1993 – Navigating Rising Advertising Costs and Building Customer Loyalty with Max Bidna

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:06With us right now, it is Max, aka Marketing Max. Marketing Max, you are found on the web at marketingmax.io. Max, it's great to have you. Thanks for having me here. Good to be here. All right. So give us an overview of your work and your impact in the world, who you serve. Yeah, super long story short, I started my career on Wall Street, actually, helping early stage companies raise capital. I royally bombed the series seven of the exam that everyone needs to pass in order to become a licensed investment banker and make a bunch of money as a partner at any investment banking shop in New York City.

1:45Two weeks later, one of my clients looked at me square in the face and said, I want you to run my Facebook ads. And I said, why do you want me to run your Facebook ads? I'm helping you raise your$5 million series A investment around. And she said, well, every agency I hire sucks. You're a millennial. I feel like you would be good at Facebook ads. And at the time I just bombed the series seven exam. I had no idea what my, what my future career would be. And, uh, I said, sure. And she gave me$2 ,000 in Facebook ad spend, which was a lot back then considering it would cost a fraction to get in front of a lot of people on Facebook, uh, back then as it does today, but she gave me$2 ,000 in Facebook spend.

2:22I turned that$20 ,000 or sorry, I turned that$2 ,000 into$20 ,000 in revenue in two weeks. totally booked revenue and immediately was hooked on Facebook ads, Google ads, landing page optimization, performance marketing. I just kind of went down a rabbit hole, ended up leaving my job on Wall Street a few months later, started an advertising agency and have been marketing max, helping companies grow and scale on the back of paid ads and a couple other services as well for the last, I don't even know, eight years, seven years, something crazy like that. Yeah. So this was the paid ads. This was what, around 2016?

3:01Yeah. When you first started and when your resume, it said millennial and your client said, yeah, good enough. Yeah. I launched her ads October of 2016. That was kind of like the first quote unquote client of my agency. use that case study to get a bunch more clients at the investment bank. And my pitch to them was essentially like, Hey, we're trying to help you raise capital from investors. The best thing that you could possibly tell investors is, you know, we have a, we have a marketing funnel where we put two grand in and we get 20 grand out, or we put even 5k in and we get 7k out, you know, that that's a funnel.

3:36We just need more money to put into that. You know, will you let me run your Facebook ads? And at the time at my very first client, the one that I took her 2k, I was like, I had no idea what the value of this was. So I was like, I'll do it for 250 bucks a month. Fast forward five years, I built a team of 15 people to execute the strategy that I used with her that still works to this day. It is very specific Facebook ad strategy. Yeah. Team of 15 people, seven figures in revenue and retainer business, worked with more than 125 customers from Fortune 500s, all the way down to a bunch of small local mom and pop shops doing any type of business or service you could possibly want.

4:11So, you know, if, if you've seen a Facebook ad for anything, I've probably ran their ad or more likely ran a competitor's ad. I mean, I've run ads for, you know, bondage lingerie to summer camp for adults, to children's swim goggles, to real estate, CRM, SAS businesses. I've, I've run an ad funnel for pretty much about everything you could possibly imagine. And then I ended up selling that business two years ago. So I started it and formally launched the agency February of 2017 and sold it October of 2021. Right. Is that still, are you, so do you still do that work today? So I am not involved in that agency that I sold to.

4:53I was kind of sticking around for six months. I have a four-year earner. So I'm still like friendly with the team and, and kind of keep an eye on what's going on. But yeah, I don't, I don't do any of that work today as part of that agency. I do manage Facebook ad and Google ad accounts for my fractional CMO clients. So basically, since I sold the agency, I've taken on at any given point, three to five different clients for fractional CMO work. And that's running their ads, but that's also setting strategy, optimizing their website, managing their own influencer marketing agencies that they have before I got on or CRO agencies or email marketing agencies that kind of act as a fractional CMO.

