How Our Client Onboarding Process Works

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.