The Benefits of SparkToro with CEO Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin is the Co-founder and CEO of audience research startups, SparkToro. He's dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, speaking, startups and his book, Lost and Founder, which I am currently reading and I highly recommend!
When Rand's not working, he's usually cooking a fancy meal for the love of his life, Geraldine, who he mentions in his book, which is really nice and sweet that he brings her into that story. If you bribe him with great pasta or a great cocktail, he'll spill his big tech dark secrets.
I had the honor of interviewing Rand and digging in to all of his expertise and have it here to share with you!
Three Random Things
Q: What is your go-to karaoke song?
A: Oh man. I'm not a great singer by any means. And so I go with my people's traditional song, the Beastie Boys' Intergalactic.
Q: What's your go-to pasta dish?
A: It's a tough toss up, if I have the time and energy and the arm strength, I do love making Pesto, especially in the spring and summer. But probably go-to, go-to is probably Carbonara because I just absolutely love it. It's very challenging right at the end there when you have to mix in the egg and make it the perfect texture. But if you use the double boiler technique, you should be able to get it just right.
SparkToro
Q: What is SparkToro?
A: SparkToro is audience research or market research tool. But it is very different and new and unique from other things that exist in the market. It's always been a challenge to explain because of that.
Essentially, SparkToro is a giant database currently about 77, 78 million public web and social profiles. So, you know, we've got your LinkedIn profile and that links to your Twitter profile, which has a link to your Facebook page, which has a link to your Instagram, and that links to your YouTube or Quora, or you've got a medium or a GetUp account."
All of these connected together are one profile and then SparkToro essentially crawls those pages, just like Google crawls, the open public web. So we don't have any private profiles or anything, any information that's not publicly available through Google. We crawl those and then aggregate them together, anonymize the data.
We don't show names and information about the people but what we can say is, "Oh, well, I'm an architect, right? Or I'm creating software for architects. So I want to find out what architects listen to, watch, read, follow, pay attention to. So you can search SparkToro for who has the word 'architect' in their bio, and then we can say, okay, well we have 6,422 architects in our database and here's a bunch of data about them. Here's demographic data. Here is data about which YouTube channels they subscribe to. Here's data about what podcasts they listen to. Here's data about what social accounts they follow and on which networks. Here's data about what press they read, websites that they visit, all that kind of stuff.
All of that data is public which is really nice. So if part of your challenge is trying to figure out how to go do other forms of intelligent marketing on the web besides Google and Facebook, SparkToro can give you that information. What are the live streams that I should be on? What are the YouTube channels that I should pitch? What are the podcasts that I should sponsor? Where should I go spend some ad dollars or some time contributing a guest editorial?
Q: How do you use SparkToro?
A: You can go to the website and do a search for free and just see kind of all that data laid out right there. It's not complicated. There's no artificial intelligence. There's no machine learning. There's no crazy weird interface to learn. It is just the list and the percentage of people that pay attention to that source.
Q: What is the advantage of SparkToro?
A: There's lots of folks who I think are trying to solve the problem of, "Hey, my executive or my CMO or my client told me they want to be featured in the New York times, or they want to buy an ad in the wall street journal." That's a terrible idea, right?
I know that is a pure prestige bit of marketing that they think is important because they read that publication, but that is not where we're going to find our audience. In fact, if we spent a 10th of that budget on these 10 other sources that our audience actually pays attention to, we would have far more return on our marketing investment!
How do I prove that to my execs? How do I make that case to my client? If I'm a consultant or an agency, SparkToro's data can really help tell you that.
Q: What is Hidden Gems?
A: Hidden Gems, there's a bunch of filters inside SparkToro. So you could filter and say, "I only want accounts that are located in Seattle." Or "I only want individuals versus organizations right in my results."
One of the filters is called Hidden Gems, and this is a very popular one. We actually feature it on the overview page as well. Essentially what Hidden Gems are, they are accounts with smaller overall reach, but very high or relatively high for their sector in niche engagement.
For example, Marisa, it could be, "Oh, well, in the web marketing field, Rand Fishkin's accounts are followed by tons of people, but relative to the size of his following, half a million followers on social or whatnot, the engagement per post that Rand puts up is only mediocre."
But maybe your account is followed by a smaller total number of people. Maybe, I don't know, 25,000 or 50,000, but when you post content on your Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, whatever, it gets a lot of engagement.
In our system that would be sort of counted as a Hidden Gem. Smaller overall reach, but high engagement per piece of content, or per post, per share put up. We will show these Hidden Gems, we have them in both the social and website section. We'll highlight those hidden gems for folks.
Very often folks will go, if they know a sector really well already, a lot of the results are very unsurprising. But when you put on the Hidden Gems filter, it brings back a bunch of surprising results that you may not know about. That could be exactly what you're looking for in terms of finding new sources to engage with.
