Office Hours: How to Write Influence-Driven Marketing Messaging
“Where we’re going, we don’t need… roads.” Slip on your self-lacing Nike Mags, and buckle up in the DeLorean. We’re going back to 2021…
New Research: Influence Happens Everywhere, an analysis of the 5,000 most-visited sites on the mobile and desktop web
Several weeks ago, I published some important research about where search happens on the web. Spoiler: everywhere, but ~73% is still Google. This data,…
Audience Research Newsletter: Why Audience Research; Grow Your Podcast; When to Charge for Public Speaking
We’re publishing prior issues of the Audience Research Newsletter here! But we’re not just copying and pasting from the archives — we’re only surfacing…
Why LinkedIn Might Have Two Algorithms — and Why Marketers Should Care
We marketers talk about the LinkedIn algorithm as though it’s a single behemoth. But a recent analysis from Christopher Penn suggests the platform may…
Office Hours: Who Will Amplify This and Why?
There’s an expression about the cobbler’s children not having shoes. We’re kind of like that. We are the cobblers AND the children, and we…
NEW in SparkToro: Uncover the AI Prompt Topics Your Audience is Using in ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Claude, and more
“Rand, I love that SparkToro tells me which search and AI tools my audience is using, but… could you also tell me what they’re…
How Much is Your Audience Searching Google vs. Prompting AI Tools? SparkToro’s Answers Just Got an Upgrade
For the past year, SparkToro’s had the remarkable ability to tell you how much your audience used Google vs. ChatGPT, Perplexity vs. Yahoo, Claude…
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…
Best Practices Are Meaningless Without Audience Research
There isn’t actually anything “wrong” with best practices. Best practices are general guidelines for what to do in order to ensure a general baseline…
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…
