SparkToro Blog

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How Audience Research Gave Me a Competitive Edge — And Helped Me Earn Respect From Customers

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 post after having Googled, “how…

When Attribution Is a Fool’s Errand, Zero-Click Marketing Is the Way

“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 platform-native world. I pointed out…
Marketing Tactics Zero Click

The Smarter-Not-Harder Guide to Content Marketing in 2024

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 or largest source of information…
Marketing Tactics

You Are Your Moat

I don’t mind the generative AI craze. While some folks rail about the AI-generated comments that dominate their LinkedIn feed, I say, thank you for the engagement boost. Do these comments make social media a better place? Not really. But neither do the human-written, “Nice post, totally agree,” comments. (Though let’s be clear, I’ll take the harmless AI comments over…

Win the RFP: Nail Your Next Client Pitch With Audience Research

Why do in-house teams hire agencies or consultants? It’s almost always for two types of expertise: Tactical: Mastery of a specific tactic in a domain (e.g. handle all the Meta ads for your online shop) Domain: Deep knowledge of a given industry (e.g. PR strategy in the healthcare space) Clients expect these tasks to be done more efficiently and effectively…
Hiring Industry Team

Embrace the High-Level Individual Contributor: How to Hire for This Unconventional Role

I’m SparkToro’s VP Marketing and here’s how I spent a recent afternoon: I sifted through our Google Analytics dashboard. I was looking for our most popular pages and copying them into a spreadsheet so that we can keep track of what needs to be updated for the public launch of SparkToro V2. I included the title of the page, link,…
Marketing Tactics Zero Click

The Zero-Click Email Strategy That Gets Us 40%+ Open Rates

Ugh, I don’t want to give away my email strategy. Because it’s mine and it’s working really well for us. But since Rand recently wrote about how email is the most consistent, reliable marketing channel — and, well, he’s right — I’d be remiss in not helping you out. Our twice-monthly audience research newsletter goes out to about 60,000 people…