Category: Advertising

Advertising Industry Marketing

The Creator Economy Is Far From Overblown

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
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…
Advertising Marketing SparkToro Tactics

SparkToro Demographics: 3 Underrated Ways to Upgrade Your Marketing

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
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…
Advertising Marketing Product Psychology Tactics

What Your Marketing Needs is a Bad Guy

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If you’re a big brand, already established, conservative in your ways and happy with your performance, this advice isn’t for you. But, if you’re a startup, an underdog, a challenger, you need to hear this. Villains are a good thing. Stories with villains make sense. They can be memorable. They can have depth and purpose. Stories without villains are meandering,…
Advertising Data Marketing Tactics

What if Performance Advertising is Just an Analytics Scam?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. So we’re not going to forget that lesson.” – Brian Chesky (via Campaign) In 2020, AirBnB cut $542 million of performance advertising spend and saw no measurable falloff in attributable sales. They continued this ad-slashing practice…
Advertising Marketing Psychology Tactics

The “Marketing is Evil” Problem.

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“I hate marketing.““Marketing is evil.““Marketing doesn’t work.““Marketing doesn’t work on me.““I’ll never buy from a company that markets to me.“ My best argument against those kinds of reflexive, anti-marketing takes is this: people create wonderful things to help one another, to entertain, to make art, and yes, to make money, too. But just because something is wonderful doesn’t mean anyone…
Advertising Data Marketing Product SparkToro Team

NEW in SparkToro: Content and Profile Text Insights

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
What does your audience talk about online? How do they describe themselves? What hashtags do they use? Prior to social media aggregation software, answering these questions was a maddeningly manual, lengthy process. Unfortunately, most of those products are exorbitantly expensive, enterprise tools. After SparkToro’s launch last year, we were somewhat shocked to find: A) How valuable these text insights were…
Advertising Marketing Psychology Startups Tactics

When Choosing Marketing Channels, Visualize the Curve

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Business Owner: “We’re launching a new company/website/campaign and want to buy ads that can get us some customers. Once that’s working, we’ll invest in content and SEO.” Marketer: “So, no one’s heard of your brand, and you don’t have any existing digital marketing, but you’d like to start with ads, then invest in content and SEO?” Business Owner: “Yup! That’s…
Advertising Data Marketing Product SparkToro

SparkToro Now Has 50% More Podcasts

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The Short Version: Every SparkToro search you perform now contains far more podcasts. That’s because we’ve made more connections between podcasts and their (or their host’s) social profiles, and also because SparkToro’s podcast index has grown substantially, to more than 600,000 unique shows. If you’re building Lists in SparkToro, you’ll also find that more than 80% of the podcasts in…

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