Guide to SparkToro Part 3: Why SparkToro Requires A Different Marketing Approach
This post was updated on April 13, 2023.
To truly get the most out of SparkToro, you need to rethink your approach to marketing technology.
The way marketers usually think of their software breaks down in front of a more unorthodox tool like SparkToro. Sure, you can run some cool searches and get fun numbers about your audience. But will you know what to do with that information?
Here in Part 3 of my SparkToro guide series, I want to present you with a manifesto of sorts - a different approach to your marketing research and to working with your marketing technology stack.
The key to this approach? Stop searching for easy answers from your marketing tools. When you take tactical recommendations from another source (human or software), you are sacrificing a level of control within your work. To properly adapt your marketing campaigns to your business, learn how to design both strategy and tactics from scratch.
And SparkToro is one of the only marketing tools that can help you figure out both strategy and tactics. So to get value from SparkToro’s audience research data, think about marketing like a cook: each data point is like a different ingredient within your kitchen and you are the chef cooking a delicious meal.
Note: If you want to check out the other SparkToro guides in this series, you can find their links and descriptions here.
License: feel free to implement this advice in your own work and link to this page as you wish, but this content cannot be copied or replicated without explicit permission and credit to Mariya Delano and Kalyna Marketing.
Why We Should Talk About Cooking
So much marketing advice feels like a recipe without an explanation for why certain steps are important or how the author decided to recommend a specific tactic. When HubSpot tells you to “name the offer in your subject line” of your marketing emails, they assume that your audience will actually respond well to deals and discounts. But what if you are a B2B cybersecurity services provider? Are you going to throw in a Valentine’s Day 10% discount on your risk assessment services?
To do great marketing, you need to start with humans, not keywords or data. See what people are saying, talk to them, read their posts and comments, listen. Figure out what your ideal customers are thinking and how they feel about the topics related to your offering. Wait to look at keyword lists or engagement statistics until you have the context to evaluate what recommendations are actually relevant to your business.
No matter how smart your tools are, they don’t know the specifics of your business. If you are trying to get some piece of software to spit out the perfect keyword list or the perfect set of recommendations for improving your draft… you’re looking for answers that don’t exist. At best, these tools will give you a benchmark for what other companies in your space are already doing.
But none of these popular marketing tools will help you figure out if your particular customer base is looking at those particular keywords when evaluating the particular type of solution that you offer. Even if these generic recommendations work for you, what happens when the market changes?
In a business, quickly adapting to the shifting context and market conditions is essential. You need to be able to do that quickly and easily with limited budget, time, and resources. But when you are depending on somebody (or something) else to give you all the answers… you lose the ability to innovate and nimbly respond to any changes within your environment.
Can You Cook Without a Recipe?
Before I can explain how you should think about SparkToro, I need you to understand why I tend to cook without a recipe. The key to my approach with both marketing and cooking is known as “first principles thinking”, popular in the sciences and (unfortunately) with Elon Musk fans.
My husband Jack and I often cook a very particular mac and cheese recipe. It’s a labor of love that demands hours of time, undivided sensory attention, and at least one good frolic through the nearest grocery store’s fancy cheese aisle. Apparently, the final dish is quite good, because we are always requested to cook it during holidays or big family dinners.
I’m pretty sure I know this recipe better than I know some of my closest friends, but when one of those friends asked me for it… I was stuck. You see, Jack and I never wrote down a recipe. We never needed one. To write out a definitive version of our mac and cheese would be to go against everything that made it special in the first place. Instead, we’d simply go to the store and follow our hearts wherever they took us, grabbing whatever ingredients we needed along the way. The ingredients would change depending on the supermarket’s stock and our shifting moods, but we always followed the recipe.
The process of figuring out how to record this recipe and explain it to my friend was very similar to how I explain the utility of SparkToro to other marketers.
How do you treat recommendations from tools like keyword planners or content writing assistants? If you view the suggestions from software as a perfect recipe and implement them without additional skepticism, then you’re losing control over your own marketing work. Sometimes the tool may make great recommendations. But if you don’t know why the final dish tastes a certain way, will you even be able to distinguish a great recipe from a bad one?
SparkToro, on the other hand, is a tool that pushes you to learn how to cook from scratch. SparkToro’s audience research data is endlessly adaptable, like a simple wooden spatula. It encourages you to just try throwing things into your meal and see how they turn out. SparkToro is so frustrating because it requires you to trust your own judgment.
Lazy Marketing & The Delivery Kit Dilemma
Convenience Of Meal Kit Delivery Services
Let’s say that you want to cook your own mac and cheese, but you don’t know much about cooking. One option is to sign up for a meal kit delivery service.