5:29So I'm definitely still like hands on keyboard, you know, managing a lot of ad spend. I love it. I'm a real practitioner of it, as Gary Vee would say. I love getting my hands dirty and clicking and typing away and coming up with ads and copy, but not at the scale of an agency. Maybe one day, but not today. Right. So I'm going to talk in just a moment about kind of your work and kind of more of a CMO role. And, you know, we'll certainly we'll talk about newsletters. But, you know, just kind of finish up talking about paid ads. It's a different world today than it was back in 2016. what would you say are some of the biggest changes that you see today in 2024 that maybe in years past?

6:12Again, it's just a completely different environment for those who think that you could just be kind of willy-nilly about it, and it's just an automatic ATM for anybody that wants to give Facebook some money today. Well, yeah, I mean, the main two differences, why it's no longer an ATM for everybody is number one, it's significantly more expensive. And number two, there's just significantly more competition. And those are not actually hand in hand, right? For some niches, for some offers, for some products, there's actually not a whole lot of competition on Facebook ads. So in some instances, that might still very well be a blue ocean as they would call it, right?

6:57In business school. but the the main thing and the main reason why it's no longer an atm machine is just because of the cost to advertise on facebook has gone up every 90 days since the platform launched because they're a publicly traded company and they need to increase their revenue every single quarter or their stock is going to go down so you know when i got that very first client where i turned that 2k into 20k you know it would cost us about two or three dollars to get in front of a thousand people on Facebook. Now, up until about a year ago, I was still running Facebook ads for that client.

7:30I kept them as a client after the acquisition, just because I had a personal relationship with them and they were my first client. Getting in front of a thousand people on Facebook today or about a year ago, but still today, would cost around 20 bucks. So literally a 10X increase to advertise is the main reason why it's no longer an ATM. It's the main reason why a lot of startups can't spend 2K and see even 2K back. Because in order to reach the same amount of people that we could reach in 2016, we have to spend 10X the revenue, or I should say 10X the ad spend. And so in order to recoup 10X the revenue, you either have to introduce bundles, you have to increase your price, you have to think about it more holistically from an LTV perspective.

8:17So maybe the first purchase someone makes on your, let's call it an e-commerce store, right? Maybe the first purchase is 50 bucks, but you know, that person over the course of the next three years is going to spend$400 with you because they'll spend 50 and then they'll want five more shirts and they'll buy shirts for a friend. So you know, the LTV is 400, you know, the strategy has changed from just trying to get as high as ROI as possible on the first purchase to what can we do to get someone in to give us a dollar, right? As quickly as possible for the least amount of ad spend as possible. And then really focusing on the LTV metrics, the marketing to existing customers to get them to come back and spend more.

8:53That's for an e-commerce example, right? For a software example, for a services example, it can still be a really, really, really effective channel because if you're selling an e-commerce product for 50 bucks, you're selling a t-shirt, you're selling a sweatshirt for 50 bucks, the lifetime value of that customer is not going to be anything more than, let's call it three or 400 bucks over five years, 10 years. But if you sell software and you sell software that's 50 bucks a month per person, or let's just say it's$10 a month per person at your company and you have 10 people at your company. Well, now you're making whatever that is, $50 a month times 12, right?

9:32You're making$500 in the first year. And if your software is good, that person's sticking around for years to come and that person grows, you'll add another member or another seat on the subscription. And so the LTV of software businesses, service businesses are much higher, right? And that's one of the ways I grew my Facebook ad agency or my Facebook and Google ads agency was I ran my own Facebook ads. Yeah. And so I would spend 10 ,000 bucks a month. And if I got one client out of it from the$10 ,000 that I gave Facebook, if I got one client, I knew that over the course of the next nine months, my profit from that one client would be 25 grand.

10:07So I spend 10 to make 25. That's a deal that any entrepreneur or any smart person would take all day. But after optimizing my landing page, after optimizing my sales calls a little bit, after optimizing our pricing a little bit. I was able to spend 10 grand every month on Facebook ads and close five new clients every month. I'd spend a thousand, make 25 grand. So certain businesses, Facebook ads make more sense for now because they are significantly more expensive. And that's not to say you can't make money on Facebook ads for an e-commerce store, but the days of being able to acquire a customer on an e-commerce store with Facebook ads for sub even$20, is just gone.

