Well, friends. The new year is here and you know what that means. It’s time for a brand new start—a fresh perspective and renewed ambition to live your life the way you want to live it.
Maybe that means you’re ready for more time with family, more time to getaway to a Caribbean island or ski slopes to shred some fresh powder, or even a more flexible lifestyle that doesn’t revolve around a dwindling number of PTO days and sitting at an office desk all day long.
Whatever it may be, I get it. I used to be right there with you. And, I’m here to tell you there’s no better time than now to start working your way towards grabbing your goals by the horns. Can you guess the best way to do just that? By launching your Facebook ad agency in 2018!
In order to become a thriving entrepreneur, however, you need to possess a range of skills. Therefore, before you dive headfirst into the unknown waters of entrepreneurship, you’re probably wondering what the key skills are that you should be honing in on in order to get your Facebook ad agency off the ground.
So, that’s where I come in. Today, I’m sharing the six must-have skills you need to adopt to help answer the most burning question on your mind at this point in time:
“How do I know I have what it takes to manage a Facebook ad agency?”
Ready to hear them so you can begin applying them ASAP and gear up for the best year yet? I thought you might. Here they are…
6 Skills to Know Before Launching a Facebook Ad Agency in 2018
1. Be a rockstar communicator.
Let me ask you this: do you consider yourself to be an introvert, extrovert, or even an introverted extrovert? (Yes, an introverted extrovert is a thing for those naysayers out there!)
Well, no matter what you consider yourself to be, you can’t seriously expect to launch and grow a successful Facebook ad agency from home if you prefer to avoid any communication at all costs. Can you? I’m sorry, but absolutely not.
Instead, you need to man up or woman up, and be a rockstar communicator. That’s right, I said it. Reason being, it’s one way to win your very first client without ANY prior experience.
Seriously? Yup. It’s true. We’ve preached time and time again that you need to step outside the comforts of your own little bubble in order to mingle with your ideal clients. And, at the core of stepping outside of your comfort zone is a donut bomb and a follow-up.
Say what? Okay, I know you might have a confused look on your face after reading the words “donut bomb.” But, hear me out. It’s something that’s going to come in handy. Here’s the gist of how it can work for you:
- Once you pinpoint the ideal clients you want to work with in your local area, make a list and set out to deliver them a special treat on a particular morning: donuts.
- On the morning of, pick up one to two dozen donuts and deliver them to your potential client’s place of business, along with a “sweet” note—before things get busy for the day.
- In the “sweet” note, be sure to include your name, what you can bring to the table (aka your business), your contact information, and a blurb to enjoy the delicious treats!
Pretty simple, huh? It really is. But, it works and can go a long way for your Facebook ad agency. So, if you want to spark a potential client’s interest in who you are and what you can do for them, go ahead and “woo” them with a donut bomb.
Once you tackle that step, it should be smooth sailing for you as it’s not the easiest thing in the world to actually go out into your community to acquire new clients. Just be sure to make your time and effort worth it by following up, not giving up.
To do that, on the same day you drop off your “donut bomb,” return to your soon-to-be client’s place of business. And, speak to the same person you spoke to when you delivered that sweet treat—whether it was the receptionist, office assistant; you name it.
Then, remind them of your company and that you’re in the process of building something brand new to help their business get new customers, clients, patients, and so on. And, ask for 15 minutes to meet with the office manager (aka the person in charge) to discuss how to get some help with your new service.
Most importantly, you shouldn’t ask if you could help them with it. But, rather, you’d like to get help with it. When you make that teeny, tiny tweak to your request for a meeting, it’ll be easier to get your foot in the door, and propel yourself and your agency forward!
2. Keep your Facebook ad agency organized.
American businessman James Cash Penney once said it best:
“No business can succeed in any great degree without being properly organized.”
And, he’s right. While I won’t judge you if you prefer to live a little messy in your personal life, you can’t let that carry into your business life. Otherwise, you’ll put your Facebook agency at risk.
It’s important to be organized if you have any hopes or dreams at all to grow your ad agency and have multiple clients on your roster. (Yes, this closely relates to having stellar project management skills!)
So, how organized are we talking? Simply tackle the following steps and you’ll be golden.
- Maintain a digital ad calendar.
Create a completely separate e-calendar strictly for keeping track of each individual client’s advertising campaigns. Take this content calendar example many writers use to note important content piece releases and promotions.
(source)
Similar to this, if you’re looking to craft your very own ad calendar through Google Calendar, we’ve put together a list of the simple steps you can follow. Check them out here.
Ultimately, nothing beats a little organization via a digital calendar. It’s a great tool to better manage deadlines and relevant project data for yourself (and even your clients if you choose to share with them).
