(The following post was written by Sam Tomlinson, EVP of Warschawski and one of the smartest marketing strategists operating today, and published on his blog. He’s kindly given us permission to reprint it here. Once you start reading, you’ll see why I believe everyone who subscribes to SparkToro should check it out. -Rand) The past
How Audience Research Gave Me a Competitive Edge — And Helped Me Earn Respect From Customers
By Here’s a confession: I’ve never really understood the whole “SEO-driven content strategy” thing. I mean, yeah, I understood it on an intellectual level. Step 1, go after high-volume keywords. Step 2, rank higher for the Google gods. Step 3, profit. Or something like that. But no one ever becomes a customer from reading a blog
Content Marketing Needs to Evolve Beyond SEO
By I’m tired of seeing blog posts, videos, webinars, articles, guides, resources, social posts whose entire raison d’etre is an attempt to rank for keywords in Google. It limits our creativity AND the likelihood that meaningful marketing improvements will happen. Content marketing is bigger than SEO. I’m tired of 99% of my LinkedIn feed pretending it’s
New Research: So Far, AI is Not Disrupting Search or Making a Dent in Google
By The good folks at Sonata Insights recently analyzed Datos‘ clickstream panel to uncover consumer search behavior insights in the “age of AI”. If you’re in the digital marketing world, it’s probably worth your time to download and read. Last Friday, I got access to the report and asked Datos for permission to share a few
When Attribution Is a Fool’s Errand, Zero-Click Marketing Is the Way
By “Zero-Click Marketing sounds good and all, but how do I get executive buy-in?” I hear that question a lot. I think it signals a fundamental misunderstanding of what zero-click marketing is. When I first wrote about Zero-Click Content back in July 2022 (whoa, happy 2-year anniversary, I guess?), it came as a reaction to our
Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century.
By Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboards. And folks, we’ve got a doozy of a topic. Yes, I’m being intentionally provocative. But it’s because things really have changed in the last decade, yet too many of us are still asked to invest in marketing as though it’s 2014. In just seven minutes, I’m going to
The Smarter-Not-Harder Guide to Content Marketing in 2024
By Classic content marketing is dead. I don’t say that lightly. Most digital marketing techniques don’t truly die, but the old way of doing content marketing–finding high-volume keywords, then writing blog posts that target those keywords and trying to get your post ranking in Google for them; dead. Why? Because Google is no longer the primary
NEW: Ranking Pages Shows the Content Your Audience is Most Likely to Find in Search Results
By Great news—the last of our three, search-focused features in SparkToro V2 has finally launched. It’s called Ranking Pages and you can now find it in the keywords section of every SparkToro report. Our next few features will focus on expanding V2’s coverage to the UK and Canada, and providing data about the ad platforms that
A Guide to Hosting Your Next Work Retreat
By There’s something magical about the third location. It’s why writers head off to that cabin in the woods. Heck, maybe it’s why you find unlikely productivity on that 4-hour flight with spotty WiFi, sandwiched between two people. There’s something about being outside of your usual element (like your home office or that same conference room)
2024 Zero-Click Search Study: For every 1,000 EU Google Searches, only 374 clicks go to the Open Web. In the US, it’s 360.
By Over the past decade, I’ve done several reports with multiple clickstream panels analyzing Google search behavior at scale. The last such analysis was in 2021, and behavior almost certainly looks different today thanks to changes from both Google itself and its search consumers. In past reports, I’ve only been able to look at searches for