Indie Letters - ⚡ IL - Advertising Agencies Red Flags

Marketing & Growth

Advertising agency red flags

1. The agency will only work out of their own ad accounts, especially on Facebook. 

The reason this is an issue is if the client ever decides to part ways with the agency, they cannot take their account with them. ALL of the data and learnings will be lost. Ownership of Facebook ad accounts cannot be transferred.

2. The agency will create its own Facebook pixel or use its own Facebook pixel on the client's ad account. 

Agencies claim that this is done for the benefit of the client because "our Facebook pixel has significant data on it that will improve your account's performance".

They can share the pixel with the client's ad account and build an audience off of it while still using the client's pixel. The client should ALWAYS own their pixel.

3. The agency requires that you pay the ad spend directly to them, and in advance. 

Typically, this is a sign that the agency is outsourcing the work to another company, a contractor, or they are up charging. Otherwise, the client should be able to attach their credit card directly to the platform i.e. Facebook Ads, TradeDesk, Google Ads, etc., and pay the ad spend themselves. 

Another reason not to do this is if the client decides to leave the agency, it will be incredibly difficult to get the agency to return the unused ad spend.

4. The agency charges one flat fee and that fee includes the ad buy. 

This was really popular back in the early 2010's and generally targeted small business owners. The issue is that many of those agencies were not transparent about how much of their flat fee went to the ad buy and how much was eaten up by management fees. In some cases, as much as 90% went to management fees.

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Facebook group strategies for B2C brands

1. Join a group as a Page:

A lot of groups allow pages to join the group. If you post and your post gets some decent likes, you can go on the likes option and invite them back to like your page.

2. Share blogs in Related Groups:

I know a pronounced strategy, but sometimes we have written blogs because we know it will do very well in one particular group and not keep SEO in mind. If your CTR is strong on the blog, you will collect emailers of people from a similar niche.

3. Always try and start a conversation:

Asking things like "What do you guys think" etc. will make sure that people reply to those posts and if you are replying to every comment, the algorithm will make sure that this becomes the top post in that group.

4. Collect Page Likes:

If the group's admin likes you, talk about sponsoring a post where you can tell people to like your page as you share similar kind of information over there.

5. Start your own group:

Not around your products but niche. If your product is Protein shakes, try making the best FB group in the health and nutrition niche. It will give you a chance to keep nurturing your leads. Hire fitness experts to do Ask Me Anything in the group and promote the group on their own social media.

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Snippets

• Googling symptoms only tells you which disease has the best SEO.
• In sales and marketing, your goal is to build excitement not explaining a feature (by @domm)
• YouTube officially begins testing the ability to discover and purchase products featured in YouTube videos. It was rumored back in October.
• Instagram is working on an option to hide the like count in a post. You can hide the like count directly during post creation by going to the "Advanced settings" section.

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Worth Reading

1. 56 online communities for entrepreneurs

2. Five landing page mistakes indie hackers keep doing over and over

3. Lessons learned growing to 5k MRR as a single developer

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