In this instructional video, agency owner Joshua Nelson outlines a three‑part framework for acquiring retainer‑based clients through Facebook advertising. He first situates the approach within his broader "Agency Growth System," which schedules daily‑to‑quarterly actions to keep a steady pipeline. The core framework consists of (1) Targeting – using niche‑specific prospect data to build custom audiences, augmenting them with retargeting and lookalike layers, and explicitly calling out the ideal vertical in ad copy; (2) Funnel – directing prospects to an application‑to‑appointment flow that leverages VSLs, testimonials, lead‑gen forms, and automated appointment reminders; and (3) Ads & Creative – employing attention‑grabbing images/video, lead‑gen forms, and reach campaigns to saturate small, tightly‑matched audiences. He shares tactical details such as loading prospect lists as custom audiences, combining them with retargeting audiences, running reach campaigns for audiences under 2,000, and using lead‑gen forms that trigger SMS/email workflows. Performance benchmarks are provided ($30‑$87 cost per requested appointment). The video concludes with a call‑to‑action for viewers to join his 7‑Figure Agency Roadmap program and invites questions in the comments.
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What's up, digital marketing agency owners? On today's video, I want to talk about how you can land clients, retainer-based clients within your niche using Facebook ads. So if you want to get more clients coming into your world pre-positioned to buy, you're going to want to watch this video. So when it comes to growing your digital marketing agency, we've got this thing called the Agency Growth System, which looks at the things you want to do daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly to keep your pipeline full and to keep clients coming into your world on a very, very consistent basis. Um, and kind of running Facebook ads touches this in a lot of different ways. A lot of people just think when it comes to running Facebook ads, you can just choose an audience, run some ads, take them to your calendar, and things will work, right? You have to have the right list data, you have to have the right message, and you've gotta have the right approach. And so, we use this model when it comes to thinking about Facebook ads specifically for your agency. Um, really there's 3 key things we have to solve for. Number 1 is targeting, right? You can have the best creative in the world, you can have the best funnel in the world, but if you don't have the targeting to laser target your right prospect, You're not gonna get off the first block. Second, what we've gotta do is we've gotta have the right funnel, right? So as we get the targeting right, we've gotta have the funnel we can bring people into where they can schedule in, they can get warmed up, they can enter our sales process. And then we've gotta have the right ads or the right creative, the right things we're running on Facebook to get that target market's attention and to get them to lean in. In terms of targeting, When it comes to running your agency, I'm a big believer that you want to be niche-focused, right? You want to be working in a very specific vertical. Our agency, which is now a multiple 7-figure agency, is Plumbing and HVAC SEO, and we work with plumbing and HVAC contractors. And now we've got over 87 agencies that have implemented this process and had built 7-figure and multiple 7-figure agencies. Each one chose a different niche, and so you have to know who you're serving. You have to understand that industry, and, and the question is, in a niche agency agency, can you really target your ideal prospects? The answer is yes, you absolutely can. You're going to use prospect data, custom audiences, and retargeting to make this work. If you go back to the previous slide, I talked about one of the main things we want to do is the cold outreach formula, right, where we've got prospect data, the names, addresses, phone numbers of the ideal prospects we want to do business with so that we can email them, so that we can mail them, so that we can pick up the phone and call them, so we can look them up on social media and connect with them. Well, we can use that same data and load it as a custom audience, right? And this is one of my favorite layers to, to say, hey, let's load this up, let's create a custom audience, and let's advertise to that audience. Now pay very close attention. You can do lookalike audiences, you can get creative with stuff, but what we found works best is get that custom audience loaded in, get it matched as tightly as possible, be doing other marketing in tandem to it to, to really have the right targeting in place. Now you want to combine that with retargeting. So if you're running webinars, if you're doing podcasts, if you're being, you know, in industry events and associations, people are gonna enter your website, they're gonna enter your funnel, and so we want to constantly be growing our retargeting audience combined with our custom audience, and that's how you can get really, really tight with who you're targeting. Now certain industries lend themselves to giving you the ability to Use some of the targeting options built into Facebook. They like a specific brand and they're a business owner. What we found works best is custom audiences and retargeting. You can really get this dialed in. You're never going to get perfect, perfect targeting. I think this is where a lot of agencies get hung up, and we did for a long time as well at Plumbing and HVAC SEO. Ah, but I only want plumbers, right? So if a roofing guy sees this, it's going to be a waste of money. It's going to be a waste of time. You're gonna have some overlap. There's no perfect targeting, but what you can do with your creative is call out who you want to speak to, right? You can call out, "Attention plumbing and HVAC business owners," uh, if you run a plumbing or HVAC business in your ad. That way your targeting and your messaging calls out the right audience, and you're telling Facebook, "Hey, this is the kind of person we want to really be hitting with these ads." and you get the right people in the funnel. So