SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool that simplifies market research and allows users to find out what their target audiences are doing online.
Thanks to the use of various filters, you will be able to know how your target behaves and answer various questions:
– What do they often talk about? For example: marketing or business .
– What words do they use in their profiles? For example: doctor or athlete .
– What accounts do you follow? For example: @moz .
– What websites do they frequently visit? For example: www.crossfit.com .
– What hashtag do they use frequently? For example: #sports .
Filter Options-SparkToro
Among the statistics and information that you can access are:
-Audience size.
-Behavior of that public (homogeneous or heterogeneous).
Audience size, behavior and trust
-Accounts that follow in social networks.
Social media accounts
-Websites visited and shared.
Websites that people visit
-Podcasts that listen and share.
Podcasts people listen to
-YouTube channels they watch and subscribe to.
Podcast people listen to
-Demographic insights and common phrases in their bios.
audience insights
SparkToro Review: Is it good? Easy to use? Does it deliver on your brand promise?
SparkToro is, as they say in sports, a game changer .
The company, over time, will probably mark a before and after in the way of doing online market research (netnographies).
The company bills its so far only service as “the best audience intelligence tool on the web” and, given the obsessiveness, neatness, and previous work of one of its founders, the phrase is probably not an exaggeration.
Asserting it on our side would be a mistake because we haven’t tried all the available options, but if anyone has earned the benefit of the doubt, it’s Rand Fishkin.
The tool collects everything we DO on the web and not WHO we are. This distinction is very important when taking into account the world in which we live, where the use of personal information is extremely sensitive .
SparkToro allows you, in a very simple and intuitive way, to reach those people to whom you want to offer your products or services.
With it you can:
-Create lists of people, brands and media that your audiences follow.
-Prioritize and improve corporate communications, SEO, content marketing and any campaign you want to carry out to cover more field and reach more people.
-Analyze the target audience of your brand and that of your competitors.
-Discover and draw plans to amplify links and media coverage.
Who can this tool be useful to?
-Public relations departments.
-Marketers who specialize in social networks and web content.
-SEO providers.
-Market research managers.
In the end, our verdict is positive: SparkToro delivers on its promise to simplify audience analysis and deliver inputs that would otherwise take weeks or months to collect.
However, like everything, SparkToro has a limit: the tool will not do the marketing of your brand on its own, nor will it generate the exact responses or actions that you need to take.
Therefore, you should take it as one more resource, as a means to achieve an end, not as the definitive panacea.
It will be useless to have all this information in hand if you do not apply specific actions that are later reflected in the profits of your company.
Therefore, after understanding how this tool can help us, I will explain the following:
1. Why are we doing this review?
2. How can you use SparkToro to increase the impact of your marketing?
3. Special features offered by the tool
4. Final considerations.
Why are we doing this review and what is our approach?
On April 15, 2020, my brother, friend, and partner, Juan Sanoja , messaged me with the following LinkedIn post from Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of SparkToro.
In the same message, he invited me to contact Rand, so that we could write this review for the Hispanic market and understand how this new audience intelligence tool could help those of us on this side of the world.
Before the announcement, we had been waiting for some time and wondering what Rand could bring with this new company, after having triumphed in MOZ.
Therefore, without thinking twice, I contacted him very excited (since Fishkin has been a referential figure for us ), with the aim of managing this press access.
After sharing some travel tips about Venezuela, and talking a bit about the challenges facing our countries, Rand granted me access to a SparkToro premium account for 7 days to use without limitations and generate the impressions you have been reading here.
As the tool only compiles information in English, it cannot yet be used 100% in our markets.
However, all those companies that must serve Anglo-Saxon audiences will be able to enhance their marketing strategies with SparkToro.
In the end, that is our focus: that people who have clients or sources of income in English-speaking markets can use this analysis tool in their favor.
Benefits of SparkToro
After testing the tool and seeing how we can take advantage of it, in this part of the article I will explain step by step how we should use it and what marketing actions we will be able to carry out with it.
Let us begin.
How to use SparkToro in favor of your business?
Market research is a fundamental piece within companies because it allows decisions to be made with a higher percentage of success.
