SparkToro Blog

Marketing Tactics

Your Burning Questions About Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) officially launches July 1, 2023. If you’re here, it’s probably because you’re not quite ready for it. Fear not, friend! We’ll get you up to speed. We recently hosted a SparkToro Office Hours crash course with our friend Steve Lamar, GA4 expert and founder of ReallyGoodData. (Eagle-eyed readers will recall we partnered with Steve on our…
Marketing Tactics

Your New KPIs to Gauge Content Quality

Rand hates the phrase “high-quality content.” Quality is entirely subjective. And because it’s subjective, it’s impossible to measure, let alone find agreed-upon standards. Here’s an example: Remember that Ted Lasso Season 2 episode, Beard After Hours? Rand thought it was art while Casey thought it was drivel. (I have the least helpful opinion here which is that I thought it…
Marketing Startups Tactics

How Being Customer-Led Can Double the Impact of Your Traffic

This is a guest post by Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop of SaaS educational and growth consultancy Forget the Funnel. They are the co-authors of Forget the Funnel: A Customer-Led Approach for Predictable, Recurring Revenue. Customer acquisition in 2023 is not like customer acquisition in 2013. Why? The competition is much greater. We now have 16x the competitors we did…
Marketing Startups

The Power of Word of Mouth: How to Find What Influences Your Customers

Customer acquisition costs (CAC) have increased significantly over the past decade. This is true for both B2B and B2C companies, with CAC across both industries being up about 70%, according to subscription software company ProfitWell. In other words, it’s becoming a lot more expensive to acquire customers. What to do? At our recent SparkToro Office Hours, Asia Orangio, Founder &…
Hiring Marketing Startups

Maybe You Need a Fractional Marketing Director — Not a Fractional CMO

I recently blurted out during a webinar that company leaders should think beyond the role of fractional Chief Marketing Officer (fCMO) — and instead consider other fractional roles. Someone followed up to ask me about the downsides to fCMOs, and then I suddenly remembered my past experiences in working with a few of them. They were definitely pleasant, talented and…
Events Industry Marketing Psychology

Should You Raise Your Rates and Only Take Paid Speaking Gigs? Not So Fast…

Over on Mastodon, SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin and Seer Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds were chatting about the blind advice of “Raise your rates!” and “Don’t speak for free!” They floated the idea of a co-authored blog post, and I (SparkToro’s VP Marketing Amanda Natividad) promptly chimed in. This blog post was written by all of us, with quotes from those…

Zero-Click Content: The Counterintuitive Way to Succeed in a Platform-Native World

Update: We hosted a SparkToro Office Hours webinar about Zero-Click content on August 23. Sign up free to watch the replay. It could be a chicken or egg situation: Maybe the platforms have made us lazy, or we’ve trained their algorithms to reward platform-native content — as in, content that keeps people on the platforms’ sites instead of sending them…

SparkToro Demographics: 3 Underrated Ways to Upgrade Your Marketing

It’s been about one year since we launched Demographics in SparkToro, and it’s one of our most popular features. Many of our customers use the insights to develop personas, run programmatic ads, evaluate brand marketing partnerships, and more. But I have a feeling there are even more creative use cases that our community hasn’t yet tapped into. So I’m outlining…