Transcript
Hey, how’s it going? It’s Chin Gregory. Welcome back again today. In this video, I’m going to take you through the six questions that you should be asking your Facebook marketer before you let them go anywhere near your Facebook ad accounts. Because I’ve seen way too many of my fellow eCommerce owners getting burned by hiring crappy agencies. So what I’m going to take you through in this video is six specific questions. Six specific questions that you’ve got to ask, or that your Facebook marketer needs to be able to answer to your satisfaction. If they don’t, don’t let them go anywhere near your ads. These questions is how you can separate the experts from the amateurs, so that you can always know that the person you’re hiring is actually able to get you the results that you want from your social media marketing campaigns.
Now before we get started, if you’re an eCommerce owner and you want to learn how to scale your business to six figures per month, potentially even six figures per day, I’ve created a short video training, which you can get at learnwithchin.com. It’s completely free of charge. And I walk you through a process that I’ve used many, many times to scale multiple eCommerce businesses to six figures per month, and some even six figures per day. So if you want to scale your eCommerce business, go check out learnwithchin.com. Now, so let’s get into the video. And the reason I’m making this video is that I’m part of a lot of Facebook groups. And I worked with a lot of eCommerce clients and one of the things that really, really breaks my heart is seeing other eCommerce owners getting burned by agencies or consultants that basically just don’t really know what they’re doing. And they’re coming in there and they’re wasting your time.
You’ve spent all this time creating your brand. You’ve built up some great products. You’ve got an audience, you’re doing really, really well. You bring in someone to help you and they just can’t deliver on the goods or even worse, they waste you time and they waste you money. I actually remember even last year, there was a client that came to us and they’d been working with a pretty successful, well-known agency. Well, I say successful, a pretty well known agency. And this agency had lots of testimonials, lots of case studies, they’d won awards. But when it came to their campaign, they just basically laid an egg. It was just a total disaster. And so this is kind of why the Genesis of this video, because there are ways for you to be able to identify before you even hire someone to run your Facebook ads on or run your Instagram ads. There are ways and there are questions that you want to ask so that you can know if they actually know what they’re doing or not.
So we’re going to get into this video. And by the way, like I said at the very beginning, if you want to learn more about scaling your eCommerce business, just go check out learnwithchin.com. Okay, so let me hop over to my whiteboard. Now there are six questions. And you want to ask these six questions, and you want to make sure they can give you satisfactory answers to these 6 questions. The first one is all about relevance. And what I mean by relevance is, how relevant is their experience to your current situation? Because for example, an agency that’s only ever worked with fashion brands. They’re going to have a very deep level of knowledge in that particular niche, but they may not necessarily have a wide breadth of knowledge.
So if they see any looks that they may not have seen before and that industry, they may not be able to help you. On the flip side of that, you get some agencies or some consultants who’ve got loads of different experience with loads of different industries, or loads of different niches, but they’ve never gotten a deep level of understanding of one particular one. Now I’m not saying one is right or the other, it’s going to really depend on your situation. And so you want to make sure that whatever experience that they have is really, really relevant to the situation that you’ve got at hand. So if you’re specifically trying to scale, or you’re trying to do a time limited promotion, or you’ve got Black Friday coming up, make sure the experience that they have actually matches up with what you want to achieve.
The second thing is process. And that’s not how you spell process. Process, and this is a deal breaker. And what I mean by process is, do they have a repeatable process that underpins their success? And this is more important than case studies, more important and testimonials, more important than anything they can show you. And the reason why is, I’m giving you some insider insights here from the agency world. Generally when we put forward our case studies, we’re going to put forward our best case studies. And we’re going to put forward a lot of our case studies that show us in the best light.
Now I can tell you from experience that running campaigns for a big brand, sometimes you’ll have an agency say, “Hey, we’ve worked with this major brand, and that’s why we’re so good.” Big brands have built in advantages that make it a lot easier to win with their accounts, regardless of whether you’re actually that good or not. Like it’s pretty difficult, you can take a B level marketer and an A level marketer. You can even take a C level marketer and it’s pretty difficult for them to mess up a big brand account because there’s so many things that a big brand or a big business or someone that’s well known has in their advantage, that smaller businesses don’t.
So you want to know that however they’ve gotten those results, they’re using a repeatable process that, sure they’ve used it for a big brand or some of their testimonials, but they can actually use that repeatable process for you so that you know that what you’re getting is based on something that’s going to work over and over again. Because the last thing you want is any type of guesswork. Guesswork, guessology, that will kill an account. I promise you that will absolutely kill account. And that’s the last thing that you want. You want to make sure that they’re using repeatable processes and they have frameworks for gate being able to get the results that they say they can get.
