The Biggest Mistake We Make When Asking: “Where Are My Customers?”

It’s January, and that means many marketers are tasked with a project to identify new channels and sources of influence for new potential investments. This year is likely more active than most given the decline of Google search traffic, the rise of AI, the Twitter exodus, and the meteoric growth of Threads and Bluesky. But, far too many times, we…
Data Industry Marketing Research SEO

New Research: We analyzed 332 million queries over 21 months to uncover never-before-published data on how people use Google

Google is a massive presence on the modern web. They’ve held 90%+ of the global search market share for 15 years. Even the rise of AI tools has been unable to budge that number (so far). They get <9% of all web visits, but send more than 60% of all referring traffic to other sites. Google is certainly one of…

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,”…

How Can My Brand Appear in Answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Other AI/LLM Tools?

It’s no surprise that marketers, founders, and business owners are starting to ask how their brands can be returned in the answers given by AI/LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. But it’s downright shocking how difficult it is to find high-quality, accurate information about how to do this. Granted, you could just ask ChatGPT (the first answer is decent,…
Hiring Marketing Startups Tactics Team

Stop Making Your Team Own Tasks. Let Them Own Programs Instead.

In a given week, I would write product descriptions, digital ad copy, pithy social media posts, a couple blog posts, and the abandoned cart email campaign. I loved having a variety of writing responsibilities. But there was a big problem: if I took a sick day, it would slow down the rest of my team.  Product, customer acquisition, social media,…

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 to Fight Back Against a Traffic-Less Web

Surveys, studies, analytics… they all show the same thing: getting traffic on the web is harder than ever and it’s getting worse much faster in the last 2 years than the decade before. Site owners are faced with two options: compete for the scraps Google and the other platforms provide, or play the game differently by engaging in Zero-Click answers,…

How Do We Anchor Content Marketing Efforts in a Multi-Platform Distribution World?

This week, I’m taking a full 8 minutes because I want to address an incredibly important email from Russell Wojcik of Liquibase that came in reply to my previous 5-Minute Whiteboard on Content Marketing Evolving Beyond SEO: What distribution point do we rally around if it’s not just keyword rankings in Google? It’s a fair question because, for many content…

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…