Category: Marketing

Data Marketing Product SparkToro

SparkToro’s New Tool to Uncover Real vs. Fake Followers on Twitter

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
On our journey to creating a great search tool for audience intelligence, we realized that the data we use to measure influence is fatally flawed in a number of ways. Our SparkScore tool was built to help measure true engagement+reach (as opposed to mere following). But the other big problem is fake followers — accounts that exist on Twitter, technically…
Marketing

You’ve Got Product/Market Fit… What About Marketing/Market Fit?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
You’ve just been asked to take over the marketing strategy for a new company that makes innovative, high end restaurant equipment. They need their brand and message to reach chefs and owners of independent restaurants. What’s your process? If you’re a smart, responsible, thoughtful marketer, you’ll do something like this: Step One: Figure out what chefs + restauranters pay attention…
Marketing SparkToro

Announcing SparkToro “Trending” — a Front Page for the Web Marketing World

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Over the last decade, there have been numerous attempts to create an news aggregation tool for web marketers — Threadwatch, Sphinn, Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Alltop — but none of them quite scratched the itch. Plus, almost all of them were susceptible to rampant spam and/or ugly drama+trolling in the comments. Casey (SparkToro’s cofounder) and I have lots of experience in this…
Marketing

Contrarian Take: Don’t Start Your Content Marketing with “What Do My Customers Want?”

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If you’re in the business of content marketing, I know you’ve seen advice like this: “Start with your customer personas.” “Create content that will resonate with your customers.” “Great content is content that your customers actually want to consume.” It sounds compelling. But in my experience, it’s wrong. Or at least, incomplete. Why?…
Data Marketing

Is SEO Opportunity Growing or Shrinking?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s our existential question as SEO professionals — is SEO still growing? Or have Google’s actions reduced the opportunity potential? I see this phrased in all sorts of ways: Are there more searches on Google this year than last year? Is Google taking more of the search traffic for themselves? Do more or fewer clicks go to the organic results…
Events Marketing

How Cultural Conditioning Biases Us to Make Bad Decisions in Our Lives, Our Work, & Our Marketing (my talk from INBOUND 2017)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This week I was invited to give a spotlight talk at Hubspot’s INBOUND in Boston. INBOUND is a unique event for me. It’s typically the largest in-person audience I’ll speak to in a given year (often in excess of 3,000 people in the room), and a less SEO-focused crowd than usual. Most of the time, I’m just trying to impress…
Marketing

A Case Study in Google’s Use of Visit & Click Data

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There’s still a weirdly large percent of the SEO and web marketing worlds that, despite overwhelming evidence, don’t believe that Google is collecting or using visit, engagement, click-through or clickstream data. This week, we stumbled across a superb example of the search giant doing just that, so I had to share. Something funny happens when you Google from the Mozplex…

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