Hey Peter, What’s Happening?
It’s the start of a wonderful new year, which means we’re making resolutions to change how we behave. Sure, most of those resolutions will be broken soon (no, I’m not running for 5 miles every morning every single day this year), but I present one resolution that you can stick with throughout 2022 and beyond—continually enhancing how we do audience research.
Fun fact you won’t find in the full article—we have a subscription to this tool already, and you can find that in our Tool Subscriptions spreadsheet on Egnyte. While still a work in progress, this spreadsheet is where all CSGers can find what tools and services we subscribe to in order to get our jobs done. There’s also a Media Subscriptions spreadsheet, too, for those trying to track down a certain article that isn’t showing up in Cision (formerly TrendKite.)
Some of you may be familiar with Rand Fishkin. It might be from founding Moz, which is a great SEO tool, or it might be because of his hair. And let’s be honest—you know I’ll support someone just for the good hair. But we’re not here to talk about SEO or hair today, we’re here to look at Rand’s newest venture—SparkToro.
SparkToro was founded in 2018 but came onto my radar during the doom scrolling days of the pandemic 2020 spring vintage, and with plenty of downtime, I started to play around with the features. It was still early on with somewhat limited functionality, but it seemed like it could be really cool tool at some point. Flash forward to today—and, yep, it’s a really cool tool that we just happen to have access to.
You might be asking, “That’s great, but what does SparkToro actually do for me?” I’ll let Rand himself explain it to you.
So the question becomes when do we, as CSGers, want to consider using SparkToro to our advantage. There’s a few very clear uses cases:
Influencer Mapping: If you’re rooted in PR, this can typically default to media outlets and/or personalities. But you can use SparkToro to take influencer mapping to the next level. Rather than making educated guesses on influencers within an ecosystem, you can let the data show you by showing the percent of a given audience that follows social accounts, listens to podcasts, visits websites and more. Thankfully our industry focus gives us a leg up here, but SparkToro can help to uncover those overlooked/under-the-radar gems that may have smaller, but passionate audiences that can move the sales needle more than a story in The Wall Street Journal ever would.
Remember the teachings of BJ Fogg (now available in CSGU!)—behavior happens when three things occur at the same time: you have the motivation to act, you have the ability to act, and you are prompted to act.
It’s much more likely that proper influencer mapping (and subsequent influencer engagement) can help us better address the underlying behavior we want prospects to take than one or two quotes on page B23 of USA Today.
Persona Building: There’s situations where a client will engage with CSG to help develop a basic understanding of a foundational marketing element—who are their customers? When we’ve been tasked with developing buyer personas, we should be taking into account a wide variety of first- and third-party inputs, including current and prospective customer interviews, CRM data, etc. But just because we have data on the current customers doesn’t mean they’re the ideal customers, and SparkToro can come in handy as a way to obtain additional data on those who are already visiting our client’s website that can enhance what is provided by the client.
Content Development: Let’s face it—there’s times when a client engages with us to develop content for their brand but may not have identified true buyer personas/the money or time to develop them. In those cases, you might consider using SparkToro as a supplement to whatever CRM data the client can share to help inform the content by looking generally at what podcasts they listen to, the types of news outlets they read, etc., that you can mine for relevant content ideas, potential keywords to infuse or even to identify potential distribution outlets.
A new year means new ways to look at audience research, and SparkToro can be a great tool in our toolkit for that in 2022 and beyond. As always, here for any thoughts, questions, rants or questions about why Dave Matthews Band Live at Red Rocks is the best album ever.
Looking for more tips and tricks from the team? Head over to The Inventing Room for more.