You know it’s not scalable, but you do it anyway. You email your friends, “Hey, I just posted this thing on LinkedIn. Would you mind resharing it with your network?” Friend, some tough love: This has got to stop. It’s not that you shouldn’t ask for support. It’s not about reciprocation either. It’s that begging
Are your customers switching to AI tools (and how much)? SparkToro’s new Search & AI Tools feature has the answers
By There is a lot of activity moving to LLMs and generative AI tools right now, and for marketers, founders, and creators, the questions are almost always the same: Starting today, SparkToro has the answers. Using clickstream panels from our partners at Datos, we’re able to see when, where, and how much people who visit a
The State of Digital Agencies in 2024: Big Challenges, Bigger Optimism, and Is Remote Work Here to Stay?
By Introductory note from Rand: This extraordinary research was put together by the brilliant Paddy Moogan, who’s had a long career in marketing agencies, and now coaches other agency owners and runs The New Leader newsletter (to which I’m a subscriber). Paddy’s contribution here cannot be overstated – he’s assembled a mountain of survey data from
New Research: We analyzed 332 million queries over 21 months to uncover never-before-published data on how people use Google
By Google is a massive presence on the modern web. They’ve held 90%+ of the global search market share for 15 years. Even the rise of AI tools has been unable to budge that number (so far). They get <9% of all web visits, but send more than 60% of all referring traffic to other sites.
The Best Damn Food & Drink Gift Guide 2024
By Everyone’s favorite food and drink gift guide is back with all-new picks! Same same, but different. It’s the 5th anniversary of this gift guide. Same rules apply: This time, we have a few recommendations that you can buy on Amazon or your local grocery or big box store because we realize this may be most
If your audience’s sources of influence and your marketing budget don’t align, you’re gonna have a bad time
By Yes, this is a rant. It’s a rant about where leadership teams allocate their marketing budget vs. where their potential customers actually pay attention. For most, that’s heavily in digital performance ads (Meta, Google, Apple, and if you’re in e-commerce, Amazon/Pinterest), a healthy amount in social media/brand ads (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, maybe Reddit), and then
Snackbar Studio Raised $2.15M Using SparkToro’s Funding Model (and we’re open sourcing the docs)
By 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 on chill work, sustainability over growth-at-any-cost, and offers investors and founders a lower-risk way to benefit from long-term, profitable operation. Several companies and funds have used our structure to raise money
NEW: Topics, Interests, and Content Ideas Now Live in SparkToro V2
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,
SparkToro V2 Is Now Available in the UK and Canada
By For the past 9 months, our devoted CTO, Casey Henry, has been working day and night to get support for the United Kingdom and Canada into SparkToro V2. Today, it’s finally here. Whether you’re a free user of SparkToro or a paid subscriber, access to data in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada is
The Chill Work Guide to Hiring and Managing Agencies
By 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 execution, but I got too much credit. It’s really all thanks to CKE, our event planning agency. Charlene and her team delivered on an unforgettable couple of days, and we only