Turning Window Shoppers Into Loyal Customers with Max Bidna

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast. Our guest today is Marketing Max, a serial entrepreneur and seasoned marketing strategist who has played a direct role in the growth of over two over 200 companies. He has founded his advertising agency in Hell's Kitchen, New York City in early 2017 and has since worked with over 120 companies across multiple countries. Max's agency boasts an impressive average client revenue of $4.22 to every dollar spent on advertising. Thanks to their proven growth advertising process, Max has also built and sold an award winning seven figure ad agency and build a personal audience of over 220,000 followers. He has driven over 100 million in attributable revenue through various marketing channels. Max, hey, welcome to the show.

Max Bidna:

Thanks so much for having me, Andy. Good to be here.

Andy Splichal:

So you've helped over 200 companies grow through your advertising agency, angel investing and advisory work. Can you share some key strategies and principles that you believe are critical to achieving such consistent success?

Max Bidna:

Uh, yeah, there's, there's a million things that go into having success in business and having success in marketing. It's kind of like a giant jenga piece. You got to have everything in line or it's not going to work, you're not going to get to where you want to be. But a few things that I talk about a lot and that I've seen, uh, my clients have a ton of success with. Number one is you have to have something that people wake up wanting every single day. You have to have something that people actually want. And if your product is not something that people wake up wanting every single day, then you need to make your marketing message and your marketing copy in your ads and on your website and your social content and everything else tie back to something that people want. So if you sell, Nike is a great example of this, right? They sell shoes, they sell shirts and running pants and running shoes or whatever.

Max Bidna:

People don't wake up every day saying, you know, I really need a new pair of sneakers. Some people do, but that's not, that's not most people, right? Most people wake up every day wanting to run faster. They want to look cool, or they want to impress their significant other, or they want something very, very, very specific. And so if you can tie your product or service back to the thing that they want every day, you know, if you're selling business services, you know, people want to make more money, they want to increase their profit margin, they maybe want to get more leads, get more clients. If you can tie whatever it is that you sell back to something that people wake up wanting every day, you know, people just tune in more, they, you know, they kind of double click on, on your brand more. And so that's the first thing I always talk about with clients, is you gotta sell something that people want. And so what I do a lot with my clients is I work on this exercise that I came up with called the carrot exercise. You basically want to find the juiciest carrot that your target, ideal customer profile wants.

Max Bidna:

And then you never ever, ever stop reminding them that if they buy you a product or service, they will get that really, really, really juicy carrot. And with my agency, I use this exact strategy, this carrot strategy, this carrot workshop, to realize what do our target clients want? At the end of the day, of course, everyone wants to make as much money as possible from their ads, but net net, our target customer were startups and smaller brands, and those people don't have a lot of budget to test and they really need to make every penny go as far as possible. So if I came out and said, hey, you know, we're an advertising agency and our strategies help you, uh, make all of your dollars go farther, that's semi compelling, that's kind of cool. But at the end of the day, like what do they really want? What do they really, really, really want? Well, they want to turn $1 into $2, $3, $4, $5. And so early on in our agency, we had about 15 clients and we made a list of all of the trailing 90 days return on ad spend for all of our clients. And it was about a 4.84.9 x return on ad spend. It's since gone down as Facebook ads, has gotten more expensive. But immediately we just kind of went to the market and said, hey, we help companies make $4 for every dollar they spent on digital ads.

Max Bidna:

And if you're a startup that doesn't have a whole lot of money, you need to make your pennies go further, of course. But just explaining it that way was way more juicy. Right? It's like a machine. You could put a dollar in and get $4 out. So, you know, that's kind of an example of how I think about, you know, taking something that people want every day and just making it the juiciest, sexiest way possible. It really, really, really helped our agency grow, because every agency on the planet says, we're a digital ad agency. We help you grow. We help you make more money.

Max Bidna:

Our strategies work really well. We can help you increase your revenue by 20% in 30 days. It's like, that is so hard for people to calculate. It's not juicy, it's not sexy. And so how can you just figure out what is the juiciest, sexiest carrot you could possibly dangle in front of your target client? So that's one.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, I mean, let's talk about those numbers. So you say 422, you get out for every dollar you spend. Can you walk us through that growth agency or growth advertising process and explain what sets that apartheid from other agencies? Is it what you just said with the carrot, or is there more to it?

