The Truth About Audience Building in Marketing with Marc Sirkin, Growth Consultant and Former CEO of Third Door Media| Ep. 393

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0:25Welcome to the Marketing Millennials. The No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials Podcast. podcast today I have Mark Sorkin on the podcast um me and Mark kind of have a beef right now I'm kidding um about Markingland but we'll talk about that more later um I can't wait but um uh he's the CEO of Third Door Media and he if you have been in marketing for a while you will probably know martech.org um he made the biggest mistake not using Markingland.com but that's also something we could talk about too.

1:25And he is great at building audiences and it was sold to SEMrush and now SEMrush is sold to Adobe. And then this is just the spiral effect of how things are going, but I want to let you, um, intro yourself and how did you get into marketing? Thanks for having me on the show. It's been, it's been a while we've been talking about it. So I'm excited to see you again. I think we last saw each other at Inbound back in September, whatever that was. Yeah. And just to clarify, I left SEMrush in October to start my own consulting firm. So I spent a year as CEO of Third Room Media inside SEMrush and left.

2:03And we can talk about that too. And we definitely can talk about marketing land because that is an interesting and fun conversation to have. So yeah, to answer the question, like kind of briefly, I started as a graphic designer back in the early 90s. I'm very old. And I was just having coffee with somebody. So I'll tell the story for the second time today. So my boss said to me, hey, Mark, you're a good designer. I was like, okay, thanks. And he's like, but you're not great. It's like, oh, shit. That's a backhanded compliment. But what he saw in me was kind of operational rigor and a strategy mind.

2:37And he kind of pulled me into project management, operations, product development, product marketing. And that kind of set the career on fire in many ways. That was the first time I was with a company. I was only young though. I was 24 or whatever. But we sold our small digital agency. We were like 11 people. We sold it to a company called IXL that became one of the big .com agencies at the time. That company grew from 30 people to 3 ,500 people in 18 months. It was absolutely insane. Inside that company, I kind of cut my chops on project management, product marketing, built a product. And we ended up getting funding for that product.

3:09We got 18 million bucks actually. Back then they were giving money away like it was falling off trees. Intel funded us with a couple of other founders. And we started a company based out of San Diego that was basically Squarespace in 1998, effectively. And so it was a really interesting experience. And it kind of like really kind of lit me up in many ways. I ended up taking a job at the March of Dimes running digital fundraising and marketing for them. And that lit up, gosh, a 10-year nonprofit career. So I spent 10 years in kind of like large health charities running digital fundraising, community strategy.

3:44Ended up at PwC doing some consulting work and then finally landed through a weird set of circumstances at Third Door Media. Love Third Door Media, incredible search engine land, Martech, as you mentioned, marketing land at the time. And I kind of grew into the president position and ultimately CEO position as we sold the company to SEMrush. And so I've kind of played all the, I've worn all the marketing hats, like whether it's the rise of social, the rise of e-commerce, the early days with content management systems, as a graphic designer. Obviously, back then, info, kind of web architect was like the hot role back then.

4:20So I've been around for a long time. I've done all the different marketing roles. It's interesting to see where it's evolved to with the sort of modern-day go-to-market stuff. But that's the nickel tour from my career. And I know, I mean, a lot of the businesses you've run have massive reach. So when did you realize that growing the audience wasn't automatically growing the business? Oh, that's a great question. I think the first time I ever reckoned with that, I think it was at Autism Speaks, actually. It was the first time I reckoned with that. We had, like everybody, back then, organic social was like the thing.

5:00It was the hot tactic. And Facebook had just become kind of public open to everybody. And we had several board members who were impacted by autism at different levels, kids on the spectrum, that kind of thing. And we had somebody at all the big companies, Twitter, Facebook, and they all came to us in those early days saying, like, let us help you build your audience and it will drive tons of fundraising. And the one that's in my mind now that kind of illustrates that point is that we were at, let's say 300 ,000 followers on Facebook at the time or friends or whatever it was back then. And Facebook lit up there, and I'm blanking on the name, but at the time there was like a special program for, you know, basically groups and businesses on Facebook.

