On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Jake Madoff. Jake is a freelance full-stack growth marketing leader and Founder at JakeMadoff.io, helping e-commerce and service based businesses increase their revenue with paid media on Google, Meta, YouTube, TikTok, and more. We talk about the holistic approach of growth marketing, maximizing ROI with limited ad budgets, understanding channel personalities, and so much more!
Jake Madoff is a full-stack growth marketing leader, specializing in growth marketing strategy, paid social, paid search, SEO, and CRO.
He’s led growth at three multi-million dollar startups—Bespoke Post, Sealed, and Everytable and founded three startups of his own.
Through his 8-year freelance career, he has worked with over 100 brands like HUM Nutrition, Home Chef, Renaissance Capital, Kindo AI, Strategic Coach, Threadbeast, Jean Dousset, Partake Foods, TradeMark Engine, and many more, ranging from small ($5K-$10K monthly spend) to large-sized media budgets ($2M+ monthly spend).
He helped these brands to optimize and scale their existing paid media campaigns, improve funnel conversion rates, evolve their creative strategy, and diversify their paid media marketing mix across different paid channels.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Jake Madoff
I think it's worth learning. If you know paid social, learn paid search. If you know paid search, learn paid social. A growth marketer is defined as someone that can play in both spheres.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today, I'm welcoming the show Jake Madoff. Jake is a freelance full stack growth marketing leader.
He's helping Ecommerce and service businesses increase their revenue with paid ads using Google, Meta, YouTube, TikTok and more. Jake, welcome to the show.
Jake Madoff
Great to be here. Excited to talk through some full stack solutions.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I'm excited to get into it. So obviously, these days, you are out on your own. You've hung your own shingle, as they say. But talk to me about your history.
How did you cut your teeth in this business? How did you learn? How did you end up where you are now?
Jake Madoff
Yeah. I started on the classic startup route. I had two startups of my own about 10 years ago that got some funding. One was an Ecommerce, kind of an affiliate revenue driven Ecommerce shop. And then the other one was an iOS trade and barter application.
So the affiliate revenue Ecommerce site really taught me the fundamentals of margin, of SEO, of just what is an affiliate program. For that I leveraged, you know, at that point it was called CJ or, you know, I think they changed their name or got bought by like A-win or something at this point.
SEO where I was really trying to compete with pretty significant players in the space where I was ranking for, you know, the classic style of product listicles, which now almost every big publication has, CNN has their spinoff, NBC has their spinoff, CBS has their spinoff.
They all have an equivalent spinoff for a product blog where it's like the best 10 products for dot dot dot. And those were the kind of articles I was writing and trying to rank for and collecting affiliate revenue for.
And then TradeMade was an iOS trading barter app that taught me kind of the more core fundamentals of paid media. And then parlayed that into working for Bespoke Post, where I worked for about five years on lead growth there.
That was fantastic. I started in 2017. We were spending, you know, maybe two or 300 a month in ads and then we scaled up about $2 million a month in ad spend and acquired hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
And I really like to say at Bespoke Post, any channel that you can run ads on, we ran ads on it. We tested everything from direct mail, podcasts, Reddit, Quora, Meta, YouTube, Taboola, content marketing channels, offline, online, core channels, experimental ones.
Over that time, but over the last several years more prominently, I've been working more on the freelance side. I've worked with over 100 brands like HUM Nutrition, Home Chef, Kim's and Hers, Trademark Engine, just really ranging the gamut of e-commerce, B2C, and employing full stack solutions across ads on meta, YouTube, Google search.
I'm finding really great success in just an omnichannel approach now. I'm really enjoying that strategy of having an on-the-channel approach going forward.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing, Jake. I want to go back to the beginning a little bit.
I've been reading a lot lately, especially around startups and I feel like something that maybe is not as obvious to young entrepreneurs is they have a cool idea and they build their product. This could be a physical Ecommerce product. This could be like a SaaS tech product. And they get caught up on perfecting this product when the number one driver of success for a startup, I'm learning, is sales.
And you get those sales through marketing and advertising, which is what you were learning how to do because you had to.
What advice would you have for marketers out there that have a startup and they are struggling to find product market fit, or struggling to find those initial customers?