With something like Hello Fresh, you log onto the app and pick the dishes you want to receive within any particular week. The app will tell you caloric information, what ingredients you should expect, and show you a pretty picture of the final recipe. Once that particular week’s box is delivered, you’ll find a pretty recipe card and all the ingredients perfectly measured out and nicely packaged together into a larger bag labeled with the name of your dish.
This process is fun, convenient, and relatively hassle-free. You don’t need to think about what you’re doing. Simply follow the steps as they come, open up the packages you’re told, and voila! You get to feel like a fancy chef eating a very gourmet bowl of dairy and pasta.
Convenience Sacrifices Adaptability
As great as meal kit delivery services are, using them comes with a price.
If all you know is that these ingredients are used with this specific sequence of steps to make this one specific dish... then you will not be able to adjust your cooking, even when you need to.
Sure, you might have served Hello Fresh’s mac and cheese recipe and it was a huge success for your dinner party last month. But what if today you need to serve dinner to a different group of people? What if one of the people in that dinner party suffers from an allergy like celiac disease and cannot eat pasta?
When you depend on somebody else’s recipe, you will not know how to adapt your process to changing circumstances. To feed your hypothetical dinner party, you will need to find a totally different recipe, buy new ingredients, or ruin everyone’s evening because you refused to accommodate one of your guests (who, by the way, is currently sulking in the corner while munching on stale gluten-free crackers). A party that’s not welcoming to one person won’t be fun for anyone.
When you’re using a sandwich maker, everything in your fridge looks like sandwich filling. And when you’re using software that can only be implemented with a specific marketing channel, like an SEO optimization suite, then everything in your campaigns will look like a great SEO opportunity.
Approaching marketing this way is very convenient, but it’s also lazy. And while I’m a big fan of taking things easy, you should always stay in control of when you choose to be lazy. When you accept easy solutions as the default, you lose the capacity to adapt.
Most Marketing Advice = Meal Kit Delivery Services
How does all of this cooking talk tie back to SparkToro and marketing software? Take a look at the cheatsheet below.
See, I told you all this cooking talk was relevant to marketing!
If you are “cooking” a marketing campaign, then we can split up different parts of that metaphor as follows:
Ingredients = information about your target audience. These are all of the different data points that you’re using to build out your strategy and tactics.
Cooking utensils = tools and software used to plan and execute your campaign. You are looking for insights, and you’re using some sort of “equipment” to get the job done.
Recipe = framework for conducting your marketing work. You may have found the framework on somebody’s blog, downloaded a template, or pulled it together from your competitors. This includes the way you evaluate decisions and what tactics you deploy.
When you read marketing advice, you probably hear some variation of “look at well-performing content to inform your own strategy”. But this advice tends to stop there. Of course you should be analyzing other people’s campaigns and tactics. But simply knowing that you should have a reference point doesn’t tell you how you should be evaluating it. How do you know your analysis is good? What should you pay attention to? What does a proper outcome even look like?
When you’re being told to analyze other people’s content but not given any further guidance, you will take shortcuts. Taking a “content ideas” list from Ahrefs is technically competitive research, but you won’t be able to make good decisions without knowing how to critically evaluate that list.
Listing word counts, basic formats, and titles of well-ranking search results without further context is the marketing equivalent of copying somebody’s homework and changing a few details to avoid getting in trouble.
Going back to our cooking analogy, if all you know is that your favorite mac and cheese recipe includes 3 different kinds of cheese, you can easily end up with a bland pile of non-melted feta, paneer, and ricotta. Without taking the time to understand why each type of cheese was in your meal kit’s recipe, you won’t know how to get the same effect or why certain pairings worked in the first place.
An Effort and Flexibility Framework
3 Types of Cooking
Remember - whatever requires the most effort also tends to allow for the most flexibility
To serve mac and cheese for dinner, you have three options:
Hire someone to prepare the dish for you. You can head to a restaurant or order meal delivery that’s prepared by expert cooks according to their existing process and preferences. You are saving your time and compensating those experts for their service. (Low Effort, Low Flexibility).
Follow a ready recipe by signing up for a delivery kit or finding a good recipe from someone else. Whether you acquire the ingredients yourself or get them shipped to your door, preparing the final dish looks basically the same. You are getting complete step-by-step instructions from an expert and then cooking the dish yourself, in your own kitchen. But when following a recipe, you are complying with somebody else’s methodology. (Medium Effort, Medium Flexibility).
