Category: Marketing

Advertising Marketing Product Psychology Tactics

What Your Marketing Needs is a Bad Guy

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If you’re a big brand, already established, conservative in your ways and happy with your performance, this advice isn’t for you. But, if you’re a startup, an underdog, a challenger, you need to hear this. Villains are a good thing. Stories with villains make sense. They can be memorable. They can have depth and purpose. Stories without villains are meandering,…
Marketing SparkToro

How to Invest in Episodic Content that Promotes Itself

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’ve long been bullish on episodic content; in fact, I think it’s likely the best kind of long-term content investment most online brands can make. The challenges are consistent creation (gotta keep those episodes coming!) and finding the right marketing flywheel to bring in fans, subscribers, and amplifiers. But, these can be overcome by crafting episodic content that promotes itself,…
Marketing Tactics

The Case for Permissionless Co-Marketing

Amanda NatividadBy Amanda Natividad
There’s a marketing tactic you’ve never heard of. It barely has a name yet. But, many of the best marketers are already practicing it. It’s called Permissionless Co-Marketing. It is the deliberate effort of aligning yourself with other brands by promoting them in your work. It’s the inverse of earned media — where you’re the one organically mentioning someone else.…
Marketing Psychology Tactics

Hook, Line, and Sinker: A Model for Crafting Successful, Viral Content

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Despite studying content that overachieves for years, it’s only in the past few months that I’ve stumbled into a mental model I’ve called: Hook, Line, and Sinker. My goal here is to broadly encapsulate *why* overachieving content pieces hit their mark, and why similar, but underperforming pieces miss. First: when we talk about “content,” we’re talking about all kinds of…
Marketing Psychology Tactics

Influence Maps—The Best Marketing Framework You’ve Never Heard Of

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
When you find a tool that massively improves your work’s effectiveness and dramatically cuts down on poor decision-making, there are two natural responses: “This is amazing! It’s gonna save me so much heartache.”“WTF?! Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before?” That’s exactly how I felt when I stumbled across the behavioral design field’s Influence Map Framework. In a single,…
Advertising Data Marketing Tactics

What if Performance Advertising is Just an Analytics Scam?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. So we’re not going to forget that lesson.” – Brian Chesky (via Campaign) In 2020, AirBnB cut $542 million of performance advertising spend and saw no measurable falloff in attributable sales. They continued this ad-slashing practice…
Marketing Psychology Startups Tactics

The Incentives to Publish No Longer Reward the Web’s Creators

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s been almost two months since my last post here. For those of you who pay attention to the digital marketing world, the infrequency of updates may be missed, but it’s likely familiar. Many, many web creators (those who publish, in any format, on their own sites rather than big tech’s platforms) who historically published content with great frequency are…

Keep up with SparkToro®