Jake Madoff
It's a great question. Some of it is case dependent. I've just had this conversation on another podcast called Amazon Legends, where I was saying how there are some marketers that are more object driven and some of them are process driven.
I would say, take a step back from the product itself. If you're finding some degree of a failure with a given product launch, take a step back and really start doing more consumer research, seeing if it's price, if it's a feature of the product, if it's an application of the product.
Once you get those insights, really just test and do it. I see a lot of the time this kind of analysis paralysis where you almost make perfection the enemy of moving forward in a way where you want it to be perfect by the time you launch and you just keep delaying and delaying and I find the best solution is really just, if it's close to there, just launch it, let your consumers tell you.
And there are a lot of services you can use to get that feedback pretty quickly. usertesting.com is a great one for that, that I used even at the spoke post when we were launching new product features.
But at the end of the day, just push it out if it's close and collect that feedback over time and you can iterate. Nothing is permanent. And it's good not to be wedded to something either in the early stages because it will change. It will absolutely change.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. And shout out to UserTesting. We use that for CRO stuff at the agency as well. It's a fantastic tool that has a lot of different use cases.
Jake Madoff
Yeah, totally.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. So thank you for asking that straightforward question.
I'll tell you the truth, listeners. I know some of these answers before I ask them because I know the right answers from smart people. And I just want to always bash that over the head that perfection is the enemy of progress, like Jake said.
Just get out there. Get it in front of people and get feedback. That's the only way that you're going to get to that next level for your business.
Let's talk a little bit about Bespoke Post.
Is there a story or something that you did there that stands out to you during that time that was really like, wow, I know what the hell I'm doing?
Jake Madoff
Yeah. Great question. There was so much. There was really so much that was done at the channel level, the creative level, the targeting level.
I would say like three big insights that I took away from that where I was like, damn, that was a cool idea and something that I'm still using today. One is building high value lookalikes.
So five to seven years ago, lookalike audiences were the gold standard on paid social targeting. Pinterest, Meta, Snapchat, they were all fighting for who has the best lookalike functionality for targeting.
Some people would just upload like a customer list just of emails. And at Bespoke Post, we were like, “How can we improve this?” And we did different SKUs of what we called HVLAL, which are high value lookalikes.
Now, that idea seems a bit more common to maybe the more experienced marketers listing, but there are different SKUs, slices you can do for your data.
So imagine lookalikes where you're taking the top 50% and you're including customer value in that and uploading that as a high value.
It's really powerful to do a look-alike on just AMEX users. So if you click payment method and you have that in your spreadsheet, associate a payment method with the email address and upload that and only filter for AMEX users. Those tend to be higher quality.
So those are some interesting ones that we really found successful at the targeting level.
It's really important also to send the most accurate data as possible through your Pixel. So make sure you have a conversion API on.
We got pretty playful with it where we were sending like, basically, with a subscription, there are multiple steps of the funnel. So this may not really work for standard Ecomm, but if you're a subscription Ecomm, see if you can actually feed the pixel back in down from events, like first box take rate.
If you're a subscription box company, see if you can feed back in not only the first purchase, but the first box or second box and feed that information back to the pixel, because then you can actually give that Pixel another high value signal.
On the creative side, at the time, cinemagraphs were really big. Cinemagraph is a type of ad creative where it's like, imagine an image of a cup of coffee, for example, and you can animate the steam.
So everything else is still, but there's one kind of thing, an animation in motion. This was before the video was really big.
And whenever we started launching these cinemagraphs, I was building them with a few animation apps, and they started just blowing up. We would use our cigar boxes and whiskey. So you do whiskey smoke with it, and that was doing really, really well.
And then lastly, I'd say just from a channel level, it was really exciting and powerful just to test across so many channels where you just really start to develop an intuition for the personality of these given channels. Although that's not really something that I can communicate in a transferable way. That was like a moment for me. I was like, “Oh shit, wow, that's crazy.”
I feel like I am stepping into the mind of these algorithms where I'm understanding why they're changing. I can drill down to the metric that's telling me this is why CTR is changing. This is what it means to exit learning. This is how volatility looks after you make a big change on an ad set or a budget.
And those were some pretty big moments.
Chase Clymer
Maybe I can help you out there. I would say the people you're targeting on Reddit are going to be insanely different from the people that you're targeting on Instagram.