10:49Yeah. Max, obviously, you know, in your broader marketing strategy work, newsletters are something that you're very bullish on. Tell me more about that. Why is that potentially, you know, something that, you know, may not be on the front burner for many of us, but really ought to be? Yeah, it's a really good segue because as we talk about Facebook ads not working as well for a lot of different businesses, e-com or not, just because it's significantly more expensive, that's made entrepreneurs and marketers shift the focus more to the LTV, like I said before, right? Not just thinking about, you know, I spend 50 bucks to Facebook and I get someone to purchase a product for 50 bucks.

11:34Ooh, that's not making a lot of money, but thinking holistically, okay, if that person's going to come back and buy a bunch more shirts, or like I said to the example of my agency, if that person is going to spend five grand a month with my agency for nine months or 12 months, right? The LTV is significantly more. One of the ways to increase LTV without spending a ton of money on retargeting ads or any other marketing is for companies to create their own branded newsletter. And when you think about it, the biggest companies of all time, whether they're consumer or b2b they spend a shit ton excuse my friends i don't know if i'm a lot of curse on this podcast but they spend a ton of money on remarketing to people it's why geico spends billions of dollars a year on tv commercials so that way the moment you're ready to get car insurance you think of geico because they're top of mind but how can you do that as an entrepreneur as a marketer how can you stay top of mind that when someone's ready to purchase your product when they're finally ready how can you do that without spending a billion dollars to be in every single TV commercial break for eternity, you do that with the newsletter.

12:46Because the moment someone purchases a product on your website, you have their email. Or the moment they book a call with your agency to potentially hire you guys, you get their email. Or the moment they land on your website and they don't purchase something, but they scroll up to the top and the top 10 % and a pop-up comes up that says, would you like 10 % off? Would you like 20 % off? You collect their email. So with those emails, Now we can go deliver them value every week or maybe even daily if you want with value relating to your product and what you know they'd be interested in. So if you're an e-commerce store and you sell skincare, right, every week you could send a new makeup tutorial about how to do eyelashes, how to do, I don't even know, lip gloss, whatever.

13:28You could send a different one. And then at the bottom of every single newsletter, hey, whenever you're ready, this new product, this new color of our lip gloss, this new color of our eyeshadow would look great for this particular thing, right? Or if you're a marketing agency, right, and you sell SEO services every week, here's one tip for you to improve your SEO on your own. And then if you write four paragraphs about that tip, hey, here's how you could do it without hiring us. In between those four paragraphs, so after the first two paragraphs, you'd put a case study. hey, we recently helped Josh's company do X, Y, and Z.

14:02We can do the same for you. Book a call here. Right? It's a way to consistently stay top of mind without coming across as salesy because you're delivering value and without needing to spend a bunch of money on Facebook ads to retarget them or TV commercials or radio commercials or any other sort of retargeting. And what a lot of companies do that I meet with, they say, Max, I send a bunch of emails. I have a drip sequence. I send a drip sequence. And then I look at their emails and every single email is buy our product. We have a new product. Here's 20 % off. Sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sale, sell.

14:32Buy my shit, buy my shit, buy my shit. Marketing is like dating. You can't just go up to someone and say, do you want to marry me? You can't go up to someone and say, do you want to go home with me? Doesn't matter who it is, right? The best way to have even a better experience for yourself, even if someone does say yes to either one of those things, is to buy them a drink and tell them a joke and make them laugh a little bit, right? The newsletter helps you do that. And so that way, when they show up to the call, if you have a sales call funnel, right? Not e-commerce, but if you have a sales call funnel, they show up pre-sold.

15:02They've already seen your case studies. They've already seen the value that you've delivered for them. It's just like the best marketing strategy on planet earth is for companies to have a newsletter. And there's a million other value points to that. I mean, it opens up another monetization stream because you can have ads in your newsletter for people who want to reach your audience, but it is the best way to increase LTV. it's the best way to convert ghosted or, you know, old, old leads, old people who abandon cards, the best way. It's not just email them. Hey, book a call. Hey, here's a new case study.