It sounds really fancy, but it's so simple, right? The Hidden Gems filter uses a little bit more math behind the scenes but we're talking about like division. It's not too fancy.
I'm always surprised that SparkToro did not exist previously because, it feels like the kind of thing like obviously someone must be collecting all this data and then showing what did people actually pay attention to. We couldn't find it so we created it.
Q: What will people find in SparkToro?
A: SparkToro does not really do what's kind of considered classic influencer marketing. Our crawl of Instagram is actually quite light. We do not tend to show you the sort of half naked people with six pack abs who posed on beaches and you pay them $500 to post with your product. We don't really have that sort of stuff in our system. Maybe we do here and there, but not intentionally.
Most of what you'll find in SparkToro is much more kind of the, people who are deeply interested in classic cars, read this website, follow this podcast, subscribe to this YouTube channel, share this, they follow this Twitter account. They pay attention to this person on LinkedIn. Maybe it's an Instagram stuff too, but it tends not to be those big influencer accounts.
Q: Who uses SparkToro?
A: A very broad range of folks, but it tends to be folks who are either in digital marketing of some kind, or market research of some kind. Like, I need to understand an audience, or I need to go optimize my Facebook ad targeting and get inspiration for what content to write. Because these are the hashtags and words and phrases that people are using, or I need to go pitch these sources, that sort of stuff.
I think what's nice about SparkToro at least is you can go try it for free and be like, it's amazing and solves my problem or no, I don't have that problem and don't need it yet.
Q: How did you launch SparkToro
A: We actually had a very long development and then sort of alpha and beta process. I started the company in March of 2018, raised some money. A little later that year, Casey came on board, he started sort of building a lot of the backend technology, while I was kind of building up audience and marketing and doing product work.
We had a beta over, basically starting around March of 2019, all the way into the holidays of that year and did several rounds of beta testing, refined the product, got a lot of good feedback. We completely overhauled the design.
Then we were planning to launch, we started our early access for SparkToro's launch at the end of February, 2020. And it was almost simultaneously the day that the first case of COVID, first confirmed case of COVID was here in Seattle at the nursing home. Right?
We had no idea what was coming next, but basically over the next four or five weeks, we were sending out invitations to all the people who'd signed up to be notified at launch, get early access. We were seeing risks of this just heartbreaking phenomenon, where we'd send out a thousand emails on a Monday, or Tuesday to this list we had about 20,000 people on the early access invite list. We sent out these emails and every morning I was waking up to all these bounces, and the bounces were not, so-and-so's out of office. They were so-and-so is no longer employed here. It was just this like, Oh my God, the economy feels like it's in free fall. It felt scarier and worse to me than 2008.
Thankfully that proved not to be long-term true. The economy sort of rebounded, especially the digital economy rebounded. We in fact had quite a reasonably successful launch in late April, but super, super scary time at the beginning.
We made a bunch of decisions right around then to reconfigure how we were going to do pricing and packaging. So we launched a much more generous free version, which still exists, that's the free version you can go sign up with. I think it's 10 searches a month and you know, a certain number of results and all that kind of stuff. Initially it was going to be a much smaller amount, but we thought, well, maybe we can start to build our audience, even if we're not going to be able to get customers over this next, however long the pandemic last.
But things, things ended up working out really well. Lots of folks subscribe to SparkToro, of course a ton of business moved online. By September, the company was actually profitable!
Q: How can people try SparkToro?
A: People can try it out at sparktoro.com.
I think what a lot of people need to do is really just try it out. It's something that would be good for their business, or even doing research on content, like you said, what to write next.
Q: Final question and this is the most important. Why is it important to listen to your audience?
A: I think that one of the challenges that we have, I certainly have as an entrepreneur and a business owner and a challenge that many, many folks who have experience in their field, live through and work through is the assumption of knowledge, right? The presumption that I know this world, I know my customers, I know what they want. I know how they engage with our products. I know how they engage with the field overall. And it turns out that, that is very rarely true.
Then when you actually look at data, when you survey your customers, or you interview them, or you go to events and you listen to people on stages, and you listen to people in audiences, and you read the answers to their surveys, and you follow conversations slightly outside your world on social media, you're always surprised.
There's new information that comes to you about how people behave and why they behave that way and their motivations behind it. I have had, especially in my years at Moz, when I assumed that I knew what was best for the field, when I told my team, we don't need to do the research, wWhen I had that smug, presumptuous, prideful attitude, that is when we failed, that is when we really took wrong turns.
I think one of the best ways to humble yourself and to make smarter decisions about the products that you build, and the ways you market them and where you do that marketing is to listen to your audience. Listen to them at scale, don't have six friends that you go golfing with or whatever. You will have a far better time, whether that's building products or writing content, or helping people or designing your marketing campaigns.