Jake Madoff
Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I do want to go back. You were talking about creating these lookalike audiences. And so what you were doing is you were using the data from your CMS from, like, Shopify. Let's just use Shopify, for example.
So you're exporting your customers from Shopify and then you just filter by total lifetime spend and you just take the top 50%. You make a custom audience from that and that's where you're creating your lookalike from?
Jake Madoff
That's correct. Top 50%. Lifetime value.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
And then the other golden nugget there was that Amex user. I've never heard that before. That's a fantastic piece right there.
Not to completely take this off the rails, but last week or two weeks ago, we're recording this in February, everybody, Shopify announced their winter editions thing. And there was a lot more information they put out there about the Shopify audiences.
Have you had any experience using Shopify audiences in your ad campaigns lately?
Jake Madoff
Yeah, I started passing it back into the audience centers across the audience libraries across the platforms. I'm not seeing too much of a difference in just taking the more manual approach. It seems like it's almost like a faster, more dynamic option versus the manual approach. It's pretty similar so far.
Chase Clymer
Shopify, at least how I saw it is Shopify is almost pivoting their resources with their network. Let's be real. Shopify powers over 50% of the best websites on the internet, and Shopify Payments powers the payments on most of those websites.
So Shopify has all that information and what they are getting into is they are building lookalike audiences that are just like Facebook's lookalike audiences.
So now you've got some cooler stuff to play with. And all this stuff can then tie into your email ERP, Klaviyo or what have you, to do some crazier stuff.
Jake Madoff
Yeah, exactly.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Awesome. Alright.
So after Bespoke Post, is that when you went out on your own and started doing full stack for all these other brands, independent of their size?
Jake Madoff
It is. Yeah. I mean, I was freelancing on the side during Bespoke Post and once I kind of made that transition, it really started to take off.
And I was kind of selling it as I'm bringing, you know, enterprise level experience at big budgets to smaller brands that are maybe spending between, you know, 10 or five and 50 K per month, working with that small to medium sized Ecommerce or DTC business, and then bring this larger experience over.
A lot of that came from, like I mentioned, just the understanding of the auction algorithms, the way you can build modular testing with Ad Creative. So Cinemagraph is one example.
The other example that I've written a few articles on is like building this creative scorecard where you build creative modularly, like a modular piece of creative where imagine a 30 second video, you have the first five seconds where you just do different hooks.You stack on the latter 25 seconds. So you have like several versions of these 30 second videos, but all you're doing is just changing the hook because that has the biggest indication.
So all these strategies that were fleshed out, tested and proven over years with large budgets, statistically significant results, which is harder to do with smaller budgets, bringing that over to smaller brands and businesses.
And yeah, just over the last five to seven years, just really enjoyed working with a very diverse set of businesses across health, lifestyle, whether it's apparel, even working for companies that are selling more supplements or Monjaro, those types of products have been pretty big and interesting to work with. A few companies are now entering into that space.
So it really ranges, yeah, from apparel to health to beauty products, furniture, it ranges, but it's been a lot of fun learning and translating those results.
Chase Clymer
You mentioned that you'd written some articles. Where can I find those?
Jake Madoff
Those are on Raisin Bread, which I believe is the MarketerHire platform. I'm releasing two on TopTal and then there are some others on Growth Collective. They're all pretty much around.
Some are like how to build the perfect campaign structure. Others are around great tactics and strategies for audience targeting and create it to have worked. And in those articles, I include my own case studies as well. So you can see the references.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. We'll make sure to link to a few of those in the show notes.
I feel like I should have asked this at the beginning.
Now, what is the difference for someone that hasn't been hired for this role before? Is a growth marketer just an ads guy? What's the difference?
Jake Madoff
In my mind, it's interesting to see paid social and paid search where I do find some people really do like to separate out. In my mind, it depends on the size of the company, but a growth marketer should be full stack in a way where it's not too different, where I think it's worth learning.
If you know paid social, learn paid search, if you know paid search, learn paid social. A growth marketer is defined as someone that can play in both spheres, but that also is not only an expert in targeting and campaign structure, but needs to be an expert in creative.