Number three, and this is really important. Actually, let me not use that word. Scaling, this is really, really important. And it’s important because I’ve messed this one up so many times when I started out. Have they had success at large budgets? And the reason why this is so important is that, it is very common to get success at smaller budgets. But the whole game changes when you start to increase the budget past a certain level, we call it a scale ceiling.
And I actually remember one of my earliest clients, I’d done really well spending about 300, 400 a day. And we were doing really, really well in the account. I was super excited. I was super happy and the client was like, “Well, you’ve done such a great job here. Let’s start scaling.” And naive old me, I thought, oh, well if I can do 10 grand a month and get them great results, let me scale to 50 grand a month, 60 grand a month, a hundred grand a month and still get the results for them. Absolute disaster. I lost them quite a lot of money. It’s pretty embarrassing talking by it. And they dropped me so fast. And I had to really go back to the drawing board.
And that’s when I really realized that there is a massive difference between spending a grand a month, 10 grand a month, a hundred grand a month, and in some cases, 200 grand a month. There is a massive difference in what goes on in doing that. And so, again, it’s all about your own specific situation. Because there are going to be some agencies that are… They’re great at running massive accounts where they’re doing 200 grand a month, but there may not be as cost efficient when they’re running small accounts. Because if you’ve got 200 grand a month to play with, you’ve got a little bit of wiggle room with your budget. On the flip side of that at the same time, if you’ve got a client who… If you’ve got an agency or consultant that’s doing really, really well at small budgets, when you start scaling that budget, the last thing you want is to find out, when you start to go up to a couple grand a month or a couple grand a day, that they’ve never done this before, and you’re now just burning cash.
So it’s really, really important that you make sure you ask them, “Hey, what’s the largest budget you’ve worked with? Have you successfully scaled campaigns in the past? Or where have you got to?” It’s not a deal breaker, but it’s just going to give you an idea of where their capabilities lie.
Number four, this is a deal breaker. And this is a question that you absolutely must ask. This is probably the most important question that you can ask anybody coming anywhere near your Facebook ads. And that is “Which KPIs do you see as critical to my business?” This is huge. Because you want, once you’ve told the marketer, the agency, the consultant, once you’ve given them your brief, and you’ve told them about your situation, you said, “Look, this is what we, as a business, want to achieve.” They need to be able to replay back to you, tell you specifically which KPIs, which key performance indicators are going to be critical for your success, based on what you want to achieve.
If they can’t do that, they have no idea what they’re doing. Any competent marketer should be able to look at your brief and say, “Okay, here are the specific KPIs that relate to your particular business model and relate to your particular situation. And here’s how we’re going to know when we’re going to be success. Here’s specific milestones, that designate or that indicate that we’re doing very, very well. Now, if they can’t do that, if they turn around and say, “Well, what KPIs do you want us to optimize for?” Just run for the hills. They don’t know what they’re doing. This is the most important question. Once you’ve given them your brief, once you’ve told them, once you’ve had that discovery call, just say to them, “Hey, you’ve had a look at our business, which KPIs are most critical to us?” They should be able, within a heartbeat to be able to tell you. If they can’t they’re amateurs, they don’t know what they’re doing.
Number five, let’s put this over here. I’m going to have to go down here. Capabilities. This is important because every different consultant and agency is going to have a different range of capabilities. Are they just going to be doing the ads management? Are they going to be building the creative? Are they going to be doing the copy? Are they going to be coming up with strategy as well? Will they be making your landing pages, your product pages? Would they be doing conversion rate optimization on your site? Are they going to fiddle with your site speed? All of this stuff is pretty important because you want to know where their responsibilities start and stop so that you know what you have available within your team to get everything else done.
Because from an eCommerce perspective, you’ve got traffic, you’ve got conversion, you’ve got retention as well. So you got traffic, conversion, retention. And then, when you’re getting really Ninja, you’ve got amplification. And those four areas, different agencies can do different parts. I know for us as an agency, we’re very, very good at specifically working with businesses that already have great content. As a consultant, I’m very good at strategy. I know that there’s certain areas that I’m not as good at it. And I know that my agency, there’s certain areas that we’re not as good at.
And so we will generally tell the client, “Look, here’s where we’re great at, we can do this other part as well, but we’re really good in this area.” And that way it gives the client enough, or it gives you enough information so that you know, which part of this whole ecosystem are they going to be managing and which part of my deficient in, so I can maybe train up someone in house or go and do it myself, or potentially bring in another consultant or another agency to fill in that particular role.
