead magnet or that webinar or whatever it is that they want to send people to.

You can be retargeting that audience and start directing them over to that lead magnet, opt in or their offer. The most essential thing that they’re going to need beyond website assets and such is a product, offer or service that people want, and that people have already been buying. So they’ve been making organic sales just by being in Facebook groups or talking to people or via their networks, they need to have a product, offer or service that has been selling so that you have the best chances of being able to help them to promote it.

If they are just starting up, then that’s a whole different kettle of fish where they need to really be investing in data to see if their product, offer or service is going to be selling. So if they do have something that has been selling initially already, then yes, you can support them with Facebook ads, either audience building, lead gen or if they don’t have funnels in place, then they’ll probably learn pretty quick that we’ll need to get funnels in place, but you need to set those clear, honest expectations of where there may be limitations and issues because of this existing setup and make sure that’s clear in writing.