So almost always whenever I work with new business, I say in addition to being a growth marketing technician where I'm building out campaigns that are configured correctly and that are testing and using best practices from a structure and targeting standpoint, I'm also wearing a performance creative director hat where I'm working with your creative team.
I'm passing learnings to them on patterns that are working in your ad creative, and then giving those learnings and making recommendations for iterations on new creatives and new concepts to your creative team.
I think having that multi-channel approach with an analytical plus creative approach, those are kind of how much, if I were to steal my answers, those four kinds of qualities I would say are most important in today's growth marketer.
Chase Clymer
And what I'm hearing is it's definitely more of a partnership and you're not going to upcharge for your opinion on anything else or helping out where you need to help out because your goal is the success of the campaign in its totality.
Where I feel like some people might be like, “I'm just doing the Google Ads. Leave me alone.”
Jake Madoff
Right. And so I'd say, the majority of my clients, I'm taking over from an agency. And I often hear, sometimes an agency approach is like, we stop at the purchase per se sometimes or like…I've stepped into accounts where they're just running traffic objective campaigns.
And that's a huge no-no for I think anyone that's a direct response or conversion driven brand, don't run a traffic objective campaign. Driving link clicks does not work, but it kind of stops at just the traffic. You don't even don't follow that user through to check out or purchase.
But yeah, absolutely. As a growth marketer, I think for Ecommerce, you kind of stop mid-funnel. Maybe there's a bit of a gray area between growth marketing and retention lifecycle, but absolutely. Once you get into, you're trying to improve that conversion rate and that comes with CRO, creative and campaign structure.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And I think you hit the nail on the head and I want to highlight that as well.
I believe it's like you also have opinions on what is going on within email accounts with retargeting with those as well because all of that plays into the performance of these overall campaigns that you're helping to architect.
Jake Madoff
Yes, absolutely. Yeah.
Chase Clymer
I don't want to put you on the spot here, but a lot of the listeners out there... They're smaller businesses. Let's be real. And they've got what you said, maybe like a $5,000 to $10,000 ad budget.
Now, myself, I cut my teeth in advertising a long time ago. Really, we've gotten more into the front-end CRO stuff. And I haven't been as much in the game. I don't think I've placed an ad in the last 5 years. I don't know how to do it anymore.
But what I had learned over time, and I just want to know your opinion on this because you're doing this every day, when you got like a $5,000 or $10,000 budget, what I found was brands were spreading themselves too thin. They were trying to spread 10k over 5 different platforms.
And my mind would be like, just put it into the one that works the best because you're not maximizing the returns on that one. Is that still the right answer when I'm talking to young entrepreneurs?
Jake Madoff
It is. Yeah. I mean, at the margins, there may be a little bit of nuance, but generally, yes, that is the right answer. So if you're, let's say, at the lower end of that range, maybe 3-5k in ad spend per month, that is really about one and a half channels.
So like if you're Ecommerce and you're spending in that three to five K a month range, put probably most of that budget into paid social, primarily meta, maybe 70% of it into meta and the remaining 30% into Google shopping or Google PMAX, for example. I would go with that approach and then just get some data on both channels. And then hopefully you're profitable by day 60 or 90.
And you can start to scale and get up into those ranges where you have some budget to play around with for a third channel or increasing budget on your main two channels, which should be your first step, is really trying to find a ceiling on those first before entering a third channel.
But yeah, if you're in the middle end of that range, in the 5 to 7 or 5 to 10 range, there you can really have a pretty housing test bed for Meta and Google, where you have a relatively a mature campaign structure, and you have a few different ad sets that you're testing within each, a few different creative concepts, and you're getting learnings month over month.
But absolutely. Whenever someone asks me, whenever I'm speaking with a client, and they ask, you know, how much are we testing? What results should we look for? It is always dependent upon your budget. If you're spending more, you get results faster, you can exit learning more quickly. If you're spending less, that just takes longer.
But sometimes it is better to do the slow, careful burn, especially if you're not a venture backed company and you're a small business where that is what you need to do.
That's also why I like marketing myself as someone that brings that learning through because I've gone through that with venture backed companies where we have large budgets and I can just bring those learnings and hopefully just cut out some of the time it takes and bring those winning test variations to these small business owners.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Let’s say that I'm a small business and we're spending 3 grand a month now. I got 2 grand in Meta and I've got 1 grand in Google Shopping. And I'm seeing cool results. And I'm scaling, I'm scaling, I'm scaling.