And then finally, lets put this one here, this is really important. And that is pricing structure. Now why pricing structure is so important is because different pricing structures are relevant, sorry about the police outside, but different pricing structures are relevant to different situations. So for example, a flat retainer fee, that’s best suited to large budgets. Because if it’s a flat fee, you want to basically utilize that when you’re running a really large budget. On the flip side of that, if you’re quite small and you’re starting out, a more of a performance based fee structure is going to be better for you, because that allows the agency to take on some of the risk as well. So you’re not the only one who’s burdening all the risks because some of their fee is tied into their performance.
What I will say about whatever fee structure you go with, there are a couple that you definitely want to avoid. So the first one that you want to avoid is any type of time based fee structure. That’s basically, “Hey, this is our hourly rate. This is how long it’s going to take us to manage your accounts.” Time-based fee structures are better when it’s just a creative agency. Like if they’re making you a website or they’re doing creative for you, that’s a bit different. But for a performance agency, like for performance marketing when you are really trying to generate sales, generate clicks, generate fans, do something specific that has a tangible result.
Time-based is terrible. Because for example, let’s say the person you hired takes two times as long to optimize your account. You’re now paying for inferior performance. Like if I could optimize an account in an hour, but somebody else takes three hours to optimize an account. If it’s time-based, you’re going to pay that individual more, and that just doesn’t make any sense for you. So in terms of Facebook marketing or any type of performance marketing, just stay well clear of any type of time based pricing structure. And the second one you want to avoid as well is the… Which one is it? My mind’s gone blank in here. The second one you want to avoid is the, we’ve got time based. And then we’ve got… Ah, that’s it, fees based on the spend. And the reason why you would want to avoid fees based on spend, so a fee based on spend is, we’re going to charge you X amount at every level you spend.
So if you spend 10 grand, we’re going to charge you this. 20 grand, we’re going to charge you this. 30 grand, we’re going to charge… Ans it goes up. Now, it’s not the worst, it’s not as bad as fee-based. But you want to be careful with that one because the problem with fee-based is the incentive is to spend more, but there’s not really any incentive to make you more money. Now, I’m not saying that they’re going to not make you money, but you just want to make sure that you’ll keep an eye on an agency that has a percentage of spend based fee structure, because obviously their incentive is to get you to spend as much money as possible. But again, you may be penalizing some agencies that have better performance, because if I can get you a 10 X return on ad spend, I can get you to a hundred grand just by spending 10 grand.
But if another agency can only get you a two X return on ad spend, and you’re paying them based on your spend, you’d have to spend 50 to get a hundred. And now you’re actually paying that agency more money than you’d be paying myself. As I’m giving you an example. So you want to be careful with the percentage of spend based pricing structure, because it’s not always the best. It’s not always a good indicator of success. Now it might work, but you really just want to keep an eye on any agency that’s doing that.
So to just recap, those are the six questions. Number one is all about relevance. How relevant is their experience to your current situation? Number two is process. Do they have a repeatable process for getting the results that they claim they can get. Number three is scaling. What level of spend and what level of budget have they been successful in utilizing? Number four is KPIs. This is the most important question. This is an absolute deal breaker. Once they’ve received your brief, once they’ve learned about your business, are they able to then tell you which KPIs are critical for your business? Because that tells you if they know what they’re doing or not.
Number five is capabilities. Where do their responsibilities begin and where do they end? And what do they have in house? What would you have to go out and get additional help for? And finally pricing structure. I’d completely avoid any type of time based pricing structure. I’d be wary and careful about percentage of spend based pricing structure. And on every other pricing structure there, value based retainer plus flat fee. All those others are going to be specific to your situation. And you want to make sure that whatever pricing structure you go for, it’s very transparent and it. allows the agency to do better for better performance. But if you’re small, it allows them to burden some of that risk as well. Not just you.
So those are the six questions that you should be asking your Facebook marketer. And they have to be able to answer it before you let them go anywhere near your account. Now, if you want to learn more about how to scale your eCommerce business, go to learnwithchin.com. I’ve got a short video training there for you, where I basically walk you through the process that I’ve used multiple times to scale businesses, eCommerce businesses, to six figures per month, and quite a few eCommerce businesses to six figures per day.
That’s learnwithchin.com. If you want to get that step by step process on how to scale your eCommerce business. But that’s it for me today. My name was Chin Gregory. Feel free to comment below if you’ve got any questions or comments about what I’ve gone through in this short video here. I’d love to know what some of your experiences have been with agencies. Have you had some good experiences? Have you had some bad experiences? What made the experience good? What unfortunately made the experience bad? Please, I’d love to know, comment below so I can kind of see where you’re at with your journey. Well, that’s it from me. God bless, take care. And I will see you next time in the next video.