What do you do when you have a client who has multiple offers and they want to promote them all at once?  This question came up in my Elite Ad Manager Certification, and it’s a dilemma that all Ad Managers come across.

In this episode of Online Confidential, where I take you behind the scenes to talk about ‘Secret Ad Manager’ business, I explain what to do when you have clients who decide they want to promote multiple offers at the same time.

Let me first say, promoting multiple offers at the same time can be fine. It does work as long as your client has the budget to adequately promote each offer.

If your client doesn’t have the budget do to so, what will happen is the results will be diluted. This is exactly the situation that came up for one of my Certified Elite Ad Managers. They had a client with three or four different offers and the client wanted to allocate their ad spend budget across all of them.

The danger of trying to do too much with not enough ad spend 

The poor ad manager was scattering the budget across all the different offers, and all the different audiences, while doing her best to get results. Meanwhile, the client was becoming frustrated because the results were below their expectations.

One of the concepts I teach in the Elite Ad Manager Certification is to manage client campaigns so they are dialed in to focus on one offer. When you have one offer dialed in, you can put the ad spend budget into that campaign and expect results. Giving the budget a chance to work on one campaign means you’ll get enough data to make informed decisions, and ideally, get plenty of conversions as well.

However, if you have too many offers on the go, and you have a limited ad budget, as most people do, you need to decide how to allocate the budget. You’ll allocate a bit of ad spend into one offer, then allocate a bit of ad spend into another offer, and then allocate a bit of ad spend into another offer. With multiple offers there will be multiple adsets, which means the budget you allocate to each offer has to be split between each adset.

A thinly spread ad spend won’t give Facebook enough budget to get plenty of data to feed into delivering results from the audience. In those first days, you need enough data to see what you have to change.  You might see there’s a low click through rate, or you need to test an audience, or you’ve spent $20 in two days and now you’re anticipating it’s going to cost $50 to get a lead.

You also have to factor in the time it takes to get the data back based on the amount of ad spend. It might be, that for just one adset, it’s going to take five days to see results, but then the results don’t come. So, you have to go back and refine everything, then let it take another five days to bring in more data to inform more decisions.

The best approach to manage your client’s expectations

If you have a client that has multiple offers, it’s really best to sit down with them and focus on one offer first of all, and give that a good run for a month, at a minimum. It’s even better if you can give the campaign two months.

Typically, for the first five days you’ll run the ads and then be able to see what has worked and what hasn’t worked. The data you get back will give you insight into what you need to do next. You might try new copy and creative, or test another audience because you’ve got insights that’s informed by the data. You need time and money to get the data back so you can do that.

So, if your client says, I’ve got this offer, and this offer, and this offer, and this offer, and we want to run all of them. You need to be upfront and manage their expectations so their budget gives them a good return.

Firstly, you want to find out which offer is the one that will move the needle for their business and bring in more sales. That’s their most valuable offer, and the offer you should help them promote to get results for their business.

For example, let’s say you’ve got a client that’s chiropractic practice and they want to run ads to hire more chiropractors to work in their business. I’ve been to my chiropractor and he said it was such a struggle to find more chiropractors. He was looking to employ another chiropractor but finding someone was really hard.

So this client thought maybe they should run some recruitment ads. But really, does that move the needle for their business? Sure, it may help them open up a new practice, but typically, the immediate need is to generate more sales and revenue. Instead of running recruitment ads for them, I would ask the client which promotion is the most valuable to their business and help them focus on that promotion first.

If you try to run multiple promotions because you haven’t discovered which promotion is their most valuable, all you’ll do is dilute the ad spend budget across all those promotions and dilute their results.

When a client doesn’t get results, they’ll get antsy, and you won’t feel great about it either.

You’ll feel the pressure to do more.

You’ll work more hours.

You’ll hustle more.

You’ll create more images in Canva, and videos in Canva, and spend your weekends trying to get these campaigns to work when it’s just destined to most likely flop. All because you don’t have enough budget to allocate across so many different offers and deliver the results the client expects.

This is a situation you don’t want to find yourself in with a client, so it’s important to be upfront and manage their expectations about what’s possible with their budget right from the start.

Take the lead to manage your client’s strategy

If you do bring a new client on board and they have multiple offers, or even if you’ve been working with a client, and they say ‘I want to do a five day challenge. I want to do a bootcamp and I want do this X, Y, Z promotion ‘.

Be assertive and have a talk with them before you go into action mode. Make a time to have the conversation with your client so they understand what they’re asking for and how it will impact their overall results.

You might say ‘Okay, that’s great, we can certainly test that, but to do all that effectively we would need to pause the ads for this funnel over here, and redirect the ad budget from this promotion over to this other promotion, so we can give this new promotion a fair go. Or you need to put the same budget amount into this new promotion/s’.

If they understand that running multiple campaigns means changing their strategy a bit then they can make that call. They want pause their ads and redirect their budget.

They might say, ‘sure, I’ve got another a hundred dollars a day. Let’s run that over here and test it to see how it goes’.

Don’t be afraid to take the lead with your client to help them understand what’s required to deliver results. When the client is clear on their campaign strategy, they’ve got the right expectations and you’ll be in a great position to do your best to get results for them.

If you manage ads for clients in the digital course and coaching space, it’s likely you’ll have clients who have different funnels and there are times when a new and different thing comes up that they’ve heard is working, or their business coach has told them to do as well.

That’s all great, but to get results, it always comes back to how much ad spend is available to effectively test that funnel.

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

Have you had a client ask you to run multiple campaigns?  Let me know if this has helped you feel confident with managing client expectations when this happens to you.

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