By Starting today, SparkToro V2 has an entirely new capability—The Topics Section—that adds massive value for content strategy, content creation, and/or audience research applications.
In fact, this new data is what our customers told us (in a September survey) was the most valuable missing piece in the product:
Let me show you what it can do, and why I’m so excited to have these features live 👇
Detailed Breakdown
The Topics section adds three entirely new kinds of data to SparkToro’s audience research reports:
#1: Relevant Topics – subjects that the audience you’ve searched for has high affinity for, i.e. they care about these topics and are likely to consume content about them, follow them in their feeds, subscribe to sites/newsletters about them, etc. For example, in the last quarter, SparkToro’s behavioral data shows particular interest in the Caribbean, Barcelona, and Arizona’s National Parks, hence these topics appear on the list.
#2: Broad Interests – higher-level affinities an audience has with ideas/subjects. For example, travel writers often have interest in crafting itineraries, trip planning, travel photography, and blogging. These aren’t exclusively held by travel writers, rather they’re interests a wide variety of groups and people might hold that happen to have high affinity for the travel writer audience.
#3: Content Ideas – we’ve heard from many of our content marketing-focused users that a key part of their SparkToro process is uploading the data export to ChatGPT and then asking for content ideas based on the behaviors and demographics of the searched-for audience. And while this is a great use of SparkToro data, it’s also frustrating to have to export, find the download, log into ChatGPT, re-upload, and use the same prompt. Why not include those content ideas directly in the app?
That’s what we’ve done with Content Ideas 😉
The headlines above are based on real behavioral data, and so while they’re still just “words that frequently come after other words” (because that’s how LLMs work), they’re also far better prompted with real audience data, avoiding the “garbage-in/garbage-out” phenomenon so common to LLM use.
Side note: none of these are “SEO Keywords,” though all of them are partially informed by an audience’s searches. And for marketers who ask “what do I center my content around if not Google searches?” this is the answer. Topics and Interests are bigger than keywords; they’re subjects people care about, even if search engines might not. Newsletter writers, social media marketers, podcasters, video hosts, and creators of all kinds looking to break out of the SEO box, but still wanting to inform their work with audience data—we’ve got your back. 🤜🤛
For now, the Topics Section feature is limited to Business and Agency level SparkToro plans, but is provided in all three countries we cover (the US, Canada, and UK). If you’re on the Free or Personal account tiers and want a sample, make sure to check out the example queries from your dashboard that will include this (and every other type of data), e.g. the audience that searches for customer retention.
Affinity, Saturation, and ChatGPT-Prompt Integration
In each of these new sections, you’ll find two score, one familiar (Affinity) and one new (Saturation). The Affinity score works the same as throughout the SparkToro application—it shows the relative degree of connection between the audience and the topic/interest/content idea.
For example, in the screenshot below, SparkToro is telling us that TryCompa.com‘s audience (a SaaS product that helps HR professionals and leadership teams benchmark compensation) is likely to have slightly more interest in the topic “job satisfaction in the tech industry” than in “understanding stock options” (and as a CEO, I tend to agree with that assessment).
In the far right column is the new score: Saturation. It measures the degree to which this topic is already well-covered on the web (at least in the recent past). For example, there was less published on the web about “prepping for management interviews” in the past quarter than about “job satisfaction in tech.”
When choosing topical areas to invest in for content creation, both are key considerations:
- Does my audience care about this topic? (Affinity can help answer that)
- Is there a ton of recent content already out there about this topic (Saturation can help here)
You’ll also see a bit of functionality we’ve added upon request from content creators who like to leverage ChatGPT for ideation and content design—integration (via a direct prompt link) with OpenAI’s LLM tool. When you click the OpenAI logo beneath any Interest, Topic, or Content Idea, it will open a prompt designed to help with ideation, design, and content creation:
Obviously, the prompt is easy to change or replace as you see fit. We filled these in with inspiration from one of our heavier SparkToro-for-content-creation customers, and I’ve been impressed with the results in testing over the last week.
Personally, I’m still passionate about humans creating content > LLM creations. I don’t think anything produced by any public model I’ve seen is as compelling, useful, or amplification-worthy as what talented people can create. However, I have been convinced that LLMs are highly useful tools to avoid the “stare at a blank page” problem. And the prompts, backed by the real-life audience data from SparkToro, really can help solve that issue for stumped creators.
As always with new features in SparkToro, we’d love your feedback, input, and suggestions. Topics is brand new to the tool, and while we’ve done a few hundred test ourselves, there’s undoubtedly things we haven’t considered or spotted, so please drop a line to [email protected] (which goes to all three of us) with your thoughts.