Getting Executive Buy-In: How to Tie Audience Research to Business Strategy

It’s a tale as old as time, or uh… for as long as you’ve been doing digital marketing: You’ve uncovered powerful audience insights that you fully believe will transform your company’s approach, but when you try to share them beyond the marketing team, eyes glaze over. Executives nod politely before steering the conversation back to quarterly targets and sales forecasts.…

If your audience’s sources of influence and your marketing budget don’t align, you’re gonna have a bad time

Yes, this is a rant. It’s a rant about where leadership teams allocate their marketing budget vs. where their potential customers actually pay attention. For most, that’s heavily in digital performance ads (Meta, Google, Apple, and if you’re in e-commerce, Amazon/Pinterest), a healthy amount in social media/brand ads (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, maybe Reddit), and then a bit of “content marketing,”…

Is Google Losing Search Market Share?

A recent Wall Street Journal made the top of feeds in the digital marketing world, claiming that Google is on the precipice of losing the lead in the search advertising wars. Supposedly, in 2025, for the first time, Google may fall under 50% of market share in search advertising (according to an eMarketer report the WSJ cites). The WSJ points…

How Paid Media Buyers Can Get an Edge in 2024

(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 three months have been jam-packed…

Why the Least Measurable Marketing Channels Tend to Perform Best: 5-Minute Whiteboard

Content marketing, social media, events, PR, and marketing through sources-of-influence have consistently produced remarkable results for the companies I’ve run, and yet, most big businesses invest 1/1,000th the effort and dollars in these tactics that they do in digital advertising. Why? Measurability and scalability. Let’s dig into this challenge (and how you can invest better) with this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard.…

If Your Marketing Mix Doesn’t Match Your Customer’s Journey… You’re Gonna Have a Bad Time | 5-Minute Whiteboard

Imagine that you have perfect knowledge of how every potential customer starts their journey to learn about the kinds of solutions your business offers. And that in that hypothetical, 25% of those potential customers learn about solutions in your space by typing keywords into Google. That’s a pretty reasonable average across most industries, but… guess what? You’re putting 75, 80,…

5-Minute Whiteboard: How Obsession with Attribution Warps Marketing Investments

Why do 90% of marketing dollars flow to paid/performance channels that provide attribution? HINT: It’s not because ads are 10X more effective than organic investments. It’s because ads aren’t just measurable, they’re attributable. Your CFO, CMO, and CEO can get in a room and look at the CAC:LTV ratio of every performance channel and feel like they know where they…

5-Minute Whiteboard: Measurement vs. Attribution

Howdy SparkToro fans and welcome to the first edition of a new series we’re experimenting with—short, whiteboard style explainer videos. This inaugural video covers a concept that’s crucial to the future of marketing: measurement vs. attribution. For the last 20 years, we’ve lived in the golden age of attribution. Measuring the kinds of metrics I talk about in the video:…

The Creator Economy Is Far From Overblown

I came across Alex Kantrowitz’s The Creator Economy Was Way Overblown in my weekend reading. It’s well-written, but completely wrong. Here’s an excerpt of the core arguments: “After years of hype, the Creator Economy is slamming into reality. Influencer programs are shuttering. Investment is drying up. And worsening economic conditions are threatening to crush creators and the tech infrastructure behind them. While…