Max Bidna:

Yeah. So our secret strategy, and just for context, I ran the agency for five years and sold it to a small private equity fund two years ago. So I don't run the agency anymore, but I still use the same framework, the same strategies, the same blueprint, the same everything for my current fractional CMO clients that I work with and all of my one on one consulting clients and everything. But, yeah, we kind of pioneered this way of testing that most other agencies don't do, especially at our price point, and we called it growth advertising. You hear a lot in the tech world and in startup world about growth marketing, where the CMO and the CRO intersect, very data driven, numbers driven, spreadsheet driven marketing and advertising. But no one really applied that science to advertising. And so we came up with our strategy, which we called growth advertising. And what we would do is we would sit down with a new client.

Max Bidna:

We would as TR, as best as possible, try to understand who their target customer was. We would absolutely do that carrot workshop to see what is that main juicy, sexy carrot that we can dangle in front of their target audience. Or sometimes the clients would have two or three target audiences. So we'd come up with a different carrot for each. And then what we would do is we would come up with three completely different marketing messages and angles and themes as best as possible to articulate that carrot to the target audience. And so the example that we used in our kickoff deck was Geico. Right? Geico's tagline is, you could say 15% or more on your car insurance by switching to Geico. That is their carrot.

Max Bidna:

But they explain that, or they articulate that to their ICP and to their target audience a bajillion different ways. So they have the caveman, right? They have the gecko, they have the comedy skits. And so what we would do is we would come up with a. Our versions of the Gecko and the comedy skit and the, and the caveman. Obviously, they weren't those same things. We basically come with three completely different angles in order to make the punchline, whatever the carrot was, for the customer. And so that was something that we started pretty early on, and that's how we were able to generate such crazy returns, because we were testing significantly more creative. So we normally, for most clients, come up with three main themes or messaging skits, right? And then we would come up with five different creative elements for each, five different headlines and five different body copies for each.

Max Bidna:

And we would run those ads towards their target ICP to see which one did best, which, you know, creative. Out of the five, along with the headlines. Out of the five headlines, along with the body copies. Out of the five body copies, we would mix and match those to see which one performed the best. And then we would continue to iterate and optimize from there. And then every quarter or so, we would refresh the. With two or three new skits or messaging themes. Skits, not the right word in that context, but where were you running these ads?

Andy Splichal:

Is this on Facebook? On meta?

Max Bidna:

Yeah. So most of our clients, I'd say we would spend 70% to 80% of their budget on meta, and then the other 20, 30% would be on Google Ads. We were huge fans of Google search ads, not necessarily YouTube or display. We do a little bit of retargeting with display ads, but most of the time it was, for most of our clients, meta ads.

Andy Splichal:

Now, one of the topics that you've spoken about is turning window shoppers into loyal customers using targeted email newsletters. What are some of the most effective tactics that you recommend for converting a casual website visitor into a paying customer?

Max Bidna:

Yeah. Well, to go back to the first question of things that work exceptionally well for my clients and strategies that I use to find really crazy success in some cases, the first thing is the carrot, I would say. But the second thing is once you have that carrot, you need to dangle that carrot in front of people a bajillion times. So I meet with a lot of early stage entrepreneurs, a lot of startups, people early in their entrepreneur career, and they're like, hey, I ran a Facebook ad and it didn't work. I ran a Facebook ad, 5000 people visited my website and we got five purchases. Well, the truth is someone needs to see or hear your brand five times at the very least before they even decide if they're going to purchase your product or not. It's this old thing in marketing called the rule of fifths. Some entrepreneurs, or I shouldn't say entrepreneurs, sorry.

Max Bidna:

Some researchers and data experts have said that number is actually closer to 15 now because that study was done about 15 years ago and we see a lot more content and logos and brands now in our day to day life than we did 15 years ago. But you need to get in front of those target customers a million times. So one way you could do that is just retargeting them a shit ton. Excuse my french. I don't know if I'm allowed to curse here, but you can retarget them a shit ton on uh, on Facebook or with Google display network or whatever. But the best way to do that is actually with a newsletter because the newsletter that you would send from your brand costs $0 to get in front of them, right? If you were to go spend a bunch of money on Facebook ads or Google display network or YouTube retargeting or TikTok retargeting or Snapchat retargeting or anything, any one of those retargeting tools or platforms, you'd spend money to get in front of those people multiple, multiple, multiple times. But if you run a Facebook ad to your website and you have an exit pop up that says, hey, before you go, enter your email and we'll send you a 20% off code or enter your email and we'll give you this free ebook about how to sleep better if you sell a sleep product. Or we'll send you this free ebook about how to run Google Ads on your own.

