Guide to SparkToro Part 0: Introduction and a Love Letter
At our agency, we use one piece of software in our work above all others: the audience research platform SparkToro.
If you’re wondering “is SparkToro any good?”, I can answer you: yes, I believe SparkToro is an incredible tool for marketers in any specialization. SparkToro is comprehensive, trustworthy, and valuable software to add audience research into your marketing toolkit.
So, I’ve put together a comprehensive series of guides on what SparkToro is, how we use it, and why we think it’s different to many other marketing tools that you may be more familiar with.
The posts are different in tone, and you can bounce around them as needed. Feel free to read only those articles (and specific sections within them) that are most relevant to your needs.
How This Series Is Structured
The post you’re reading right now is the overarching introduction to this series of SparkToro guides.
If you are convinced to learn more and try out SparkToro for yourself, feel free to bounce around and explore these articles in any order:
Part 0: Introduction to the Project and a Love Letter (You’re here) – your reference point to locate other articles in this series and a short essay on why I love this software so much.
Part 1: How I Use SparkToro for Content Marketing Projects – a practical walkthrough of how I (and the rest of our team) most often tend to use SparkToro when working with clients on content marketing projects.
Part 2: Marketing, PR, and Personal Use Cases for SparkToro’s Data – a large list of use cases with suggested tips, approaches, and further reading. Includes PR, Paid Ads, Networking, Pitching, Journalism Research, Competitor Analysis, and more.
Part 3: Why SparkToro Requires A Different Marketing Approach – a manifesto on why we think working with SparkToro requires a radically different approach to marketing work and software.
Part 4: What The Heck Is All This Stuff? A Reference of SparkToro’s Features – mini software documentation listing all of SparkToro’s features, interfaces, and options.
BONUS: Case Study on Our Impact for SparkToro – and a behind-the-scenes around the creation of these guides.
Disclaimer
Kalyna Marketing and Mariya Delano are not officially affiliated with SparkToro and have not been compensated for these posts or any of our other mentions of SparkToro and their individual employees in any way. I am simply a big fan, really like both the product and the people who make it, and wanted to share that with the world.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to SparkToro’s very own CEO and founder, Rand Fishkin for his help with creating these guides. Rand has encouraged this project since I first began writing, and he took the time to thoroughly read through all 20,000+ words of these drafts and provide me with wonderful feedback. I couldn’t have created this series without Rand’s support.
I also want to thank the other members of SparkToro’s team, Amanda Natividad and Casey Henry for all of their help and encouragement to me over the last couple of months. Casey in particular has helped me by clarifying some product details that I wrote about in Part 4 of this series.
Some Tools Become Our Identities
How do you begin to describe a tool that has become part of your identity?
If you’re a painter that has used the exact same set of acrylic paint for your entire life, how do you describe why you love that paint? How do you begin to separate the brushstrokes that you’ve left on your canvas from the portrait of your long-dead family cat hanging in your kitchen?
How can you ever decouple the pigmentation of that paint from the exhilaration of finally finding the exact right shade of blue to capture that dreamy feeling of fog settling over your native city as you’re driving over to the airport to leave for the very last time?
How do you draw the line between the way that packaging crinkles as you first unwrap your favorite tube of yellow ochre and the smiles that you got from your fellow artists when you recommended that paint to them?
You know that those people have become your friends thanks to who you are as a person, but the very first time their eyes lit up in response to you was when you began telling them about this particular brand of paint. So months later, as you sit and share inside jokes about all the laughs you’ve shared together, why wouldn’t your mind drift back to the way you first showed them your work and how much better it got thanks to the consistency of your paint.
At a certain point, our tools become a part of us. Especially if these tools were a little out of the mainstream, something that we had to consciously seek out and choose to make an essential part of our workflow.
I Couldn’t Write This Series for Months
I’ve struggled to write about SparkToro for months.
I’ve spent hours interviewing fellow marketers, reading every review ever published, recording my screen and my observations as I use the software, and talking about this series of posts with anyone who would be willing to listen. But I have not been able to type out even one paragraph for more than a month of sitting down with the intention to do so, every single day.
Why was this series so hard to create? I’ve spent hundreds of hours using SparkToro, explaining it to people, and reflecting on how exactly I use it and what I love about it. But finding the right words to share that love in such a permanent, coherent form… that has felt impossible.
I cannot write simply a practical and educational guide on how marketers should use SparkToro. Because the only way I can write about this software is to make it a love letter.
This is my love letter, and to understand why SparkToro holds such a special place in my heart, we need to take a step back.
