New Research: Search Happens Everywhere; an Analysis of 41 Websites with Significant Search Activity
For 25 years, web search meant Google (and a little bit of Bing, Yahoo, and DuckDuckGo). But in the past 2.5 years, it’s often…
Startups
Digital Agency New Business Still a Concern, Referrals Still Rule for Lead Gen and Are Sales Pipelines Finally Recovering?
Recently, Rand and I released the results of the State of Digital Agencies survey for 2025. Our goal of this annual survey is simple…
Where Agency Revenue Is Heading: Fewer Big Retainers, More Mid-Market Retainers, and Longer Engagements
Recently, Rand and I released the results of the State of Digital Agencies survey for 2025. Our goal of this annual survey is simple…
Your Next Launch Will Fail Without an Amplifier Strategy
When teams say, “We’ll build first and figure out marketing later,” they’ve already made their launch harder. That’s not a dunk; it’s an observation.…
Make Something People Want to Talk About
In my formative years as a tech entrepreneur, Paul Graham (cofounder of YCombinator), wrote a seminal essay entitled: Be Good. Most tech folks have…
The Case for Zero-Click Content in a Zero-Trust Ecosystem
There’s a reason zero-click content has taken over your feed, your marketing strategy, and increasingly, your job description. It’s not just because it performs…
“AI will replace all the jobs!” Is Just Tech Execs Doing Marketing
Over the weekend, I went digging for evidence that AI can, will, or has replaced a large percent of jobs. It doesn’t exist. Worse…
ROI vs. VOI: Smart Marketers Look Beyond the Numbers
Most of us default to Return on Investment (ROI) for measuring marketing success. It’s the tried-and-true metric that quantifies financial returns. Money in, money…
Snackbar Studio Raised $2.15M Using SparkToro’s Funding Model (and we’re open sourcing the docs)
Since SparkToro’s founding in 2018, I’ve been been passionately loud about our unique funding model (becase it’s a really good idea.) The model focuses…
The Chill Work Guide to Hiring and Managing Agencies
We recently hosted our first in-person SparkTogether event. It was a smashing success without any mishaps. I got a ton of compliments on the…