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…

Win the RFP: Nail Your Next Client Pitch With Audience Research

Why do in-house teams hire agencies or consultants? It’s almost always for two types of expertise: Tactical: Mastery of a specific tactic in a domain (e.g. handle all the Meta ads for your online shop) Domain: Deep knowledge of a given industry (e.g. PR strategy in the healthcare space) Clients expect these tasks to be done more efficiently and effectively…
Marketing Product SparkToro

SparkToro V2 is Finally Here. It Can Do Incredible Things for SEO, Content Marketing, PR, and Ad Targeting.

It’s an exciting, relieving, high-anticipation day for all of us at SparkToro. Today’s launch—which we call “V2″—is the culmination of more than a year of work, including a complete rebuild of the infrastructure and data sources for our product. And though, for many months, Casey, Amanda, and I feared we might lose key pieces of V1’s functionality, the opposite is…

Where Web Users Spend Time vs. Where Traffic Referrals Originate

“Most of our site’s traffic comes from Google, so most of our digital marketing efforts and spending should be on Google, too.” – An absolutely terrible way to invest in marketing On Monday of this week, I published a comprehensive look at how traffic flows on the American web. Unfortunately, some folks in the social feeds where this research was…
Data Industry Marketing Tactics

Email is the Most Consistent, Reliable Marketing Channel on the Web and I Can Prove It

This is a very short post to say: If you’re not investing in your own email marketing list, you’re making a bad choice. Social media engagement rates have plummeted the last 15 years. Ad engagement, too. Google CTRs have fallen massively the last decade with the rise of zero-click searches. The visibility of TV and print advertisements have died off…