Design your own dish from scratch or use somebody’s recipe only as an initial jumping off point . When you are making your own dish, you can cook it however you’d like. But that freedom requires that you become somewhat of an expert yourself, with a coherent understanding of what ingredients, equipment, and process will be required to produce your desired outcome. (High Effort, High Flexibility).
Whatever option you choose, you are trading effort for flexibility. Low effort means that you have to accept whatever somebody else decided was best. High effort means you can pick and choose whatever you’d like, but you have to invest your own time into developing skills and then creating the final product.
3 Types of Marketing
Just as with cooking, in marketing you also have to choose how much effort & flexibility you want
As you might imagine, the same framework applies to marketing. Whenever you’re choosing how to execute on your marketing tasks, you’re deciding between three types of options:
Hire someone to do it for you.
Use a template that provides you with ready answers.
Build it yourself.
Hiring someone to do it for you is straightforward: depending on your requirements and the skillset of your chosen provider, you can sit back and relax after ordering off the menu and that consultant or agency will do all the work for you. Just remember to tip.
The issue with ‘lazy marketing’ is that too many of us are used to treating our work as if there are only two options: hire an expert or use somebody else’s recommendations (from templates or software).
But in both cases, we aren’t doing the work ourselves. We don’t know how to create our meals from scratch and so we lose out on a world of possibilities beyond blindly copying competitors or following gurus on LinkedIn.
What Is Marketing Software For?
Let’s take a step back. If you’re anything like the marketers that I speak with on a regular basis, you probably struggle to get more value out of your marketing software.
I’ve seen people build elaborate contraptions integrating 10+ tools for monitoring different channels, visualizing performance, and planning out their next campaigns (and of course, the integration itself requires an automation tool!). I’ve also seen people who got so frustrated at their dashboard not working correctly that they gave up and started checking everything manually, their brain against the world.
But both groups have a problem: if your marketing software isn’t making you better at your job, then why are you paying for it?
Unfortunately, many of us assume that the solution to our tooling problem is to add even more tools. We sit in front of our screens, squint at spreadsheets and dashboards with bloodshot eyes, and pray that maybe, just maybe, it’ll only take one more refresh on the analytics dashboard to finally show us something new. How could that ever work?
The entire point of having a “data-driven” marketing department is to make more informed and educated guesses with our campaigns. But we cannot depend on other people’s answers to make those guesses! If we don’t understand why the things we do are effective, our only hope for improvement is to take yet another aimless shot into the unknown.
To Understand SparkToro, Understand Marketing Strategy
Every single time you open your favorite marketing software, you should have a goal in mind.
Why are you looking at Google Analytics right now? What are you trying to accomplish? What about that automation flow that you’re optimizing in Klaviyo? Why did you choose to work on that task in particular?
Every action you take in a marketing tool should serve a specific purpose that drives you and your team closer to accomplishing your marketing (and overall business) objectives. Whenever you open any software, and especially when you consider purchasing a new license, think to yourself: how is this software going to help me build demand, grow relationships, gain trust, or educate my prospective customer base?
To answer these questions, you need to understand the difference between marketing strategy and marketing tactics. I’ve talked about the distinction between these two concepts in other parts of this series, but here’s a refresher:
Strategy – why you are choosing to pursue a certain marketing approach or set particular KPIs for the next quarter. These decisions should be based on research, experience, and data.
Tactics – how you will be accomplishing a chosen strategy, such as specific channels, campaigns, frameworks, and approaches. Every single tactic you select should be directly connected to your strategy.
To learn more about the difference between strategy and tactics, read Rand Fishkin’s post
As I was editing this piece, SparkToro’s own Amanda Natividad published a new edition of her excellent newsletter, “The Menu” (which I highly recommend). In it, she recommended building out a marketing plan by first establishing key marketing priorities that will help your team judge which investments are the right ones to invest in. As Amanda phrased it:
“It doesn’t matter whether we ship seven things per week, just that we ship the right things.”
You cannot determine if a specific tactic or marketing software is relevant or valuable to pursue unless you already know your strategic why.
As for your MarTech stack? Remember: your marketing tools are… tools. Made for a specific purpose, designed to help you accomplish a task better than you would otherwise.
Is SparkToro for Strategy or Tactics?
Since marketing software is built to help us do our jobs better, it tends to fall into the same two categories as our overall campaign planning:
Strategic Software – helps you figure out the reasons for why some marketing approach might be a good idea. These are typically variations on market research tools, certain business intelligence solutions, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, social listening software, and project management tools.
Tactical Software – helps you figure out how to execute on your strategy and run your campaigns. These include keyword planning tools, SEO rank trackers, social media schedulers, email campaign automation, design and writing systems, content management systems (CMS), and most “marketing tools” that we commonly think of.