5:40And we went from 300 ,000 to like 800 ,000, like over, it was like on a Tuesday, I went in and checked the dashboard. I was like, wait, how did we get to 800 ,000 people? And it was because Facebook had launched this program and we were in it. We were like one of two or three charities in the program. the audience exploded uh and fundraising did not follow and it was just like to your to your question it was like oh wait like just because you can acquire eyeballs doesn't mean necessarily growth follows now we figured out how to drive growth out of that audience ultimately but it wasn't like turn on the turn on the faucet and all of a sudden you know money comes and i've seen that multiple times in my career in fact i'm just remembering now um the march of times highlighted uh on oprah winfrey show back in the day which was like the biggest thing on the planet and we saw traffic jumped that day by like, you know, 10 ,000%, but no donations.

6:27And so, you know, there's, there's an, there's an interesting relationship, you know, thinking about the, the, the Superbowl this weekend, like there's an interesting relationship between eyeballs and growth that is worth talking about. Yeah. I, I wonder for the, like fallout growth and just like the, the mention on like a big show, like what was, what do you think the perceived gap was that? um like because for some for some businesses that they get a mass spike and they do have a good landing page and the offer is there um it can explode like your business but also like if you get mentioned and there's not a good like call to action of like okay oprah doesn't doesn't say like i don't know what but oprah didn't say hey everybody go like Like I'm putting money into March, you should too.

7:21Like what was like the perceived gap basically on Facebook and like mentions, what do you see? Like what would have tied in that gap to help more? I think it's context, right? I think, I think, sure. You're absolutely right. Like, you know, the, the direct mail and the direct marketing worlds understand that the right audience, you know, it's interesting. I'm again, I'm kind of like, I wasn't really thinking about this until you just said that, But like pre-internet, when we were in a world of non-social media, non-performance marketing, direct marketing and direct media, like they figured out pretty quickly, hey, if we advertise, you know, I don't know, the Tony Robbins program at 3 a.m.

8:04when people are up and they shouldn't be up and they're feeling bad about themselves and we put something motivational, like there's context for that. So I think there's something similar here. I don't think the principles have changed. I think, you know, in the case of Autism Speaks, all of a sudden we're in front of a whole bunch of people who are on Facebook exploring the platform who don't necessarily have a direct connection to that world. Okay, you know, okay, let's see what this is all about. But I don't think we were sophisticated enough at the time to understand how to try to convert some of that, let's call it anonymized or non-contextual audiences into donors, volunteers, whatever we might have wanted to do with that.

8:37So I think, like, getting that alignment, as you said, is critical. So, you know, yeah, sure. The pieces are like the landing page and the offer, but the channel and the medium also matter, right? Like, it's like. Yeah. It could have been like, yeah, people didn't care on like an Oprah's audience about March. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So I think it's, it's dangerous to assume big audience, big results. Doesn't mean it doesn't work. It can work. I'm sure we're going to hear about several advertisers that, you know, put, you know, Superbowls out that had great response and others that didn't. the question is how you align, how you align that to the audiences.

9:11Cause obviously Superbowl is a different thing, right? You're talking about a mass, mass audience. Yeah. And I think with those types of things, it's like creative is the targeting, like you not targeting. It's like, that's right. Whatever creative you put out as there is targeting. Like if you're a business owner and like Squarespace is trying to get domains. That's right. Like you're trying to target people to come. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I think what's interesting about the world we live in today is that we've all grown up, let's say the last 15, 20 years in a very performance marketing culture, right?

9:43We all kind of understand the equation, like put money in over here, get people here, get results over here. Well, prior to performance marketing, you know, again, 15, 20 years ago, brand marketing and sort of more general marketing was, was not measured that way. It was measured in terms of brand lift and brand, you know, aided, unaided. These are things that big brands still do, but the typical performance internet marketer isn't doing those kinds of things. They're expensive, they're time consuming, you don't get a fast feedback loop. So there's something happening, and we can talk about what's happening with GEO or LLM visibility, because there's some interesting parallels to how do you measure visibility in LLM to the way we used to measure brand versus clicks, money, clicks, results.

10:23And so it's shifting a little bit, I think, in interesting, subtle ways. I also think, I mean, I want to get your take on this, because you you hearing now a lot of people that like some of their primary goal is like we need to grow our audience we need to grow our audience like how do we need to grow our audience but they um and that could even come to the expense of like they're not thinking about like business outcomes and stuff like that so um like how do you what do you tell marketers about that audience grows p to be careful of and then also like how to do it the correct way Yeah, I mean, I've thought this for a while, but I've just started to really articulate it in my own head, you know, sort of as a consultant, like what's the story I'm trying to tell people?