- Jump on Trello to organize client communications.
As you get things up and running, and start to add more clients to your roster, the last thing you want is for important messages to disappear into the abyss of your inbox. Let alone, waste time wrangling feedback from your clients on campaigns and answers to your questions.
The best tool out there to help prevent both of those things from happening? Or, at least reduce the number of occurrences? Trello. It’s an easy, free tool to manage and organize your client campaigns and communications—from checklists to documents, deadlines, and more. For a how-to on how to use it, click here.
- Make Facebook Business Manager your best friend.
To halt the plethora of client Facebook pages from consuming the left-side of your News Feed, and make it easier to keep track and successfully run various campaigns, Facebook Business Manager is your go-to. Here’s how to set it up for your agency in 10 minutes or less.
- Automate, automate, automate.
You might envision scheduling out social posts when you hear the word “automate”—whether it be through Hootsuite, Buffer, or another similar platform. But, no, automation isn’t just for that. It’s also for Facebook advertising.
In your Ads Manager, you can create an automated rule to receive a performance alert right in your inbox whenever a campaign, ad set, or ad’s creative is experiencing a positive or negative trend (high/low click-through rate, budget spend, CPC, etc.).
Plus, you can set up ad set spend pacing alerts whenever ad sets are trending towards overspending or underspending of your total monthly budget. And, even optimization rules such as pausing any ad that reaches a frequency of 5 ad views.
These lifesavers can help you get back some time you’d otherwise spend manually checking on the performance of your client’s campaigns!
- Keep your days straight.
Designating certain days of the week for accomplishing certain tasks can help you better manage your ad campaigns wisely. We like to follow this weekly schedule to keep our days straight.
3. Be willing to learn.
Hey, the secret to success in the new year is all about staying motivated. Am I right? Heck, I sure like to think so. With that, here’s another inspirational quote for you from none other than motivational teacher Zig Ziglar:
“If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no one can stop you.”
The second you stop being willing to learn as an aspiring entrepreneur, you’ll deter your Facebook ad agency’s success. So, what’s the solution?
It’s easy: keep up the desire to LEARN! And, I don’t just mean taking online courses related to Facebook ads and staying on top of the everlasting changes the social media platform loves to dish out. I also mean learning how to calculate one important value in particular for your clients: customer lifetime value (CLV).
What is it? Simply put, it’s a prediction of the average value a business can expect to gain from their entire relationship with all customers.
Why should I care? I’m no math geek. I’m with you, and in no way am I saying you need to become one. But, calculating your clients’ customer lifetime value should be something you care about. And, to backup my last statement, here’s why:
- Budgeting: it allows you to determine the maximum allowable acquisition cost for new patients. Using those numbers, you can then develop a thoughtful marketing and advertising budget.
- Marketing and advertising messaging: it offers you the opportunity to generate CLVs based on various buyer personas within your client’s business. From there, you can segment customers according to your calculations, delivering specific groups different messaging they need and will respond to.
- ROI: it provides an accurate measurement of any and all marketing campaign performance, generating a real ROI from your patient acquisition efforts.
- Retention efforts: it helps you focus on keeping loyal patients in your practice, while putting the spotlight on the timeline for when people tend to take their money elsewhere.
I’m convinced. How do I calculate it? I thought that might be the case! For that reason, we put together an entire post dedicated to walking you through your calculation efforts. For high lifetime value clients (medical practices, real estate agents), click here. And, for low lifetime value clients (restaurants, hair salons, gyms), click here.
4. Be okay with asking others for help.
Most entrepreneurs know that as you grow and grow, you’ll have less time and energy on your side to keep doing all the things on your own as a party of one.
But, despite knowing that, it can feel like pulling teeth when you’re ready to ask for help. The truth is, it’s not something that comes easy. You know, relinquishing control to someone that’s not, well, you.
Therefore, you must learn to be okay with asking others for help. And, by help, I mean hiring a virtual assistant.
Okay, I know the thought of hiring a team member and paying them some of your hard-earned money just might make you cringe. But, hear me out. You can buckle down and follow that piece of advise. Or, you can take one of the following routes:
- Let important assignments slip through the cracks as your business stagnates and/or declines.
OR
- Work 80-90 hours a week to grow your business yourself, and then experience burnout.
That virtual assistant is sounding and looking pretty good right about now, huh? Yet, a problem many run into upon actually hiring one is determining what tasks to outsource to them. So, to help you get a better idea, here are just a few of many options:
- Social media graphics
- Accounting and/or bookkeeping
- Sales funnels and/or Facebook ads
- Customer service and/or email management
- Custom sales page creation
- Social media management
- Internet research
If you’re curious about the process you should take to find one, the qualifications you should look for, and the onboarding process you should have in your agency toolbox, you’ll want to read this.