This framework helps us articulate one of the main problems with SparkToro: is SparkToro strategic or tactical software? I think the answer is “both”, and that’s exactly why it’s so hard to understand.
SparkToro is weird: it doesn’t quite fit the dichotomy of software that helps with strategy or tactics. SparkToro does both!
SparkToro doesn’t fit into a neat box. Should you visit the dashboard when you’re assessing your performance and planning out your marketing efforts for the next quarter? If so, that’s a strategic use case. Or should you research your audience whenever you’re figuring out your next set of social media posts? If so, that’s a tactical use case.
The wonderful and confusing fact is: SparkToro and audience research can benefit you both with determining your marketing strategy and your marketing tactics.
So, let’s talk about this wonderful new world of implementing a marketing software that refuses to be pinned down to one category.
Why Most Marketers Don’t Understand SparkToro
I’ve heard so many marketers say that SparkToro sounds cool, but they haven’t figured out how to use it.
Hearing that makes me sad, because SparkToro is (as you’ve definitely figured out by now) my favorite marketing tool. So here’s my guess as to why marketers have struggled to adopt this software in their work.
SparkToro is a newer tool on the market. Because it’s outside of the typical marketing tech stack, any team using it has to change their preconceived notions of what marketing tools they need and what information is useful for them to gather.
SparkToro helps you figure out what accounts, websites, and other corners of the internet are influencing your desired audience. SparkToro’s own Rand and Amanda call these online spaces “sources of influence”, which is an elegant term when you know what they are talking about.
But the more I speak with other marketers, the more I wonder what it means to evaluate a “source of influence” and act based on those insights in any practical way. Because if you have never been taught to think about your marketing work as something you can “cook” from scratch, then you won’t know what to do with software that refuses to force you into a particular recipe.
Why You Are Missing SparkToro’s Value
When you perform a SparkToro search, for instance looking for people who frequently use the hashtag “#digitalmarketing”, you will see information like the social media accounts that they interact with:
What are you supposed to do now? How do you turn this information into actionable insights?
But how can you use the fact that 25% of these marketers follow HubSpot on social media to actually inform your own campaigns?
Many marketers have no idea how to evaluate this information or turn it into any type of actionable insights. And that makes sense! Most of us haven't been taught to think that way. This approach is fundamentally more difficult to understand than any straightforward keyword list or 10-step social media strategy template could ever be.
SparkToro provides a very subtle set of insights. As I mentioned before, SparkToro is kind of like a wooden spatula. You can use it to cook a pasta sauce, a stir-fry, or even a soup. Other tools (Ahrefs, Clearscope, Semrush, Moz, etc.) are sandwich makers. They will only accept a particularly sized slice of bread and then generate a single type of dish. Sure, you can try and squeeze a waffle in here every now and then. But a soup? Forget about it.
SparkToro helps you work with a set of ingredients that, if cooked the right way, could become a phenomenal meal that your desired audience would love. But the tool doesn’t lend itself to a step-by-step recipe or easy answer like ”cook this particular chicken soup".
Instead SparkToro tells you that your audience enjoys chicken. Maybe they like chicken with garlic or lemon.
But then you have to go out there, do the work, and pick or make your own recipe: should this chicken be a soup? Should it be a grilled kebab? Should it be a chicken bake?
SparkToro’s approach is a lot more powerful, because with this flexibility you can adapt for changing conditions or specific subsets of your audience. But while the subtle ingredient-based approach could make you a much better marketer, you need to put in a lot more work. And if you don’t know how to do it… you’ll give up before tasting a single bite of that mac and cheese.
How to ‘Do It Yourself’: Understand When Marketing Works
Don’t Expect Ready Answers from Marketing Tools
So how can you get better at adapting existing trends and frameworks to your unique circumstances? You need to learn how to cook your mac and cheese from scratch.
If you have a deep understanding of how each ingredient fits into the recipe and works to produce the final dish – you will know how to make informed substitutions based on all of the dietary preferences of your dinner party.
If you know that your cheese sauce recipe included a smoked gouda for additional flavor, you will be able to achieve a similar effect with a mild cheddar and some smokey paprika seasoning.
If you understand that your roux is meant to provide the initial texture to your sauce, then you’ll know that oat milk would be a good vegan substitute, but soy milk would be too overpowering. And if your mother’s vegan boyfriend Carl is coming to dinner, you’ll know how to whip up some nice tomato and garlic farfalle instead of your usual dairy bonanza.
