Hi everyone, welcome to the Ad Hacks podcast.
I'm your host Rod Bland, and in this podcast, I talk about
how to get better results from your Instagram and Facebook
marketing and the many lessons that I've learned from being
in the e-commerce business for the last 20 years.
If you've just started working with an advertising agency
and literally just signed the agreement, it can be a little
bit nervewracking, not knowing what's going to come next.
So this video is gonna be all about how we onboard
new clients up to the point where we are ready
to start putting together the advertising strategy.
So this is for people who might be considering
working with us.
This is also for other agency owners who are perhaps
new or finding that their onboarding process takes
a long time, and there's a lot of back and forth.
We've rationalized our onboarding process
over time, so that it is pretty streamlined.
So I'm gonna take you through all the different steps
that we go through whenever we take on a new client.
Now, step number one is pretty straightforward
and that is getting the service agreement signed.
Now we don't have any contracts in our agency.
As in you just work with us on a month to month basis,
we don't lock you in for any particular period of time.
Having said that I always stress to people that it's
better for all of us, if you are in it for the long haul.
Because despite what anyone else may promise you,
especially if you're a new advertiser, or you've got a
new business, building the necessary infrastructure
for your Facebook business manager, your ad account,
putting together audiences, fixing any site speed issues
that you might have, adding in automated email marketing.
There's a lot of things that need to be done to
make sure that the money that you spend on your
advertising, you're gonna get the best possible return
from it from the get go.
Then once you start advertising, there's
this iterative process of improvement that
we'll go through while we're figuring out what
creative and what copy is resonating with people,
which audiences are working well, which ones aren't.
Sometimes it can take a while before you get to the point
where you're actually breaking even, and once again, that's
particularly true if you're a brand new advertiser or
you've got a new business.
So that all takes considerable time and investment from
our part and it takes time and energy and
investment from our clients.
So there's really not a lot of value in us having a go
at something for a month.
It's better for us to work with you for a period of
three to four months to allow all of that process
to start to bear some fruit.
That's why I set that expectation right from the
beginning, and we end up working with clients for
much longer, we have much happier clients and it's
generally just a much more fun business relationship to have.
That's number one to get the service agreement signed,
and it's really just to explain in detail, what
are the services that we are gonna provide to you?
We use a package called Proposify and that
just details all the different services that
we offer for our clients.
It's not particularly long, we try to make it so that
it's easy to understand, and it's just, so there's a lot
of clarity around what we are gonna be doing for you.
Number two is to get the first invoice paid and to set
up a payment subscription.
That really saves a whole bunch of time
with following up.
I'm sure that a lot of people end up spending a lot of time
chasing up accounts with their accounts department, with
their finance department.
It's just so much easier if there is a credit card
agreement that's put in place with automated billing.
Then in step number three, we go through
a onboarding survey.
So the survey contains all the next steps that
somebody would need to take before we are ready to start
actually putting together the advertising strategy for them.
We use Google forms to do that.
I just send the client a link to the Google form and all
they have to do is just go through and fill out the form.
So this is what part of the form looks like.
And then as far as what's on the form goes, I'll
break that down for you now.
So firstly there's systems access, so that's setting
up access to the backend of their Shopify or their
Magento or their Maropost e-commerce, aka Neto store,
so that we can install any pixels that are needed.
So typically that's gonna be the Facebook pixel.
It might also be the LinkedIn pixel, could
be the TikTok pixel.
The pixel may already be installed.
We might just need to check to make sure that
it's installed okay.
For example, with Shopify stores, we're gonna want to
have a look at the Facebook plugin, if it's already
been enabled and make sure that the detail is turned on
which enables the facebook conversions API to work.
Next we'll be requesting access to your email service
provider, which is typically gonna be Klaviyo or MailChimp
or one of those so that we can make sure that the integration
between Facebook and the service provider is set up.
That's often used when we're creating lookalike audiences
so that we can automatically update the custom audiences
that the lookalike audience is based on.
