5-Minute Whiteboard: Why You Can’t Just Crank Up Marketing to Get More Sales

CEO/Sales Leader: “Hey marketing team! We’re behind on our quarterly sales goals and only have 3 weeks left. Do some marketing why doncha?! Crank up them SQLs!“ Marketer: “Yeah, that’s not really how this discipline works. It’s a long lead cycle between awareness, branding, and conversion, and…“ CEO/Sales Leader: “Sorry exec team. Marketing underperformed and that’s why we didn’t meet…

“High Quality Content” is the Most Useless Phrase in Marketing; We Can Do Better

Did you watch the television program Ted Lasso? You probably did; it has the ubiquity of the 1980s’ The Golden Girls in an era of deeply fragmented viewership. I enjoyed the first season quite a bit, but after watching the second season, was so repulsed by the folksy, smarmy, saccharine shallowness that I stopped. Season 2 somehow made me feel…
Hiring Industry Psychology Team

You can’t hire ambitious people and then ask them to stop being ambitious.

Hiring managers, executives, CEOs—especially those in tech—are proud to say that we only consider applicants with an unrelenting drive for success and a track record of impressive accomplishments. These qualities often correlate with what we perceive (accurately or not) to be our own reasons for success, and we want to find people like us: individuals with intrinsic motivation, constantly striving…

Too Few Marketers Grasp the Difference Between Strategy vs. Tactics; We Need to Fix That

Look, I get it. For (at least) the first decade of my career, I, too, foolishly conflated strategy and tactics. I’d say things like: “we need to be strategic with our paid search spend,” or “let’s get tactical with the pricing tiers.” Did I sound smart? No. Did I *think* I sounded smart? Yeah, probably. Here’s the short version: Strategy…
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…

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…

Google, Apple, and Amazon Stifle Innovation When They Favor Their Own Products

The SparkToro team got an exciting surprise on Sunday evening: a mention of our research on Last Week Tonight by John Oliver. The full episode, Big Tech Monopolies, is available on YouTube. It covers an issue I’ve railed against before, but with a heightened sense of urgency: there is actually a bipartisan bill in Congress that might fix this. Thankfully,…

SparkToro’s Mission, Vision, and Values: BELUX

Those skilled in the art of BS detection can tell you that 99% of company mission, vision, and values statements are meaningless. For corporate ideals to be more than just blatant-hypocrisy-in-poster-form, leadership has to build them into the company’s operating systems: how they hire/fire/promote, how they prioritize product investments, treat customers, make decisions around funding and acquisitions, and more. Even…