Max Bidna:

You collect that email and you start sending emails to them every single week and you always include that carrot. It is by far and away the highest ROI marketing channel you could possibly introduce into your marketing strategy. No matter your product, no matter your service, no matter your revenue, no matter how big your list is. I've started to work with a lot of clients, literally who have like 300 people on their, on their email list. They basically export their Gmail contacts and they sell, you know, a $500,000 a year service. So they really only work with like five or six companies a year. It doesn't matter if your email list is two or 300 people, if every week you're providing value to them, and then you dangle that carrot and say, we can help you make $4 for every dollar you spend on whatever that is.

Andy Splichal:

Yeah, no, I mean, that's great advice. Let's talk about the value you'd provide, because that is where I think a lot of business owners might have issues, is you're not just sending them stuff for sale. You know, this is on discount. This is on that. What is some of the kind of value that you're providing in those newsletters?

Max Bidna:

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because it's probably one of the top two questions I get is, hey, we already send marketing emails. What's the difference between a marketing email and a newsletter? What's the difference between what we're sending now and a newsletter? And the truth is, 99% of companies that I meet with, they're sending marketing emails. And a marketing email is, hey, buy this product. We have a new product, it's 10% off. Or this product is almost out of service. Or here's a case study book a call. Here's a case study book a call. Here's a case study book a call.

Max Bidna:

What you want to do is you want to create a newsletter that has a different name than your company. So if your coMpany's name is, you know, Andy's t shirt company, right. You don't want the Andy's t shirt company newsletter. You know, if your t shirt company is in the golf nIche, let's just say I'm a golfer. Let's say it's in the golf niche. I don't have to play golf, but it was in the golf nIche. You want to create a newsletter called, you know, par under, or, you know, three under par. You want to create something under a completely different name than Andy's t shirt company's newsletter.

Max Bidna:

Right. And you would start sending value of some kind related to your product or service. So what that would look like for you guys or not, you know, in the hypothetical example here would be maybe you find the most viral golf tweets and TikToks and Instagram posts of the week, and you start sending that to people. Maybe every week you recap what happened in the PGA Tour and the LPGA Tour and the Champions Tour, right? Maybe you would do an in depth article about a particular topic in golf. Maybe like the industry, maybe you do a Q and a with a golfer about their favorite clothing brand and how they were able to break 90 or 80. There's a million different things that you could send, but the idea is if you create a separately branded newsletter and send value beyond just, hey, buy our product, you create something that people look forward to reading every week beyond just, hey, buy our product or service. And then you basically have your own ad inside of the newsletter. So it doesn't seem like, hey, we're just sending you this Q and A.

Max Bidna:

We're just sending you this in depth article about the golf industry. We're just sending you these viral golf tweets and TikToks and Instagram posts. Because at the bottom we always want to say, hey, purchase our product. If you put it separately branded and you insert your own ad in there, it doesn't feel as slimy or grimy. They don't feel like the readers don't feel like you're just sending this content just to be able to promote your product or service and hope that they buy more. It also gives you more flexibility so that you can promote different products or services. And it also adds an extra revenue stream because you can charge other brands who want to get in front of your audience to advertise in that newsletter as well.

Andy Splichal:

How do you get them to subscribe to the newsletter if it's branded different than your website? Somebody goes there and you say, here's 40% or 20% off your purchase. How do you get transfer from that than putting their email in to get that coupon to adding them to this newsletter?

Max Bidna:

Great question. So there's really two strategies to do this. The first is you would say, hey, enter your email here to subscribe to 300 Power newsletter and get 40% off our product. And what I like to say with my clients is I call it the Velvet curtain. You want to create something that's thick enough where you can pull back the curtain to say, hey, this is actually from Andy's t shirt company. But most of the time, as they start getting more sends, they don't really think about Andy's t shirt company. They really think about three under par. And that's why they read it.

