Events Industry Marketing Psychology

Should You Raise Your Rates and Only Take Paid Speaking Gigs? Not So Fast…

Over on Mastodon, SparkToro CEO Rand Fishkin and Seer Interactive CEO Wil Reynolds were chatting about the blind advice of “Raise your rates!” and “Don’t speak for free!” They floated the idea of a co-authored blog post, and I (SparkToro’s VP Marketing Amanda Natividad) promptly chimed in. This blog post was written by all of us, with quotes from those…

Why Marketers, Creators, and Brands Should Start Using Mastodon ASAP

I joined Twitter in June, 2007. It turned out to be a very smart move; over the next decade, that network had a massive impact on my professional success. Some of that is because I did interesting or valuable things, but a lot of it was a combination of timing and serendipity. There are plenty of articles about why you…

How Rand Makes Those Split-Screen Videos You See on LinkedIn and Twitter

Several times a week, I post videos that look like this on (usually) LinkedIn and Twitter: They tend to get a lot of engagement (in this case, 10,000+ “impressions” which translates to a respectable 2,880 “viewers” according to LinkedIn). And inevitably, I get comments, DMs, or emails that ask “how do you make those split screen recording videos?” It’s easy…

NEW: Audience Tracking is Now Available in SparkToro

Since our launch in 2020, SparkToro has helped thousands of marketers uncover the most popular demographic and behavioral attributes of their target audiences. Emphasis on “most popular” 😉. That data is undoubtedly valuable: it helps folks know where and how to reach their customers online. But, in the two years SparkToro’s been active, we observed a handful of our smartest,…
Data Marketing

Which 3rd-Party Traffic Estimate Best Matches Google Analytics?

In July and August of this year, SparkToro solicited (via Twitter, our email newsletter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram) voluntary sharing of Google Analytics data from the web marketing community. Over 1,000 participants shared their websites’ traffic (through GA’s oAuth function) with us. We then acquired metrics from four providers of traffic estimate data—SEMRush, Datos, SimilarWeb, and Ahrefs*—and compared these against…
Data Marketing Tactics

How to Measure “Hard-to-Measure” Marketing Channels

I’ve ranted endlessly about how marketing leaders refuse to invest in hard-to-measure marketing channels like PR, media, native social, events, many types of content, and word-of-mouth. But, never stepped up and made clear how to use metrics, imperfect though they may be, to turn impossible-to-measure into difficult, but possible. Sadly, I’ve never seen a high-quality offering to reliably point-to, either.…
Data Marketing Product SparkToro

Which Subreddits Does Your Audience Follow? What Do They Talk About? Starting Today, SparkToro Has the Answers

Today, we’re launching a new “Reddit” tab in SparkToro. It will show you the Subreddits to which the audience you search for most-heavily subscribes, and the text content of their Reddit posts. This feature is briefly available for all paid subscribers. In a few weeks, SparkToro is updating our prices & packages, at which time it will be exclusive to…
Events Marketing SparkToro

Introducing SparkTogether 2022: Because the Marketing World Needs Better, More Unique Events

On November 10th, we’re running SparkToro’s first-ever marketing summit: SparkTogether. It’s live. It WON’T be recorded (because our presenters are sharing confidential numbers and information). And we’d love to have you there. For details and tickets, check out the SparkTogether 2022 Event Page, or read on for more background. Early bird tickets are on sale until Oct. 8, then prices…

Zero-Click Content: The Counterintuitive Way to Succeed in a Platform-Native World

Update: We hosted a SparkToro Office Hours webinar about Zero-Click content on August 23. Sign up free to watch the replay. It could be a chicken or egg situation: Maybe the platforms have made us lazy, or we’ve trained their algorithms to reward platform-native content — as in, content that keeps people on the platforms’ sites instead of sending them…