How to Describe Your Audience to SparkToro

Pro tips for describing your audience in natural language: how specific to get, when to segment, and which details actually change your results.

Friends, let me give you some pro tips for describing your audience to SparkToro. This input box says use natural language to input interests, behaviors, job titles, any descriptive or demographic features. Sometimes we get queries like this, cactus plants.

I would recommend against that. If what you're looking to do is say, I'm looking for people interested in buying cacti. That's pretty good, but a few tips to make it even better.

What if you could say, my audience, the exact audience that I wanna dial in is a variety of cacti buyers. Some of them are resellers, some of them are collectors, some of them are gardeners. Analyze each of these individually.

Say, home gardeners interested in buying cacti and succulents in California. Right? So you can get very specific.

SparkToro will do a better job with a dataset like this, an audience like this. And you can segment this audience. So if you know that you're interested in two different groups of home gardeners, one who are relatively high net worth and who often have staff or people who help them with their garden, and more of the amateur home gardener who's doing it themself.

Self home gardeners who are retired and interested in buying cacti and succulents in California, or rare collectors, rare cacti and succulent collectors in California. The reason I'm trying to break these up is because when you're doing audience research, breaking your audience into these multiple groups to target them separately can be incredibly valuable. I'll show you what I mean.

We'll create a report for these rare cacti and succulent collector folks. What you'll see is information specific to the group of people who would consider themselves going after particularly special unique cacti as opposed to the ones who are just putting cacti in their gardens to look nice, to be pretty. Difference, and every time you create a new audience you can do this again.

You can describe a different audience. What I do then is I take these different audiences and I put them into a project. So you can see in my interior design group, I've got luxury home interior owners, affluent US homeowners seeking lighting design, modern lighting design shoppers, because these are all different audiences that are potentially targeted by the person I was helping who's an interior lighting design company.

So this California rare cactus group, they are going to look different if you describe them different ways, and very subtle differences can lead to deeply unique different groups because of how our interpretation layer manages that information that you give us. What you'll see are different usage of search and social networks. You'll see different websites that they visit and different affinities that they have for those sites.

You'll see different categorization breakdowns. This is why I strongly suggest being as descriptive as possible to the point where if for example you are running audience research and you are including details that wouldn't change your marketing, or they wouldn't change how you do targeting, or they wouldn't change your messaging. Those you don't need to include.

So if for example, you say something like rare cacti collectors between forty five and sixty. My question would be, is that group very different from the group who's thirty to forty five? If it was, what would you do differently?

How would you differently target them? I'm not saying don't run these two searches. You could run these.

You might find interesting data. But my suspicion is that it's not that valuable to analyze different audiences unless their behavior is actually gonna be different and unless your marketing use case for them is gonna be different as well. So tons of awesome data inside SparkToro that you can get very demographically detailed on, and you can describe an audience to us virtually anyway.

If you need help describing an audience, please feel free to reach out to us, support@sparktoro.com, or I will say this, a lot of your favorite AI tools are quite good at breaking down and describing an audience to SparkToro for use. So feel free to cut and paste. Feel free to use the MCP connection to Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini Enterprise, which works with every SparkToro account.