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Episode 53: Who Are the Trickiest Clients to Run Ads for?

You may be wondering who are the trickiest clients to

Jody Milward

You may be wondering who are the trickiest clients to run ads for. And no, I’m not talking about specific niches like CBD or things like that. I’m talking about actual clients who are the trickiest ones. Ones that I have seen over the years time and time again can be those clients who have run ads themselves.

They’re the ones who likely have had some good success, and it’s time for them to hand some tasks over because it’s taking up too much of their time. They’ve got other areas of their business that they need to focus on. So it is a bit scary for them to now find someone to manage their ads because they’ve been living in Ads Manager pretty much themselves, spending their own money, learning, finding audiences, finding what works and have had success with it.

They’re now at a place where they can hire someone else to run their ads. But it’s kind of like handing over a baby. This is their baby. This is their business. They know how important Facebook ads are for their business, but they just don’t have the time or resources to keep working on it. So they need to find someone else.

They go and talk to ad agencies. They talk to a few, and they really hope that when they find the one they’re going to be able to scale them to the next level immediately. So that they’ll just be able to pick up what they’ve done and run with it, and before they know it, they’ll have four times the ROAS.

Now, this is Facebook, right? What happens and works well, one week is not necessarily going to work well the next week. Also, when you talk about scaling, costs go up; it’s inevitable. It’s what Facebook will call their breakdown affecting what they’ve been going through, getting this low hanging fruit etc. So you want to increase the ad spend, and things get more expensive.

So when an agency or a freelancer comes on board, and they try to do that, costs go up, and the client initially starts to freak out. And you know, they’re a bit nervous because they were getting four dollar leads, and now your leads are costing them seven dollars. So that’s stage one of freak out.

Now another thing is, how long have they been running their ads? How long have they been managing this themselves? Is it a matter of fatigue for the audiences? If they’ve been doing the same thing for maybe the last 18 months and may have even gotten to a point where things have gotten harder for them to get results. So again, that’s where they want to come over to an agency because an agency will fix everything straight away. Or a freelancer will fix everything straight away and get everything working, and I won’t have to worry about it anymore.

It could also be that maybe the audience is fatigued with the offer, and the offer itself needs a bit of a rest. That can be another cause for things that have not gone so well and why they won’t. That’s why when you have a discovery call with a potential client, getting all this information will help set you up for success and set the correct expectations with your ideal clients.

How to run facebook ads for clients

That way if they do come on board and on your discovery call they say, “Yes, I’ve been running these ads for 18 months. It’s done really well in the last three months. But, unfortunately, things have just dropped.” Well, we all know Facebook ads this year have been crazy different, but yes, it could be a matter of, “Yes, okay, well, you’ve been running this for a while. You’ve had a decent amount of ad spend on it. It’s gone to a lot of audiences, and maybe this offer just needs to be rested for a little while, while we go out with something else out the front.”

It could be a different opt-in. It could be a different lead magnet or something, for example. It may be that the offer just needs a break. So make sure your client knows that. Setting that expectation up, that this could be another consideration for you as well. Then, as you get them on board, you start running ads for them. You do your thing, you test various audiences, and you increase the budget. We all know that it takes a bit of time for the data to come through and especially with the delays in tracking the delayed attribution.

Put your hand up if you’ve ever turned off an ad set, and then come back to see that it’s clocked a lead or sale. Yeah? I’m not the only one. Awesome. So that inevitably happens. What tends to happen when your client has been doing their own ads is they are going to go into Ad Manager. They’re going to be checking on things. They may even tweak things. They may think that you haven’t got the right audience. They may want to put in some different copy and creative and just add it into an ad set that you’ve got running.

This is where service agreements come in and really save you. You have a service agreement that is strictly saying that they’re not to go in there and be doing anything to your campaigns. That’s going to help to protect you as well. Because it’s a bit of an awkward conversation, but one that you would need to have nonetheless if they are going in and making changes to the ads that you have loaded up and you’ve got running.

You need to set those boundaries and have a conversation with them going, “Hey, did you go in and did you do X, Y, Z?” “Oh yeah. Because X, Y, Z they say…” “Okay, great. Yep. I understand that. That’s fine. However, moving forward, I really need you not to do that because we have our systems. What we see in multiple ad accounts, bringing in all our years of expertise, and what you have hired us for is to manage your ads. We’ll take care of any optimizations, tweaks, or changes. If you’ve got any questions or concerns, feel free to pop them in our Slack channel.” That’s where I recommend you have a Slack workspace for them to pop it in, and then you’ll review it the next day. “But please just don’t make any changes to the ad accounts because that’s really going to have a big impact on the data that we’re gathering so that we can optimize your ads to get the best results possible.”

You would have to have that conversation with them if they are going in there and doing that, and that is something that quite often happens when you’ve got a client who has been doing the ads themselves. They’ll go in to tweak, optimize, and turn things off. “Oh, it wasn’t getting results. You spent X, Y, Z.” And it’s like, “Well, yeah, that’s fine. That’s because we’re anticipating that it will cost a third of the cost of your product to generate a sale from this ad set. So we haven’t reached that, or we haven’t reached the minimum number of impressions that we’d like to see an ad get before we make these decisions.”

Good luck if you are working with someone who has run their ads before. It’s not always like that. There will be clients who will be very thankful, and then there are the ones who will have a hard time letting their baby go. They’ll want to go in there and tweak and optimize things.

So one, with your service agreements, you have things in there that are clearly stating that clients are not to go in and change the ad accounts or the ads that you’re working on or make any changes without prior discussions. Two, just setting up expectations of why things may be fatiguing or whatever the issue may be in the first place. And three, just always keeping that communication open with them. Talk about it, so if they do make changes to things, you’re onto it very quickly and establishing those boundaries.

So that’s it for today. If you want to know more about being an in-demand ad manager, head over and get my free guide at admanagerguide.com and discover the quick steps to being an in-demand ad manager.

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I love to share practical information to help you improve your skills, learn something new or help you avoid the mistakes that many Ad Managers and I have made to help fast-track you on your journey as a well-paid and in-demand Ad Manager.