In part D this is where we get all of the Facebook business
manager side of things set up.
So if somebody doesn't already have a Facebook business
manager, then we have a video that walks them through what
they need to do to set that up and create the ad account
and apply the payment method and put in all of their
business details so that they've got a business manager
and and account ready to go.
Then we walk them through how they then provide us with
access to all of those assets so that we've got everything
that we need to start creating the initial facebook
ads campaign structure.
Next this is where we need access to all
of the brand assets.
So that's gonna include things like the brand logo,
preferably in an SVG format.
SVG is great, especially because we use Canva a lot
for producing creative.
It means that we can then apply any of the brand colors
to that SVG, or we can make it black or we can make it white,
we can make it transparent.
That's really useful.
If the client doesn't have SVGs, then we want them
to upload PNGs or JPGs, whatever they happen to have.
Then we can usually work with that and create
the format that we need.
This is where we'd also get any style guides that
the client already has.
Their colors, their fonts that they like to use,
any particular layout requirements, that can help us
make sure that we are creating ads and copy and creative
that is always on brand.
Now the next section of the onboarding survey, which is
arguably the most important one is where we put together
a lot of information about our clients' ideal customer.
So we're gonna ask questions like who is
their ideal customer?
How old are they?
Where do they live?
What's their income?
What do they believe?
What do they not believe?
What's their ideal situation, what sort of situation are
they likely to be in now?
What sort of pain points do they have at the moment?
We've got around 20, 25 questions in that part of
the survey, and it just helps us put together a good
picture of what the client's ideal customer looks like,
and it helps guide us in the kind of creative and
copy that is likely to work in the very first ads that
we start to run for them.
The final part of the onboarding process
is in relation to ongoing communication.
So we communicate with our clients using Slack for
day to day communication.
If you're not familiar with Slack, that's a really great
tool for conversing in real time or asynchronously,
via chat, you can send back and forth videos.
You can can upload images, documents, whatever.
It allows everyone in my team to see what's going on
with a particular client.
We make a private channel for each client and it also
allows everyone on the client side to see everything that's
been going on and go back and see the history, and it's
just a really efficient way to manage communication and
works much better than email.
The last part of that particular piece is setting
up the automated email that goes out to all of our
clients to invite them to book in a zoom meeting which
is currently with me at the beginning of each month,
so we can talk about the results from the month before.
We can talk about the strategy going forward.
We can talk about what sort of problems or what sort of
ambitions the client has.
This is a really great way to build an ongoing rapport
with clients, but it's also a way to understand what
sort of business issues the client has, because
oftentimes you may have skills that can actually help
clients solve their problems.
They didn't know you had the skills, you didn't
know they had the problems.
So you've gotta have this regular communication, at
least on a monthly basis I'd say, just to keep
those communication lines open and you'll find that
you'll have much happier clients by doing it that
way, and it's certainly been my experience as well.
That's it for this video.
Hopefully you've found this useful to
understand how our client onboarding process works.
What comes next is how we actually put together
the advertising strategy, and I'll make that the
subject of another video.
And if you are looking for assistance with improving the
results that you have from your Facebook and Instagram
marketing, or you're wanting to improve your conversion
rates, your automated email marketing, and you'd like
to have a chat with somebody about that, then there
will be a link in the video description where you can
book in a time to chat with myself or one of my team.
And we can talk about, what you wanna do in your business,
how things work from our side, what the pricing is
like, all that kind of thing.
And who knows, we may end up working together.
Thank you so much for watching or listening.
If you found this episode useful, here's two ways
I can help you grow your business for free.
Firstly, subscribe to my YouTube channel at rodsyt.com
or just subscribe to this podcast, which I'll be doing
in video format from now on.
And secondly, you can join my free group at rodsgroup.com.
And finally leave me a five star review so that
I can reach some amazing people that I can bring
on as guests on the show.
I'll catch you in the next episode.