You can imagine how excited I was when I found out SparkToro had integrated with Hunter.io

A Bit of Context

Grizzle are a content marketing agency specializing in creating high-quality content for SaaS and tech brands. Grizzle manages the entire content process, from research and ideation, to production, implementation, and link building.

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We help B2B brands grow organic traffic by producing, promoting and optimizing killer content.

In short, Grizzle provides a content marketing methodology for exponential organic growth through specialist research, audience identification, and detailed strategy.

With the end goals of increasing organic traffic, widening demographics, and capturing consumers at all stages of the customer journey - the process is one that requires in-depth customer insight and a detailed research process.

Addressing the Problem

As you’d imagine, when designing an organic content strategy for high-profile brands, the research process can be arduous. In fact, two of the main issues Grizzle faced boiled down to research and needing a seamless tool / software that could provide the information members of the team required in one place.
Let’s go into a bit more detail...

First was the task of locating experts and thought-leaders within particular niches and industries. Why is this an essential part of content strategy? It helps give content legitimacy, provides additional insight for content pieces, and provides research and knowledge to include in the articles themselves.

But finding these experts had always been (before the introduction of SparkToro) a slow, manual process that involved lots of Googling, and copy-and-pasting.

The second task was identifying publications with which to collaborate and contribute guest blog posts. Grizzle have strict criteria when searching for these publications, so again, this time-heavy process was done manually by members of the team (prior to SparkToro).

Why SparkToro?

Both of the above processes are now housed mostly within SparkToro, which frees up a lot of time, and makes the research process much more efficient and profitable for the team.

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We use the lists feature to collect target thought leaders and publications for each client, which helps us stay organized and easily export into CSV format when we're ready.

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Tom Whatley, Founder & CEO of Grizzle

Through our partnership with Hunter.io, SparkToro also managed to save the team time searching for contact details and email addresses. This also made the research process for Grizzle noticeably more streamlined.

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When looking for contact details, we used to use Hunter.io as a secondary step. You can imagine how excited I was when I found out SparkToro had partnered with them to source email addresses from within the platform.

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Tom Whatley, Founder & CEO of Grizzle

While Grizzle have tried other software on the market with similar functionalities, SparkToro can hone in key individuals, brands, and publications that hold immense value for the team, with the SparkScore being another useful metric for them to measure and organize contacts with.

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SparkScore is a leading metric when making decisions on who to pursue. There's definitely a correlation between SparkScore and the quality of relationships we build

The Results

The positive results that Grizzle have noticed since introducing SparkToro to their workflow have impacted several parts of their business and the services they offer clients. These have included:

• Digital PR - finding publications that fit the client’s messaging is now easier and quicker. And SparkScore makes it easier for our team to qualify the research.
• Content marketing - SparkToro allows the research team to quickly identify key thought-leaders within niche industries, which leads to better quality content and collaborations.
• Content amplification - SparkToro allows the team to find social accounts and publications that are ideal for networking with and sharing client content with. Again, the SparkScore has helped with qualifying these contacts.
• Link Building - SparkToro’s partnership with Hunter.io means Grizzle can find media contacts, and their contact information, all in one place. SparkToro eliminates the need to use multiple tabs and multiple spreadsheets.
• Audience building - SparkToro helps Grizzle identify hashtags, topics, and ideas easier and quicker than before.

In short, SparkToro has helped Grizzle speed up their processes, conduct more efficient research, and identify key contacts easier and effortlessly.

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Our clients often say, "Wow, that was quick" when gaining traction for outreach and digital PR efforts.