Max Bidna:

And so long as the sender is, you know, three under par newsletter and not your brand, it starts to build brand affinity towards the newsletter separately than the actual company itself. So that's the first strategy is, you know, say, hey, you know, enter your email here to subscribe to a three under par newsletter. 40% off and you'll get 40% off. Or, and you'll get our ten minute video about how to improve your putting stroke or your golf swing or whatever the other strategy is. You can run Facebook ads just for people to sign up to the newsletter. So you wouldn't run Facebook ads, meta ads from your t shirt company's handle. You'd create a new Facebook page. You don't need any followers, just a dummy page with three under par with the logo of 300 par.

Max Bidna:

Say, hey, sign up for our newsletter. Then the moment someone purchases, you can ask them questions and say, how much money do you spend a year on golf clothes? What is your handicap? How good, how many weeks? How many times a week? How many times a week do you play? And so you start to collect this information on people, and then you can maybe start to introduce new products, new services. You can go to other vendors, other potential brand partners and say, hey, we can send an email list to the 700 people last month that said that they are, you know, a golfer who plays five days a week. It might be interested in your swing improvement app or your whatever. You start to collect a lot more data that allow you to segment lists and therefore promote your own products or services better. And then also monetize or create brand partnerships, like maybe a trade of some kind. So you can go to a golf app like that.

Andy Splichal:

I mean, in this example, it's great because, I mean, golf, I mean, people are super passionate about it. But what about industries where people, I mean, let's talk about it like a t shirt company where people aren't that passionate about. It's not their hobby, they're just looking, looking at a shirt or looking at apparel. How do you take that into a newsletter?

Max Bidna:

Well, at some point in your business, there is a defined ICP. You need to define who your ideal customer is and what they're interested in. And so if it's a regular t shirt business, you know, you, you, if you were to pull all of the people who come to your site or pull all the people who have ever purchased your product, right. You're going to understand their age, you're going to understand what influencers they follow. There's some overlap. And so if your core ICP happens to listen to the Joe Rogan podcast and loves the UFC, even though your product has nothing to do with the UFC, that just tends to be who your target audience is, then you'll find other influencers. You'll check out the content that they create, and you'll try to mimic their most viral posts, right? Or like, if you're a makeup brand, right? Kind of generic makeup brand. Like you're saying, you know, golf is not people super passionate.

Max Bidna:

If you're a makeup brand, there is some ICP there. There's 100%, some ideal customer profile. Maybe not 100% of your audience falls within this bucket, but if you look at, like, the highest spending people, the people who pay for your makeup every month, right, the people who come back, the most loyal fans, they probably all follow the same influencers. They all probably watch the same tv shows. They're all probably interested in the same thing. Your top 20 or 30% of customers, right? Not the, not 100% of them, but a lot of them will overlap. And so it's your job to find those overlapping. Like I said, influencers, tv posts age other brands and then create content that inserts yourself into the culture that they are already integrated into, assimilated in.

Andy Splichal:

So, I mean, it's great. And it's not just theory, because I saw that you bootstrapped your newsletter from zero to 100,000 readers and 500,000 in revenue in just a year. What were some of the critical steps that you took to achieve this kind of growth?

Max Bidna:

Yeah, I spent a ton of money on paid ads. That's the answer. No, there were a lot of learnings. And the whole time I was building the newsletter business in the first year, in 2023, because we launched the first real daily newsletter, kind of January 2 or January 3 of 2023. And, yeah, it got up to half a million in revenue. And in the first year, just from ad spend alone or not ad spend, but advertisers paying us to get in front of the audience, a few tricks about how to monetize the newsletter better. You don't want to sell off one. You don't want to sell one off ads at a time, because sometimes the open rate might be low on that day, or there's something else in the newsletter that really draws people attention away from the ad.

Max Bidna:

And you can't just run ads for one day on Facebook and expect people to click and fill out the form to become a lead or purchase your product or whatever it is. So a handful of tricks, including that only selling packages of ads, really monetizing on the lead gen side. So the moment someone signs up for a newsletter, we ask them what company they work at, how much money they spend a year on marketing, whether they have an agency or nothing kind of services theyre looking for, and then we can segment that list to say in the future, okay, if an advertiser comes to us and says, were an SEO agency and we want to get in front of cmos and CEO's of companies over a million dollars a year in revenue who are interested in SEO. I now have a list of 10,000 people that I can send a dedicated send to, and I can charge five to ten grand just for that one email, because if they get one client from it, they more than pay for itself and they know theyre getting in front of 100% of their target ICP. So on a B two B perspective, building a newsletter gives you the ultimate leverage, because now I'm able to acquire customers for anything I ever want to promote in the future or launch in the future. For literally negative dollars, I turn a profit on our monthly ad revenue. And so not only am I making money there, but then we have eight ads to sell across both of our daily newsletters every single day. I can't sell eight ads.

