On April 23rd, 2020, at what felt like the worst time to start a new business in a hundred years, SparkToro launched for the first time. The world’s attention was anywhere but on a new software product, yet Casey and I felt we didn’t have much of a choice. We needed revenue. We needed to
NEW in SparkToro: Content and Profile Text Insights
By What does your audience talk about online? How do they describe themselves? What hashtags do they use? Prior to social media aggregation software, answering these questions was a maddeningly manual, lengthy process. Unfortunately, most of those products are exorbitantly expensive, enterprise tools. After SparkToro’s launch last year, we were somewhat shocked to find: A) How
When Choosing Marketing Channels, Visualize the Curve
By Business Owner: “We’re launching a new company/website/campaign and want to buy ads that can get us some customers. Once that’s working, we’ll invest in content and SEO.” Marketer: “So, no one’s heard of your brand, and you don’t have any existing digital marketing, but you’d like to start with ads, then invest in content and
SparkToro Now Has 50% More Podcasts
By The Short Version: Every SparkToro search you perform now contains far more podcasts. That’s because we’ve made more connections between podcasts and their (or their host’s) social profiles, and also because SparkToro’s podcast index has grown substantially, to more than 600,000 unique shows. If you’re building Lists in SparkToro, you’ll also find that more than
One Customer Feedback Email Changed Our Startup’s Trajectory
By Building a new company means constantly managing one’s emotions. The high highs of days when everything’s golden inevitably give way to the low lows when you’re certain it’s all doomed. At the end of February, Casey (my cofounder) and I were in that latter boat, nervous about how signups for our 10-month old startup had
In 2020, Two Thirds of Google Searches Ended Without a Click
By In August of 2019, I published research from now-defunct clickstream data provider, Jumpshot, showing that 50.33% of all Google searches ended without a click to any web property in the results. Today, thanks to new data from SimilarWeb, I’ve got a substantive update to that analysis. From January to December, 2020, 64.82% of searches on
Marketing Personas Are Almost Always a Boondoggle (but they don’t have to be)
By Boss: “We need marketing personas for each of our customer targets.”You: “Got it. What problems are these personas meant to solve?”Boss: “You know, um… Strategy. Targeting. And, uh… give ’em fun names like Workin’ Wendy and Stay-at-Home Steve, or something.”You: “Oh god, not again…” A few years back, I worked on a 6-month project to
The Paradox of Content Marketing to Beginners vs. Experts
By Over the last 20 years, I’ve done a lot of educational content campaigns, both for my own companies, and to help others. But it’s only recently that I’ve come to grok the odd paradox of how certain types of content earn reach, amplification, and success with the people they’re meant to engage. Here’s the problem:
The Secret Is… There Is No Secret.
By This is a blog post about spaghetti alla carbonara. It is also a blog post about the perfection of simple things. And about the remarkable effort required to perfect a craft, even a very simple one. And, finally, it’s about all that is wrong with the phrase: “The secret to great X is…“ Those six
New in SparkToro: Enhanced Text and Hashtag Insights
By Just last week we released the new Press tab, but we’re at it again with another upgrade for your SparkToro account—albeit a more modest one. Today, we’re excited to announced an upgraded Audience Insights tab with more data available, and new segmentation of text insights. All the details and a few examples of how you