11:08And I think that at its core, the product market fit and the sort of ICP of that product is the most important thing. You know, there's trite sayings, like you can say, oh, there's riches and niches. Okay, fair enough. But different products have different audiences. audiences. And some products appeal to mass audiences and some don't. Some appeal to niche audiences. But at the end of the day, what strikes me as interesting is that we're in a world now where SEO isn't working the way it used to work. It's not as predictable. We don't fully understand how discoverability is working on LLMs, nor do we believe that the kind of clicks that you're, the click volume you're going to get from LLMs is way less than it was from traditional SEO.

11:52We know that the email game is shifting very quickly. It's very, it's hard to get in people's inboxes and get people to click. So we know marketing, channel marketing is getting harder. Costs are rising. And so I think if you, if you have a product that doesn't have a really well-defined ICP and a really great product market fit, it can be hard to figure out, well, what is the message here? And so the size of the audience is important. You need a big enough audience, right? You need a big enough, a big enough TAM to make a difference to your business goals. But I think if you just think in terms of just gross numbers in terms of the audience, it's like, who are we talking to here?

12:27Do we understand how they're receiving it? Again, I think about the Oprah example. Like, great, we got in front of millions and millions of people, but it didn't move the needle. So what the heck does that mean? So there's kind of a weird tradeoff that I think is becoming more acute in today's marketing landscape, which is like, you better have your product market fit dialed and you better have that ICP dialed because people are expecting more personalized content. They're expecting a better buyer journey. These are things that like, they're tough to do with the mass market. And look, God bless you if you're a B2C marketer and you're selling, I don't know, tires or something.

12:55That's not my world. But if you're selling B2B stuff, you're talking about a specific audience, I do think that the pressure is on to sort of get those pieces right before you accelerate channel marketing. I think if you just say like, we're just gonna spend money on LinkedIn because we know the audience is there. I just haven't seen a lot of signs of success of that. Yeah, I think that's why a lot of people say hire a product marketer as your first marketer yeah um a lot of problems when you go into business is they they lost track of like that their roots of like product marketing and discovering their core message and going to read you to redo that exercise to figure it out because usually the reason they're not performing is like the messaging isn't clear it's not their audience isn't clear like there might be a mismatch on messaging an audience um just like you always have to go back to like fundamentals usually with these with marketing um so i think that's a crucial point you're making on that going back to you have to go back to your core a lot and that's usually like where people mess up as they start oh i want to build an audience of a million people but why i mean you could have an audience of 8 000 plumbers and and hit your goals easier You're having 100 ,000 and 8 ,000 art plumbers and like 5 ,000.

14:19I think that's right. Yeah. And the thing is, once you have that audience, you have a revenue spine. Because once you understand the product market fit and once you understand the ICP and the audience, you can build a spine that drives the kind of revenue you need to drive through that business. I think where a lot of businesses get in trouble is – and we struggle with this at Third Room Media. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. You know, we had an event business that drove sponsorship dollars. We had an advertising business that monetized the eyeballs on sites like Search Engine Land.

14:47And we had a lead gen business that helped us work with sponsors to drive like targeted ICP fit lead gen, right? We debated for years, like, should we create a job board and charge for listings? Should we create certifications, training programs? And, you know, it was always very sexy. It's like, oh, yeah, let's create it. And I spent probably six months like really digging into certification during COVID. We're like, you know, third door media boy, it would be great to have like a search certification from search engine land. Sounds sexy, probably could sell a few of those. There was a huge organizational commitment.

15:20And what we realized was the certification business is different than the advertising event sponsorship business. So we're actually deciding to go into a different business. Do we think organizationally we can support that business or is it going to distract us? In our case, we decided it's going to distract us. but I would argue, and maybe the audience will feel me on this, is like, there's a lot of businesses that make the decision, like, it seems like an easy lift. Today we can vibe code a website, no problem. Let's start another revenue stream. It's very distracting for an organization to have multiple revenue streams if you haven't dialed the main one in.

15:53And so it's like, again, like the audience might be receptive to more products, but are you hitting your goals? Are you driving the revenue you need to drive through? Have you earned the right to sort of expand beyond that. And I think that's a, that's a discipline conversation. I mean, that's, it's easy to get distracted and think we could do that too. No problem. And it's also a different, a lot of it's a different motion too, and a different like skillset and sometimes a different audience. If you're trying to go after a different audience, you just, you have to redo messaging. You have to go back and do all that.

