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…
Events Marketing SparkToro

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…

Content Marketing Needs to Evolve Beyond SEO

I’m tired of seeing blog posts, videos, webinars, articles, guides, resources, social posts whose entire raison d’etre is an attempt to rank for keywords in Google. It limits our creativity AND the likelihood that meaningful marketing improvements will happen. Content marketing is bigger than SEO. I’m tired of 99% of my LinkedIn feed pretending it’s not. This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard…
Marketing

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…

Attribution is Dying. Clicks are Dying. Marketing is Going Back to the 20th Century.

Welcome to another edition of 5-Minute Whiteboards. And folks, we’ve got a doozy of a topic. Yes, I’m being intentionally provocative. But it’s because things really have changed in the last decade, yet too many of us are still asked to invest in marketing as though it’s 2014. In just seven minutes, I’m going to try to change your mind…
Marketing Tactics

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…

Don’t just “Get a sense” for your customers. Make audience research actionable through revenue-lifting tactics.

There’s nothing wrong with running a quick SparkToro audience search, scrolling around for 5 minutes, and coming away savvier and better-informed about a group’s behaviors and demographics. But, if that’s all you’re doing with the tool’s output, you’re missing out. Instead of telling you, I’ll show you. Let’s use the example of Klaviyo.com; a company whose marketing automation, email segmentation,…
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…