Data Marketing Product SparkToro

How to Apply SparkToro’s Data and Get Better Marketing Results

Updated April 3, 2024: We relaunched SparkToro! This blog post has been updated to reflect our product’s current functionalities. In 2018, my cofounder, Casey, and I had a crazy idea: what if you could aggregate the behavior of tens of millions of public social profiles and get insights into how groups of people behave online? What if you could build…

Why You Should Hire Agencies & Consultants (for everything you can)

In my first decade as a tech CEO, I consistently got advice about how building a great team was essential to building a great business. Agencies and consultants were never part of this conversation. It was always: hire full-time employees in areas where you need a competitive advantage; only hire agencies for functions you want to put on autopilot or…
Marketing Product SparkToro

Six Ways SparkToro’s Early Customers Use Our Product

Tl;DR: SparkToro’s early customers include a mix of agencies, independent consultants, and in-house marketers whose work involves Digital PR, Social Media+Content Marketing, Market Research, Digital Advertising, Audience Building, and/or Creative/Brand Marketing. Clicking those will take you to the accompanying section of this post with use-cases and examples. This has been a hard year for everyone. The pandemic’s separated us from…
Marketing Psychology

Outreach Tips (better than anything you’ll find searching Google)

It’s 2020, so your inboxes probably look like mine. Bloated with requests from people you don’t know, overrun by low-quality spammers, a bubbling morass of bandwidth-consuming time vampires mixed in with people and sources you actually *want* to hear from, forcing you to pan for gold amidst the sans serif grays and post-modern white of your mail provider’s “productivity-centric” user…
Marketing Startups

Where Should You Start Marketing a New Business or Product?

There’s no question I get more when presenting on startup marketing than this: “I feel so overwhelmed… Where do I even start?” It’s a fair response, one for which I have great empathy. If you start consuming information about marketing a business online, the rabbit hole can quickly lead to some very overwhelming and, in my opinion, misleading advice. When…

How to Find Those Hard-to-Reach Audiences in SparkToro… Fast

Updated: April 5th, 2024 (for SparkToro V2) Every day, I help folks in fascinating, unique niches uncover key information about the audiences for their marketing efforts. It’s a fun problem! For a few minutes, I get to feel like a digital Sherlock Holmes, digging into their products and services, trying to understand their customers, and then figuring out how to…
Data Marketing Psychology

Too Much Creative Marketing is Stifled by Attribution

You’re listening to a podcast. The guest describes a product that sounds compelling, alluring, something you’ve been looking for… What happens next? Yup. You search Google. And then what? Google shows you the website for that alluring product, and you click. Maybe you explore the site a bit, perhaps give them your email address or even buy the product. Next…
Marketing Psychology

The “Wall Street Journal” Marketing Problem

If you’ve worked in the marketing field long enough, either with consulting clients or as an in-house practitioner with executive participation, you’ve encountered a scenario just like this one. Marketer: “Based on this market research, we know our primary audience: tabletop board game enthusiasts with kids. So, we’ve designed a content marketing campaign, followed by PR and social media outreach,…