15:37Hey, here's a new case study. It's to deliver value, deliver real value. I call it the honey pot marketing strategy, right? You're giving them honey. You're giving them sweet, sweet, sweet honey. And then once they're, once they're on it, they open it every time. And whether it's the second newsletter they get or the 20th newsletter they get or the 200th newsletter they get, right? They will be at the right moment in time thinking, man, you know what? I do want to book a call. We need SEO help. Or, you know, we just raised$5 million in venture capital. Or we just had a really good month. I want to spend some money on SEO.

16:08I'm tired of doing this myself. I need to hire Josh's company, Max's company, whatever. I need to hire these people. So, you know, the biggest thing I could possibly advocate for, for any entrepreneur listening or for any marketer listening, or for anyone who's really just trying to make marketing a little bit easier is to launch a newsletter. And it doesn't really matter what the content is, so long as it's not asking for a sale and promoting some product. Absolutely. Curating news in your industry. I mean, man, if you have, and forgive me if I'm rambling or tell me to shut up at any point, but if you have a cosmetic brand, and you're like, man, what do I send every week?

16:45I'm not gonna send a tutorial tip every week. Literally go on TikTok, find the five most viral fashion, beauty TikTok, of the week and curate an email every week to your email list with the five most viral cosmetic tutorials on TikTok and link to all of them. Like that's it. That's the whole newsletter. You don't need to hire a writer like I have for a couple of my newsletters and pay them$6 ,000 a month like I do. You can have an intern do it. You can have a virtual assistant do it. You could do it yourself. Calendar block 30 minutes every week, every single week to go on TikTok, find the most viral tweets or the most viral TikToks, or if you're on Twitter, the most viral tweets in your industry, in your niche, and be the person that curates it for them, for your community.

17:32And then in between all those five tweets that you send out, hey, if you want help with SEO work, book a call. Yeah, it's really interesting. You're looking for a new whatever. Yeah. Buy this now. Yeah. You know, what's really interesting, Max, is, you know, you're not necessarily talking about Like, you don't have to create all of this from scratch. You know, it's kind of like you and I talking about this before. You know, we started to record. It's like, listen, this is your world. Like, my audience is doing thousands of other things. But, you know, if they can say, listen, you are my go-to, guys.

18:06You're my eyes and ears for everything in X. Then I know that I can trust you. Also, the power of curation is now I kind of look at you a little bit more objectively, right? Because you're not using that platform to just sell, sell, sell, sell, sell. I feel like I can trust you to kind of be my bird dog for all things that are out there, independent of your own, what most marketers do. They use platform to promote and sell themselves. One thing, one final thing I want to ask you, Max, is I'm a big fan of well as well. Like I love the idea of curating these things. And another thing too is personal connection, right?

18:49So we can kind of create that familiarity bias. Like if I feel like I'm getting to know you personally, like in our email list, we've got close to a 50 % open rate once a week. We give a lot of value in it. But I really try to keep that top part is just something very personal. Occasionally it's announcements about something that we think might be relevant, but most of the time it's a picture of my wife and I at Disney world or, you know, seeing, you know, me playing a bass guitar or something like that, you know, it's just connecting on a human level, um, you know, not to distract too much, but to remind people, Hey, I'm a human, you're a human, you know, we love what we each do.

19:28Um, but I've, I've had so many people then, you know, that at some point they book a call or whatever. And, you know, they just, they'll, they'll mention, Hey, I saw dot, dot, dot. How's that going? Right. And I just, I just think that's so cool. A hundred percent. One of my clients that I work with very closely is a really big EDM fan. I'm a huge EDM fan. I love electronic music. And his newsletter was very stale, very business. And so I said, okay, here's what we're going to do at the beginning of every single newsletter, similar to you, we're going to have one sentence and we're going to rotate between either a new EDM song that you love or he loves guns.

20:04I'm not a gun guy, but or a new gun video that you watched on YouTube or, you know, we're going to have four pillars and you're going to rotate through each one of those four pillars. That way people get to know the depth of you. They get to see the layers of you. They know that you're not just an EDM fan. You also like to shoot guns. You also your kids also like Disneyland. You're also a father. So you talked about, man, you know, my kid was sick last week. Anyone else struggling with, you know, having a sick kid and trying to work at the same time, like creating layers for people to get to know you within, you know, four cents.