5. Be able to handle tough ad client situations with poise.
With running your own business as a Facebook ad agency owner, you’re guaranteed to experience losses, wins, bad days, good days, bad clients, good clients; the list goes on and on.. It’s all part of the rollercoaster ride that is entrepreneurship.
In order to be a successful entrepreneur, however, the last thing you want to do is lash out when you’re feeling stressed or give a difficult client of yours a piece of your mind. Yikes. That’s a super quick way to flip your hard-earned success upside down.
Therefore, what you must learn to do is manage yourself well and show grace under pressure. Why do I say that? Because not every client will make it easy for you. I’m sorry, but it’s true. So, to gear up for those fun learning moments, you must:
- Learn the 3 key signs it’s time to fire your difficult client.
- Personality conflicts. This is no one’s fault. Sometimes, two people just aren’t meant to get along. For example, if you’re laid back and are working with a high-strung client, it may not work in your favor.
- Time sucks. There are only so many hours in a day, especially if you’re a 1-3 man or woman show. A majority of your clients should only take you a few hours a week to communicate with and a few more hours to actually do the work. If it starts to become more, you need to determine if they’re worth it.
- Constantly changing the plan. If this happens, they either don’t understand what the heck it is you do or they don’t trust that you’ll be able to deliver what you say you will.
- When you need to terminate them.
The professional way to go is finishing out your contracts, ensuring you’ve completed the projects you’d promised to deliver. Yet, there’s an exception to that: if the client ever asks you to do something you feel to be unethical or unlawful. But, this is all up to you. If you feel you can’t continue any longer, you can choose to end the contract early and refund your client.
- And, how to terminate them.
- Keep the same type of communication. Communicate with them the same way you always have. If you keep conversations limited to in-person visits, you must walk in their door and do it in person. If you keep conversations limited to email, it’s okay to finish things up that way, too.
- Let them down easy. Follow the “It’s not you, it’s me” logic. Say your schedule is getting a little too full and you’re needing to cut back on some work. And, that you won’t be renewing the contract when the project reaches completion.
- Give them a referral. Recommend someone you know who can pick up the work right where you left off. If you don’t know anyone personally, do some research and find someone you can point them to.
- Always leave the door open. Tell your client they can always contact you if anything ever changes or if they have questions. You never want to burn a bridge because they can always end up referring you to their industry friends.
6. Be patient.
Ahhh, patience. It’s a tough, tough skill to master. Yet, an absolutely critical one. Why? Because nothing ever goes as planned.
No, I’m not just talking about entrepreneurship as a whole. But, also your Facebook advertising efforts for your clients. Far too often, people are eager to get results right away—as soon as an ad campaign goes live. Unfortunately, however, it just doesn’t work that way.
Therefore, as with most things, good things come to those who wait. I know, I know—you probably want to show your clients you have what it takes to get them the results they’ve been hoping for with their hard-earned money.
As the saying goes, however: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” And, that’s especially true with Facebook ads. Despite that, most people will send a campaign out into the Facebook universe, and, within the first 24 hours, they don’t see the results they anticipated.
So, what do they do?
They play around with the targeting, the placement; all that good stuff. Then, what happens? They screw it up. They tried fixing something that wasn’t broken yet.
Because of that, we love to follow 72-hour “no touch” rule. That means, sit tight, be patient, and let the ad do it’s thing for 72 hours.
Why 72 hours? Well, what happens is Facebook's algorithm is looking to see if your ad received engagement. That engagement can vary widely depending on the day of the week and the time of day.
If you stretch out your ad testing time and you get more data, you’re going to get more consistent data for the algorithm. And, the more data the algorithm has, the more it can optimize the ad based on what's REALLY going on.
Make sense? Great. But, say things go south once you’ve hit the 72-hour mark. What do you do?
It’s time to get in there and change things up a bit—whether it be the creative, the targeting; you name it. To help get you started, we’ve put together a list of the 8 most common Facebook ad fails from last year and how you can fix them.
Well, there you have it! The 6 skills you need to know before launching your ad agency in 2018. I have a feeling with these tips, this new year for you is going to be one for the books. What do you say?
Oh, and if you are craving more of what we shared today, and want ongoing help navigating the waters of growing your Facebook ad agency, I invite you to join AdLab. It’s your unfair advantage to stay ahead of the game, while mastering ads for your current and future clients.
Have questions or something to share about launching your Facebook ad agency? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you or be of any help!
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