“Where we’re going, we don’t need… roads.” Slip on your self-lacing Nike Mags, and buckle up in the DeLorean. We’re going back to 2021 to that time I (Amanda) presented on writing influence-driven marketing messaging. A lot has changed since then. AI wasn’t yet swallowing every marketing conversation whole, “zero-click” was just starting to take
New Research: Influence Happens Everywhere, an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on the mobile and desktop web
By Several weeks ago, I published some important research about where search happens on the web. Spoiler: everywhere, but ~73% is still Google. This data, fascinating as it is, begets another question – where does influence happen? What do people read, watch, listen-to, browse, and surf on the web *before* they search? For answers, I turned
Audience Research Newsletter: Why Audience Research; Grow Your Podcast; When to Charge for Public Speaking
By We’re publishing prior issues of the Audience Research Newsletter here! But we’re not just copying and pasting from the archives — we’re only surfacing what we believe is still salient today. For the newest, freshest advice on audience research and doing better marketing, subscribe here so you don’t miss new editions! We send this newsletter
Why LinkedIn Might Have Two Algorithms — and Why Marketers Should Care
By We marketers talk about the LinkedIn algorithm as though it’s a single behemoth. But a recent analysis from Christopher Penn suggests the platform may be running two separate systems that work together to determine what shows up in the feed. One system decides whether your post should even be considered for someone’s feed. The other
Office Hours: Who Will Amplify This and Why?
By There’s an expression about the cobbler’s children not having shoes. We’re kind of like that. We are the cobblers AND the children, and we somehow have lots and lots of shoes, not all of them fit, and we keep making more anyway. In the spirit of wearing all our shoes (you’re still with me, right?)
NEW in SparkToro: Uncover the AI Prompt Topics Your Audience is Using in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Claude, and more
By “Rand, I love that SparkToro tells me which search and AI tools my audience is using, but… could you also tell me what they’re searching and prompting?” For a long time, the answer was only yes to 50% of that request. Starting today, we’ve got it all. Research any audience in SparkToro and we’ll show
How Much is Your Audience Searching Google vs. Prompting AI Tools? SparkToro’s Answers Just Got an Upgrade
By For the past year, SparkToro’s had the remarkable ability to tell you how much your audience used Google vs. ChatGPT, Perplexity vs. Yahoo, Claude vs. Bing, and dozens of other search engines and AI tools. But… well, we’re a bit embarassed to say this… that data used clickstream visitation, NOT search and prompting activity. When
New Research: Search Happens Everywhere; an Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity
By For 25 years, web search meant Google (and a little bit of Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo). But in the past 2.5 years, it’s often expanded to include the major AI tools: ChatGPT, Claude, Deepseek, CoPilot, and Gemini. We found this broader definition welcome, but a little strange. If ChatGPT is search, why isn’t Instagram? Or
Best Practices Are Meaningless Without Audience Research
By There isn’t actually anything “wrong” with best practices. Best practices are general guidelines for what to do in order to ensure a general baseline of success. The problem comes when you employ best practices without personalization or a point of view. Then you’re just leading with some statistically average decision and marketing to… nobody in
Digital Agency New Business Still a Concern, Referrals Still Rule for Lead Gen and Are Sales Pipelines Finally Recovering?
By Recently, Rand and I released the results of the State of Digital Agencies survey for 2025. Our goal of this annual survey is simple – get a temperate check on the digital agency world and give folks a benchmark for how they’re performing compared to their peers. If you’ve missed the launch post, you can