If you want to do better marketing, you have to stop looking for ready answers from marketing software or other people. Learn why things work, and learn how to replicate your own processes, just as if you were cooking mac and cheese from scratch.
What Makes A Good Marketing Tool?
A completely unrelated image. (Rand allowed me to post this, I swear!) Source: LinkedIn
If you look at the way professionals describe their issues with marketing technology, you’ll notice a pattern.
For example, Adverity’s 2022 report found that most CMOs hesitate to buy tools because they don’t know how their business could benefit from them or because their team isn’t fully adopting those tools in their work.
This hesitation makes sense!
There’s no value in paying for the most advanced and powerful tools if you don’t know how to use them. Your marketing technology needs to translate to actions and execution within your campaigns, otherwise you’re simply wasting your time and money.
If we think back to our effort vs. flexibility framework, we can see that many marketers struggle because they don’t understand why their tools are measuring the things they do. When you see a list of 100 keyword recommendations and your only context is search traffic volume, how are you supposed to figure out whether those keywords are actually popular with your ideal customers or with your competitors?
A good marketing tool provides you with the context that you need to assess the data that it provides. A bad marketing tool spoon-feeds you with arbitrary recommendations without any insights as to why those results may be relevant to your particular use case.
Add Context to Data with Better Software
Treating data as an “objective truth” is a mistake.
All data is subjective because the numbers you’re getting from your marketing tool are a result of many subjective decisions: what to measure, where to measure it, how to calculate the value, what data points to include and exclude, and how to present the results to you in the software’s UI.
When I spend too long looking at keyword lists, engagement statistics, or industry reports, I often find my head spinning because I’ve ventured too far from the actual meaning of those numbers. Statistics on their own don’t actually mean anything. Traffic trends are only useful when combined with the real world conditions that they are supposed to represent.
When I was a freshman in college, I worked with an astrophysics professor on analyzing telescope images in deep space. Basically, you can analyze the wavelengths of light captured from an object in space. You take the image and then use the range of light from that object to figure out what you are looking at. The object might be a star, a black hole, or a supernova and you can figure out which one you’ve captured by plugging those wavelengths into some equations.
But here’s the thing: if you have wavelengths and equations with no further context… you won’t know what you’re looking at. Is the wavelength that particular number because you are looking at a black hole really far away or at a star really close by? Is it a pulsar or a planet blocked by dust?
You need context to make sense of your data. Combining those numbers with the right context is where real insights emerge: look for the moments when something doesn’t fully follow an expected pattern, but you have enough clues to still figure out what kind of object you’re looking at.
Learn How to Cook Your Meals From Scratch
When you’re truly designing your marketing plan from scratch, you should be able to:
Audit your business goals, customer base, surrounding market, and define your target audience profile.
Research and understand where members of your target audience spend time, who they pay attention to, and what they care about.
Define a specific marketing strategy that ties to your larger objectives, leverages on your existing resources, and appeals to your specific target audience.
Establish and design specific tactics that relate back to your strategy. Once again, make sure that any marketing channels, approaches, and angles you implement are informed by a deep empathy for your target audience.
Execute on your strategy, adapting tactics as needed when external circumstances (or internal priorities) shift within your business & team.
SparkToro is a wonderful tool to help you with every single step in that process. But you won’t be able to leverage that flexibility and power unless you accept a certain level of uncertainty and discomfort that comes with fully taking control over your marketing work.
You see, when my mother first taught me how to cook, she didn’t tell me a single recipe.
Instead, she taught me how to cook like she did: figure out the basic shape of what dish you want to make, buy missing ingredients, and then experiment until you find something that works.
We always had a full spice cabinet, and as my mother tended to any dish ranging from a simple omelet to a traditional Greek spanakopita she would begin looking through all of the spice options and throw in a pinch of this and a dash of that. At first, I’d ask her “wait, how much cumin did you throw in?” But her answer was always the same “as much as I thought would taste good.”
Make no mistake, learning to cook this way is often a confusing, infuriating, and frustrating process. But by the time I got to the other end of the learning curve, I developed an intuition for what parts of any dish or recipe can be messed with. And now, my spice cabinet is like my set of paints: I can make mac and cheese spicy one day and tangy the next. I won’t be able to tell you my recipe, but you’ll know that it would be good either way.
And when I first opened SparkToro, I thought of its results as my spice cabinet. I never quite know what I’ll find or how I’ll decide to use it, but I have had enough practice to know when I think it would taste good.
Learn about the SparkToro guide series by checking out the introduction or read about my content marketing workflow with SparkToro.
Acknowledgments
Big thank you to Jerome Choo for helping me reorganize this piece and make the ideas within it more coherent.