the first thing to solve for is targeting. We use custom audiences. We're gonna use retargeting, ideally with the other marketing we do, to flow as effectively as possible. Second to that, we've gotta have a great funnel, right? I've got lots of other trainings. If you wanna search the Ultimate Agency Funnel, you'll find me walk through exactly what we do and how we get people to raise their hand to opt in. Uh, but really what we found works best for Um, for our agency at this stage in the game is an application and an appointment, right? If you're doing a custom audience and you've already put out lots of value into the marketplace and you've got a little bit of credibility, especially because they're in your retargeting sphere, you can run an ad with testimonials, an ad with a VSL straight to an application where they say, hey, my name is Tom Jones and I'd like to schedule a time. And you know, they give you their details and then you leverage the appointment automation to get them warmed up, excited to show up, prepositioned to buy. Go deep on that. If you get your funnel dialed in, you're gonna get people coming in, showing up, and a higher percentage close ratio on the backend. Now, on the final aspect of this is we've gotta run ads and creatives that capture attention. Obviously we've gotta set this up correctly, and there's some trainings we do specifically for 7 Figure Agency members on how to set up the targeting, how to make sure you choose the right ad outcomes that you're looking for. One thing I do want to say in this video, so I'm talking about how to land clients for your agency with Facebook ads, is oftentimes you want to be doing lead generation ads and you can use web forms for this, like the Facebook ad forms. I'll show you some examples. Works pretty well if you've got some questions that stack the authority, but also Don't, don't sleep on running reach campaigns. If you've got a custom audience and it's only 1,000 or 2,000 prospects, and let's say Facebook only matches 50% of that, maybe they do less, you've only got 500 prospects that you're targeting. That's not enough data for Facebook to be able to really just focus on lead generation and what's converting. But with a reach campaign, you can say, "I could care less whether it converts. I want those 500 people to see my ads again and again and again and again and again and again." You can develop omnipresent positioning in your industry. So don't sleep on reach. It's not just a brand play. If your custom audience is just those 500 prospects, you can saturate their, their feed, right? They're seeing you again and again. You do that through reach campaigns. And then obviously ongoing optimization, right? You can't set this and forget it. You wanna be looking at which creative is getting the best click-through rate, you wanna make sure you're optimizing your ad spend, there's lots of different things to think about. Let me know if you have questions on this. This model, I'm talking super high level here, but this model works well. If you get the targeting, the funnel, and the ads dialed in, you can get a consistent flow of your ideal prospects showing up on your calendar, interested and excited about doing business with you. I talked a little bit about the Ultimate Agency Funnel where it talks about, you know, giving them a lead magnet that gets their attention, getting them to a schedule page, getting them to the calendar. What I found works best with Facebook ads is VSLs and testimonials and image ads straight to lead forms. Right now that tends to work best. So let's say they get to the website because they were looking at one of our webinars or reading one of our blog posts. Now they're gonna see ads And we found a family-based picture of me, well, for whatever reason, tends to work well because it's very organic. A picture of our team and then videos of our clients. Hey, my name is Bob the Plumber and I hired Plumbing and HVAC SEO when I was a 5-man operation and now I'm doing, you know, 17 trucks. These guys got me ranked, they got my phone ringing. And then below that it's like, hey, you want to get similar results? Um, go ahead and schedule, right? We take them straight to to the schedule page in our funnel, that works really, really well. And so I've got some examples of this. You know, type Facebook ad library if you'd like me to share some of our best performing Facebook ads and kind of the strategies that work best. What we found, when we get the targeting dialed in, we get this all running, again, I at this point have moved more towards lead ads. So it's like literally an ad and they're filling in the form on Facebook I have a bunch of questions in that form and then it triggers a workflow that reaches out to them via SMS and email and moves them to appointment. We found that works really, really well. And we're averaging between $30 and $87 per requested appointment on Facebook. So that means we're able to spend, we're able to get appointments, we're able to keep our sales team's calendar full, and of course this strategy is something you can scale up. Or you can scale down as you need and kind of as you grow the business. Hopefully this has been helpful. If you have follow-up questions on how to leverage Facebook to land clients, type them in the comments here. If this was valuable, please hit the like button, hit the subscribe button so you can get more of our new ideas and strategies. If you're just getting into our world and you'd like to learn more about the philosophy and how to land clients and grow your agency to 7 figures and multiple 7 figures over the next 12, to 24 months, I've got a great training I'm making available called the 7-Figure Agency Roadmap Implementation Program, and you can get that by going to 7figureagency.com/roadmap. So go there, check that out, let me know if you got follow-up questions, share this with another agency that you think would benefit, and I look forward to seeing you on a future video where we're talking about how to land clients, deliver world-class results, retain your clients at the highest level, and scale your digital marketing agency so you can make more money, have more freedom, and have a bigger impact. I'll talk to you soon.