You mentioned you should keep scaling until you see diminishing returns is basically what you alluded to. I know ‘It depends’ is the answer for everything out here, but in your experience, what is the range people are starting to spend every month where they're starting to see those diminishing returns and then it starts to become like an acquisition math equation to whether or not you should continue to grow in that channel.
And then the second thing would probably be that it starts to lean itself into maybe having a budget set aside to experiment in other channels like YouTube or TikTok. Yeah.
Jake Madoff
It's a great question and yes, I will answer it with ‘It depends.’
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I know, man.
Jake Madoff
That's just because I know sometimes someone will really try and give a very clear answer to this, but I want to be as accurate as possible in these answers and use the experience that I have to answer it most accurately.
It depends on how long the company has been in business, obviously, the market fit, the ROAS that you are at, the conversion rate that you're at, et cetera.
I would say if you're hitting a benchmark across conversion rate, you're at around a break-even or just over break-even ROAS, you're a bit profitable, maybe at like a 3, 3.5 ROAS. In your example, it was around 3K a month in ad spend. Definitely continue to scale.
At that amount, you should still be putting more into those platforms, more into meta, more into Google Shopping or Google PMAX.
I would also say part of it is, do you have bandwidth to add a new creative? With paid social, new creative and good performing, not just new, but well established data-driven creative, that is a big lever too for the performance of outside of budget.
Where if you have really good creative, that means more channels are available to you. If you have a really good nine by 16 creative, that means you can try TikTok, you can try YouTube Shorts.
So I'd say definitely try and continue to spend. And if you have good creative, if you're hitting your benchmark, if you're at like just over breakeven ROAS, at their minimum, you should be putting a few thousand, maybe two or three into a given channel.
But once you hit that, you know, over 5K, over 7K around, you can try introducing a third channel with maybe another one or two K in ad spend. Let's see how that works.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Yeah, that was a lot lower than I was in my head thinking.
I was like... A lot of brands historically would come and they were doing 10, 20, even 50k a month on Facebook. And they're having great results and they wanted to introduce another channel.
And I was just like, I mean, just put it into that. Because that clearly works. So that was my opinion on things. And I guess that could work or it couldn't work. It all just depends at the end of the day.
Jake Madoff
It does. It's worth testing too. I would say a brand spending $10K, they're doing well on meta. They can weather a moderate test on Google PMAX, for example. They can take $2,000 or so and test that as a different channel. Yeah.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Jake, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Jake Madoff
I think just the importance of being multi-channel is something I do want to underscore. I'm not just saying that as a full-stack growth marketer, I truly find the most success when you're doing testing across different channels.
And I don't mean just pay it. I mean, you're active on organic social. You have an SEO strategy. You're pairing paid channels and paid strategies with organic.
It is just really important not to put all your eggs in one basket. You really do want to have emails for your acquisition. It's so important. Sometimes I've come in and it's like, “We aren't succeeding as a business.” And I see all their time is just in organic Instagram or all their time is just in, in paid search.
It is so important to have a multi-channel approach to acquisition and growth. I just want to underscore that for small businesses.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. I've seen this a few times with some fairly successful nine-figure brand founders.
They're just like, “At the end of the day, marketing is marketing and you need to do it.”
So it doesn't matter if it's paid, organic, like you said, SEO, earned media, PR plays. Marketing, at the end of the day, is building awareness about your brand. And all that stuff compounds into success.
Jake Madoff
Totally. It's a lot easier to have a successful paid social campaign if you have an active organic social identity as well.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely, Jake.
If I'm listening to this episode, I'm like, “Wow, this guy knows what he's talking about,” which he does everybody.
How do I find you? Where are you hanging out on the internet?
Jake Madoff
Yeah. Check me out. If you just Google my name, Jake Madoff, you'll see a handful of the articles. My website is jakemadoff.io. If you just type that in, jakemadoff.io, you'll see my website with some case studies on it.
Feel free to submit a form. Happy to do a consultation with anyone that submits. And yeah, it was great. Great to be here. I love the conversation.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Thanks for coming on. And everyone, have a great day.
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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