Max Bidna:

You know, I'm not the Super Bowl. I don't have that many eyes. I mean, there's not that much demand. So I can promote my own products or services in there. And a lot of people would say, oh, it's free marketing. Well, it's not just free, like, I'm literally getting paid. It's negative cost to acquire a customer because I make profit on the ad spend, right. And then from there I can go and promote my own products or services.

Andy Splichal:

So was this a newsletter? Was this newsletter strategy a part of your advertise an agency before you sold it, or is this something youve done since?

Max Bidna:

Something ive done since I launched the newsletter. After I sold the agency in, I think, yeah, October of 2021, took six ish months off. Wanted to figure out what I wanted to do next and just kind of enjoy life and decompress from the stress of agencies and the stress of agency life. And I built up a little following on Twitter. I think at the time I had like 10,000 followers after six months, and I launched a course and my course totally flopped. I think I had 20 purchases. And I got on the phone with a mentor and he said, don't launch a course, launch a newsletter. That afternoon, I bought the domain for the newsletter I wanted to launch because I came up with the idea for it pretty quickly.

Max Bidna:

And I started to send a weekly newsletter every single week with one marketing tip, basically what I called a growth hack. And after about three or four months, uh, we were booked out months and months and months in advance. After we started allowing advertisers to come in, we were booked out months in advance. And I realized that this business is a billboard business, right? It's just inventory. I need more inventory. If I'm booked three or four months in advance, I can't make money. And so that's when we launched the daily newsletter and really got into it. Um, you know, like I said, January 2 or third of 2023.

Andy Splichal:

And that's when, and so now are you, what are you up, are you working on the newsletter? Do you help others do this? What is your, I guess, what's your day to day look like?

Max Bidna:

Yeah. So the newsletter business really only takes up about ten or so hours of my time. I have an amazing team that runs that business. So 10 hours a week to that. And then now I'm launching software and service businesses on the back of the newsletter. So I launched an agency reviews platform like Yelp for marketing agencies called agencyReviews IO. Last year, I launched a service to help other brands start their newsletter called the newsletter team. Join Dash Tnt.com if you want to learn more about all the newsletter stuff that I just talked about.

Max Bidna:

And then we're going to be launching a handful of other marketing related services over the next nine to 18 months to plug into the newsletter and really build a portfolio of marketing software businesses and services businesses on the back of the 100,000 people that read our newsletter every single day.

Andy Splichal:

And what is the newsletter in case somebody listener wants to subscribe to it?

Max Bidna:

Yeah. So we have three newsletters. But if you go to growthdaily.com comma, you'll see a pop up very quickly for our main newsletter that goes out every morning, growth daily. We call it like the daily newsletter or the daily report for marketers and CEO's who are interested in learning marketing and who know that the lifeblood of their business is marketing. So every morning, 50,000 people get growth daily. Every evening, those 50,000 people and an additional 50,000 people that we drove through ads get the CEO report, which is a daily business news recap of the most important business headlines that happen during the day, while you yourself as a busy CEO, are too busy working and building your empire to catch up on and read. So we catch you up every day and then every Sunday, the combined master list gets growth hacks weekly, which is the original newsletter I launched. You know, before we launch the dailies, that's the domain I bought Growth hacks weekly.com dot and back that first day when my mentor said start a newsletter, don't start a course.

Max Bidna:

And yeah, that goes out to like 100, 607,000 people every single Sunday. So yeah, if you go to growthdaily.com, you can see all of it.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you would like to add before we wrap it up today?

Max Bidna:

Max no. Thank you for having me. I would just say if you have any questions on anything we chatted about, or if you want help with marketing at all, go to Twitter or x now and find me on Twitter. Arciting Max I respond to Twitter DM's more than text from my friends. So any thoughts, questions, help with anything, just dm me on Twitter arketingmax All.

Andy Splichal:

Right, well, thanks again for joining us today.

Max Bidna:

Thanks for having me.

Andy Splichal:

For listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on Max, you will find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center, available at podcast Dot make each clickcount.com we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information any of the services discussed in previous episodes? Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing, and I'll talk to you in the next episode.