16:21You're going to redo, you're going to have probably a different person thinking about it than thinking about um main audience and a lot of people put it on one marketer to be like you to do messaging for this and then oh we have this other product that does this and you have to do messaging for that and then messaging with that and then that's right then you end up what we talked about at the beginning is you try put out this like broad messaging and see who comes in And then it doesn't work as well as targeted core messaging to your ICP. That's right. And it takes real discipline. And that discipline isn't just a marketing function, right?

17:01It's pressure from sales saying we want more products. We need more products to sell. Fair enough. But are you selling the current products well enough, right? Or do we agree that we've got the right motion for that first set of products before we go launch new products? There's a financial component to it, right? How's this going to affect profitability, EBITDA, all the rest of the stuff? There's an ego aspect to it, right? Hey, we're good marketers. We can pull this off. Don't worry. I'll just work a couple extra hours. Like, there's a bunch of other factors in when you make this decision. They're all dangerous, and I'm not saying it can't work out, but I am saying, like, it's dangerous, and you should be mindful about, you know, adding pressure to an ICP and a product market fit is tricky.

17:41um which um i know with like third door media which like um motion did you like figure out had like the most leverage um when it came the motion with the most leverage to be honest was advertising the problem with that because it's so high it's so high margin easy right it's easy to implement an ad an ad platform take orders and deliver the ads the problem is demand demand was very macroeconomic in my experience maybe maybe we were wrong about this but our experience was advertising, and I'm talking about display on the sites, house ads on our sites went from sub 10 % total revenue to 30 % during COVID and right back down after COVID.

18:21So there are macroeconomic reasons for that, but highly, highly leveraged. Lead gen is very high leveraged, huge margins on like selling webinars, you know, with lead gen components to it, especially if it's a targeted ICP where once you get them hooked on, hey, this is a really good fit, we're getting good quality leads that's real easy to resell so you get a real good retention number on it in the event business virtual events are great high leverage because it doesn't cost a lot to do virtual events but other than our friend jay i don't know who's figured out virtual events very well maybe marketing land has but like virtual events are getting harder and harder to sell post-covid and now the drive back to in-person events has the downside of in-person events are expensive to run a scale so they're not fully leveraged so hard it's like one of the they're needed, but it's not like a profit play.

19:11It's an audience play. Correct. And that's tough in this environment, right? Because like for Third Door, and I'm not sure how you run Marketing Land, but for Third Door, those were for-profit events. Those events were designed to make profit for Third Door Media, period. Now we leveraged sponsors to pay for some stuff, but if you're a B2B marketer and your boss is, you know, know your cmo your co is like we got to get in front of people um it's very very tough to run a b2b event without losing money and saying hey we're going to lose some money here but we're going to make it up in pipeline that's a tough one i think in person is a long game thing i think eventually it becomes a profit center but if you need revenue now it's like a hard it's a hard trade of us eventually it's if it becomes a a thing you it's going to be a very good profit center for you.

20:01But year one, year two, year three, even maybe year four, it might make break even or slightly profits. That's a hard... Dude, let me tell you something. Yeah, I'll leave names out of this just to protect the innocent. But I know that there are several B2B events that lose somewhere between$800 to a million dollars a year. I've heard of one that loses $20 million a year. And they're fine with it. They're a huge company. They invest a huge amount of money. It's both a... It's a marketing... A media company can do it, but it's a marketing play for a SaaS company to do it. Correct. Yeah. But think about it.

20:36If you're a CMO of a mid-sized B2B software company, as an example, and you're like, look, we're going to do this event and it's going to have marketing benefit down the road, but we're going to lose$300 ,000,$400 ,000,$500 ,000 this year, that's a tough sell. You really got to be sold that there's something down the road for you. And it takes a real vision, right? The event team and the leadership team need the vision to go do that. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but you're right. In a media context, like there was unacceptable to lose money running events. Like they were, they were for-profit events.

21:07And I think, I think when you come down, like for like the media example you gave, I think when you're deciding on advertising versus like people paying, you're deciding versus, am I trying to create opportunities that everybody can have versus like making it like only for a select group of people because advertising basically like with this open ai talking about it like being ads like it's trying to make it not like the only the people with money can afford like chat gbt is trying to say like it's a library where anybody who wants to be educated could do that and advertising is the medium to do like That's why people are still advertising all around is because it's a way to offset cost so people can have it for free.