Text-Editing Software and Creative Freedom
Why I Hate Microsoft Word
Do you remember the first time you opened Microsoft Word? I do. I was about 6 years old, recently learned how to read and write, and I wanted to feel like a fancy adult with a computer. So I opened Microsoft Word on a family desktop running Windows 97, and I stared at that blank page.
Learning Microsoft Word felt like a battle against who I was as a person. That software did not bend to my will. To use it, I had to bend to the software.
Microsoft Word assumes that it knows the exact best way you should work with text documents. There is one framework to follow, one workflow, and one type of document structure. Everything out of the ordinary is a series of hacky workarounds that can break your entire document if you don’t account for every wacky exception.
Microsoft Word is easy to use only if you are the exact type of person that it was designed for.
How Notion Freed My Soul
I also remember the first time I opened a different type of writing software: Notion.
I was in college, exasperated by my constant troubles with Evernote, and I heard about this funky new tool on a podcast. So I went on, downloaded this strange new software, and pulled up a blank page.
The first few seconds of looking at Notion made my skin crawl. Where was the formatting bar? Where was the “insert” menu? Where was the clunky “design” interface? All I saw was a blank document that was begging me to simply start typing.
And then I saw the instruction to type in one key: “/“. I didn’t know what that would do, but I did accept the invitation. And once I hit that slash on my keyboard, my life changed forever.
A screenshot of Notion’s basic interface when you first create a new page and their magical slash menu.
Using Notion, as it turns out, didn’t require learning how that software wanted me to think. Instead, Notion presented me with a blank slate and a list of all the tools I had at my disposal. That slash command opened up the menu with every possible option for what I could put into my document.
I was allowed to put images wherever I wanted! I could make a document inside of a document inside of a document! I could type in markdown and headings would magically appear, perfectly formatted to the exact right size and consistent across the board. I could embed a little link. I could even make a database, and then display that data as a timeline or a calendar or a list.
Using Notion was the first time that I felt like software could simply fit the way I already liked to think. That my brain wasn’t broken. That I didn’t need to repress my personality to create something worthwhile.
Why am I talking about text documents in an essay that’s supposedly about a marketing research tool?
Because the first time I really used SparkToro, I felt the world expand into a new dimension the exact same way as when I first hit slash in a Notion document.
Why SparkToro Feels Different To Other Marketing Tools
I’ve never really gotten used to most marketing tools.
They feel clunky. They impose a certain worldview on me. They ask me to see my work and my field in a very particular way, and to view things as important when I desperately want to disagree.
When I open Clearscope or Ahrefs or Buffer, I feel like I need to forget about my imagination and repress my skill set to fit a narrow box. I feel my soul die the exact same way as when opening a new document in Microsoft Word.
Most marketing tools make you think “this is a professional tool, for professional people”. There is no space for love, excitement, or exploration. This is the window you open when you are trying to accomplish a particular task before you are finally allowed to go home for the day.
When I open SparkToro, I feel like I’ve been handed a box of cookies. All of them are different and there are no flavors listed on the backside of that box, so I don’t quite know what I’m going to find. But the process of trying out every type of cookie in that box is exhilarating. Because I know that whatever I’m about to sink my teeth into, it’s going to be good.
A screenshot of SparkToro’s audience research options. This is how you define what kinds of people you’d like to get behavioral insights on.
I genuinely don’t understand how SparkToro’s team of only 3 people could have created a tool this good. I’ve spoken with Rand, Amanda, and Casey many times over the last year and I still don’t know what superpowers they’re hiding behind their cheerful exteriors. But I do understand, at the most basic level, that these three people have created something truly special.
SparkToro is not only a tool that forms the foundation for all of the work we do at our marketing agency, but it’s also a tool that I’ve opened just to have fun. I’ve spent hours playing around with searches while drunk in the middle of the night. I’ve opened SparkToro while bored out of my mind on the 4 hour bus ride from Ithaca to New York City. I’ve interrupted my husband’s study sessions to shove my laptop in his face while exclaiming “LOOK, DID YOU KNOW THAT THIS MANY PEOPLE WERE INTO ANIMAL CROSSING?”.
What I’m trying to say with all of this is that SparkToro is special to me.
I am not affiliated with them in any way, besides being a very active advocate and a clingy fangirl. I am not being paid to write this. Nobody on SparkToro’s team even asked me to make this series.
Everything you’re seeing here is simply my way of saying thanks and of sharing my complete adoration for this tool with the world.
Feel free to start with Part 1 - How I Use SparkToro for Content Marketing Projects.