It is not the same to launch a service, a product or content to the market after inquiring if it will be successful, than to hope by magic that what we are releasing to the public meets the objectives that we have set.
Now, what are the problems with this type of research?
1. They take a lot of time: you must identify the problem, define objectives, find the sample and create the methodology (surveys, focus groups, interviews).
2. They are expensive: you have to access databases, organize spaces to conduct interviews and hire external consultants if necessary.
3. There is a risk that they are not very applicable: if you take a long time to do the research, the situation can change and that insight that cost you so much to determine can be useless.
So, this is where SparkToro comes in.
How do we research our target audience with the tool?
In our case (we are an SEO Agency ), if we want to gain links or offer our services to more people, we need to know where the interested people are spending their time.
SEO Audiences- SparkToro
When doing the search, the tool collects 218,969 sources that frequently talk about “SEO” .
These people follow on social networks: MOZ (59.1%), Search Engine Land (58.5%), Rand Fishkin (57.1%) and Danny Sullivan (48.2%) .
Websites they visit
This audience generally visits the same websites: searchengineland.com , moz.com , searchenginejournal.com and seroundtable.com .
podcasts they listen to
And they listen to podcasts from: Search EngineJournal, EDGE of the web, SEO 101 and Search Talk Live Search Engine Marketing & SEO Podcast.
Marketing actions
What marketing efforts can we make with this data?
Clearly, these are the monsters of the industry.
Unless we have a very very good product to offer them for them to promote us, or a significant sum of money to give away, it will be quite difficult for them to pay attention to us.
However, we could:
1. Find out how much it would cost to sponsor one of the podcasts.
2. Identify what type of content (guides, surveys, newsletters) these companies are not making, so we can make it and then contact them to promote it.
3. Negotiate a commercial alliance (if we offer a service that they do not have in their portfolio).
4. Use these companies as references to raise our brand.
SparkToro Special Features
The tool does not stay at a general level.
You can be much more specific in your research by adding other filters:
Geographic location
Filter by geographic location
In this way you will define who are the people who frequently talk about SEO within the Greater Miami Area location .
This would reduce the fonts to 1,193, from the 218,969 we were previously working with .
Websites
Website filters
In case you want to know more information about the websites of my research, you could filter them by:
-The number of portals to which they already link (this is very important because you will form a prior idea of how willing they will be to give you a link).
-The domain authority of the site (if you approach small portals you will have more possibilities of reaching an agreement to carry out joint marketing activities. You will attack tiny niches, but with a greater probability of conversion).
Podcasts
Podcast filters
When was the last time these companies published episodes?
With these filters you will know who is truly active with the content and where you could place an intelligent investment.
In addition, you will know what exact percentage of the audience interested in SEO listens to EACH of the podcasts.
audience insights
This section is very important because it provides the data that you can take advantage of through immediate application marketing strategies.
You will not have to create new content, but simply adapt it.
In this section you will find out about:
-The main platforms where your target users are spending time.
Busiest Plataforms
– The hashtags (#) they use.
The most used hashtags by the audience
-Geographical distribution.
-Frequent words used in the biographies of the profiles.
-Online activity of these users (average number of publications per week).
Social media
Social media filters
This feature allows you to identify profiles that fit your company’s values and budget, in case you want to do influencer marketing.
As the filter itself indicates, you will be able to discover those hidden gems that help amplify your brand and your content.
The idea is to play with the options to discover those spaces in the networks that may be accessible to you.
YouTube
Filters for YouTube
Lastly, you will be able to find out which are the YouTube channels with the highest audience and see when they published their last video, how many subscribers they have and how many average views their content has.
Final considerations
SparkToro can be the perfect tool for all those companies that want to carry out influencer marketing, sponsorships and commercial alliances.
The user experience is very good and anyone with a few years in the online world will be able to collect all this information without an induction that lasts days or weeks.
The fact that some data is quite generic and that the tool is only in English are two limitations, but it is still a valuable resource for companies.
Many thanks to the SparkToro team for giving us this opportunity.
In the end, we hope that all Spanish-speaking audiences that need to serve Anglo-Saxon markets can get the most out of it.