22:00That's right. Yeah, I mean, look, you're in business to make money, so there's different schemes by which to make that money. A free event that draws lots of audience that you can monetize later, that's a fine strategy. I don't think it's about good or bad strategy. It's about being deliberate about that strategy and being specific about it, right? as opposed to being sloppy and saying, we'll just try everything and whatever works, works. It's tough. Yeah, I think that's sort of like the audience play is hard, like we talked about before, because it's also like picking the right stream to go first.

22:33It's like, am I becoming an event company? Because when you're coming down these ropes, they're different motions, as we said. is like event motion so different than a newsletter motion versus a community motion versus a um and there and you have to decide do we have the people on the team to execute this in motion is it uh is is it going to be a profit center or is it going to be a loss center or is it going to break even is it an audience play is it a um marketing play or is it a profit play you have to make these decisions ahead of time and before saying, I'm just going to run a vent or I'm just going to run a newsletter.

23:13That's right. Yeah. That's right. That's exactly why I said earlier, the revenue spine. That's my frame of reference is what's the spine of this company? And are we world-class at this part of execution? Because we need to be, because the market demands it. And once we've built a solid foundation, okay, great. Like we've built a big audience and we've monetized it through, let's just say advertising as an example. Right. And we used to say this at third door all the time. Like the reason SMX works, the reason MarTech works is we've earned the right to ask people to pay to show up for an event in person with us.

23:43We earn it every single day by publishing great content. They trust us. And then when we say, Hey, we're going to run an event. Would you like to come? It's 1500 bucks. Enough of them say, yes, we would like to come to the event. Right. But like there are different models. You can get at this in different ways. You can start an event company that doesn't have an editorial brand, but for third door, the DNA was the editorial brand first, build the audience and then earn the right to monetize it through the other ways that we monetize it. So getting that strategy right and understanding what that revenue spine is, is, is, is step one.

24:10I mean, I think it's interesting. It's really easy to get sucked down the like clay go-to-market engineer, AI powered, whatever. Like it's easy to get like enthralled by like how cool it is over the things you can do today, but without a good spine, I don't, I'm not sure any of that stuff works, you know, like great. We got a ton of leads. They're the wrong leads nothing converted okay good luck yeah i i also think that um we're becoming in a time where like things are commoditized like b2b is becoming more like a and i hate it is more like a consumer play than it was ever before because before there was like one or two or three options in your space and you can run certain plays like demos and win because you can hide pricing you can save fluffy things you could work but now like truly marketing is the mode and the person who owns attention is the mode and the person who owns trust is the mode um where before it was less of that because the competition wasn't there but now now that everything is kind of becoming a commodity even in b2b um there's like 10 different options for everything um i mean why advertising works is because it does like i say for me it lowers like the the choice paradox basically um yeah like it helps you like make a decision advertising in this world where there's 20 options at least like and ads educating you getting you closer to that perching decision that you didn't have before um so that's why I think the odds need to exist in this world.

25:47Yeah, I agree completely. I mean, there's a reason why Duncan keeps hiring Ben Affleck to do his Duncan commercials, right? Like, it's very on-brand. Duncan's a Boston brand, a Northeast brand. Ben is a guy who you sort of relate to in a bunch of different ways. And they make that calculation the same way that any brand, you know, utilizes celebrity or brand messaging or brand positioning. there's an art to it that, you know, it's, it's like, again, we've been, we've all been like, we've all been trained over the last 15 years on this performance, this relationship to like spend and results. But the reality is that brand choice, and you're absolutely right.

26:23The cognitive, the cognitive load on making a choice in a crowded market's hard. Like, how do you make a choice? Like, okay, I'll just go ask ChatTubT. Well, I don't know if ChatTubT is right. So how do I start to winnow that down? And the truth is that advertising as one tactic, there's a reason why storytelling narrative driven advertising kind of lasts like the kind of advertising that nike does at that level like sticks with you now you may hate it fair enough but you remember it and that that does reduce that choice paradox i think that's a good way to frame that so advertising you know look i mean we could debate whether or not you know the budweiser ad was a good ad or a bad ad that's not the issue the issue is like did it hit the did it hit the audience the way that they hoped it did and did it get them the results in terms of their brand list that they wanted and you're seeing more and more of those brands like it's not the super bowl is just one of the the moments where that that campaign now they're learning that that campaign needs to be that's right social um the ctv i mean like a different channels like they're making use of that creative yeah like and and they took multiple takes and yeah it's become like just because they have that one super well they're trying to make it work for multiple different channels and multiple.