20:37Now that they know that you like EDM, you like guns, you're a dad, like one of those things, someone will relate to you. And so, oh, and then later down after five, six, seven cents, right? You show a case study. Hey, here's the work that I do. I'm an amazing SEO strategist, whatever. that's like man he's a dad like me he loves edm like me and he's really good at seo i want to hire someone like me but that just happens no seo how much more powerful is that than sending an email saying hey here's another case study yeah and uh you want to book you want to work with us this month here's our special 10 off forever give a shit excuse my french about 10 off yeah yeah the relationship to your point moves them yes yeah absolutely and that's the uncompetitive advantage, right?

21:25No one can compete with that personal relationship. Max, your website is marketingmax.io. I will say you're a great LinkedIn follow, but do you mind maybe just sharing a bit about to our friend that's been listening value that they can get from connecting and engaging with you and where that would be? With me, I spend the most amount of my time on Twitter. So sometimes my friends know me, you know, if I, if they texted me in the morning and my phone's turned upside down, they'll get a faster response from me on Twitter. The value of connecting with me, man, I'm on a mission to just make marketing easier for people.

22:01Marketing is the lifeblood of our whole world. As crazy as that sounds, right? These products wouldn't be sold. Entrepreneurs wouldn't exist. People wouldn't have jobs if it wasn't for marketing. I don't care what your job is. If there's not someone in your team or in your company doing marketing, there's no revenue coming in. And if there's no revenue coming in, you don't have a job. You can't, if you're an entrepreneur and there's no revenue coming in because there's no marketing, you can't keep the lights on. You can't feed your family. Marketing is everything. And I heard this great quote like many, many, many, many years ago before I think I even got into marketing, which was basically like, you know, you need to get five or 10 years into your career, learn a bunch of stuff, and then go help all the other people who don't know what you know five to 10 years into your career is.

22:45And how do you learn the things over the next five to 10 years? You learn from people who have done it five to 10 years ahead of you. And so all I'm trying to do is take the lessons that I've learned spending tens of millions of dollars of other people's money on ad campaigns and managing so many influencer campaigns and SEO campaigns and so many just marketing strategies. I'm trying to take all of those lessons and give it away for free in my newsletter, with my Twitter content, on my TikTok to 75 ,000 followers. 100 ,000 people read my newsletter every single day. 100 ,000 people are getting free marketing tips, free marketing insight, not because I'm trying to sell them anything, just because it's my duty to go back and help people who are not as far along as I am to learn the things that I wish I knew when I was in their shoes.

23:28So the value of working with me or of partnering with me or of following me is just make marketing easier for yourself. Whether that's a conversion rate optimization strategy about how to get more of the 98 % of people who visit your website, but don't actually fill out the form to become a lead or purchase anything, how to get more of them to purchase your product or fill out the form, how to write a better Facebook ad, how to write better SEO content, how to create a newsletter. I'm working with a ton of their newsletter. I have a whole program that I'm pushing brands through to help them figure out exactly what kind of content to share, to figure out exactly where to get that curation content.

24:08Is it TikTok? Is it Twitter? I'm talking way too fast. is it TikTok? Is it Twitter? Is it Google News? If you literally go type into Google News, Marketing Industry News, then you click the little tab under Google that says News, right? You'll get all of the day's news. You could summarize all of those things, send it to people, boom, you have a marketing newsletter. You could plug it into ChatGPT and have it summarize it for you. Boom, you have a newsletter. It's crazy, crazy how simple it is to make a newsletter that can radically transform your business. Radically. So yeah, Yeah, marketingmax.io is my website.

24:41But if you want to get my most up-to-date content, my freshest tips, and you want to have a conversation with me, DM me on Twitter, at marketingmax. Yeah, that's me. Awesome. Marketingmax, thank you, Mo. So much for joining us. Your website again, marketingmax.io. Thanks, Max. Thanks for having me.

25:09Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.