Guide to SparkToro Part 2: Marketing, PR, and Personal Use Cases for SparkToro’s Data
You may have heard of this “SparkToro” tool from somebody, or you’ve already tried and quickly abandoned the software because you couldn’t figure out how it fits in your own work.
As a heavy user and self-proclaimed SparkToro’s biggest fangirl, I’m here to help.
I’ve already written at length about my own process of using SparkToro for content marketing projects, and now we can cover a variety of other use cases across different types of marketing, PR, content creation, and simply some nifty ways to play with cool audience data.
This post is structured by use case and I’ve included examples of questions from real marketing communities, my own thoughts, best tips, and specific recommendations for how to use SparkToro’s software for those situations.
SparkToro’s own Rand Fishkin and Amanda Natividad have also written at length about many of the use cases and ideas that I’m describing here, so I’ve included links to and examples from their relevant blog posts throughout the guide.
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.
SparkToro Use Cases Covered In This Guide
I cannot cover every possible application of this software, but I’ve tried to provide a decently thorough overview. Here are some examples of SparkToro use cases that you can implement in your work:
Market Research / Business Analysis
Whether you’re a marketer, business analyst, or founder – you probably need to do some type of analysis on your company, the market you’re targeting, and specific customer segments within that market.
I am not an expert on many of these use cases (outside of marketing & content marketing specifically), but from my limited experience, here’s how you can explore using SparkToro to analyze a market, industry, or customer segment.
What Makes a Good Marketing Strategy?
Let’s start with a common, overarching question: you have a business that you’d like to promote to more people… where do you start?
You can find many versions of this question getting asked on any social media platform, professional event, or marketing-adjacent community every single day. For instance, here’s a real inquiry that I found on a marketing Slack group:
“Marketing strategy” is such a nebulous term that every marketing community gets questions like this one.
The word “strategy” is used just as often as it is completely misunderstood. At its core you’re trying to understand where to invest your resources and how to prioritize certain actions over others.
I’ve long been a believer that blindly following marketing tactics without understanding why they work or how they apply to your own unique situation is just a waste of time and money.
Rand also wrote a fantastic post about the difference between marketing “tactics” and “strategy”, which I’ve been quoting at every opportunity that I can get away with.
At its core, the difference between marketing strategy and marketing tactics can be summed up this way:
Tactics are the how behind your marketing. These are the channels, frameworks, topics, and formats that you use to produce your content, run ads, reach out to prospective customers, etc. And this is where most marketing advice fits in.
Strategy is the why behind your marketing. To know which tactic you should invest in, you need to understand why certain tactics work and whether they would be effective for your business at a particular point in time. This is the part that most marketing advice glosses over or completely neglects to mention.
You need to back up every single tactic that you invest any of your time or budget into with a specific and relevant strategic why. Without a proper justification, your marketing is about as purposeful as letting a toddler loose with a set of watercolors and hoping that the toddler will somehow paint a masterful portrait of your family dog. As Rand puts it:
”No tactical improvement will work if the underlying strategy is wrong.”
Sure, guessing things may sometimes pay off. But what if it doesn’t? How can you course correct without understanding the reasons behind any of your previous successes and failures?
So how do you find that strategic why? By doing proper audience research and digging into some SparkToro data to understand:
Who are we trying to reach?
What are we hoping these people will do once we reach them?
Where are these people already spending their time?
Who do these people already pay attention to?
What do these people care about?
How are these people feeling about topics related to our product / offering / area of expertise?
How can we speak to these people in a way that they will resonate with?
Once you’ve answered all of those questions, you can begin determining tactics and budgeting to implement those tactics in an effective way.
Assessing Content Performance and Audience Fit
Us marketers are always hoping to “drive brand awareness” and “establish authority” with our campaigns
If you’re trying to figure out how to approach “building authority and thought leadership” to “ultimately drive sales”, like the Slack poster above, then SparkToro can help you figure out:
Why your (or your competitors’) previous content campaigns failed or succeeded
What your customer personas are actually like
How well your content actually fits your desired audience’s preferences
What topics receive the most engagement from your target audience.
As Aparna Allam, a marketing and brand director working in the fintech space, told us:
“One key goal is to make content that meets your audience where they are already headed.
SparkToro is extremely useful for audience identification and competitor mapping.
Drilling down on WHO your audience is helps you figure out content production in a very targeted way. Knowing WHAT people are talking about and WHERE they are already congregating helps you identify strategy gaps.”
Let’s say you’re working with a consulting company in the cybersecurity space. You are trying to reach cybersecurity executives (a common title is “Chief Information Security Officer” or “CISO”).
Head to your SparkToro dashboard and select “My Audience uses these word(s) in their profile” as your search type. This means you can search for people who have used a particular phrase when describing themselves in their social media profile.
Searching for an audiences that uses certain words in their profile is a good way to look for people with a specific title
Type in “CISO” as your search value to look for cybersecurity executives, and then press “Search”.
Here’s one of my typical searches when looking into cybersecurity and infosec.
Check that your search turned up the correct audience by looking at the other words these people use in their bio by going to “Text Insights” and then clicking on the “Words in Bios” tab.
We know that the people who we are analyzing are in fact working in cybersecurity
Do another check for seniority levels by checking “Demographics” and looking for the “Years of Experience” results.
Since we see that 61% of this audience have more than 20 years of experience, we can assume that most of them are actually in senior positions within their companies.
Years of experience can be a convenient shorthand for seniority and weeding out students or junior employees
Begin exploring what social media accounts, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels, and Reddit communities your audience frequently engages with. Pay attention to the “Percent of Audience” metric, which tells you how many people in this group engage with that particular source.
A screenshot of what SparkToro’s social media account results look like
Check the “Hidden Gems” filter within your search results to see sources that are less mainstream but get great engagement. These might be helpful for you to emulate:
If you filter for “Hidden Gems” you’ll get more niche but high engagement results
Pitching Investors
When you’re trying to pitch investors to get some funding for your startup, your main priority is to show that you know who you’re building your product for and the size of your potential market opportunity.
In addition to your classical market sizing approaches, you can gather additional intelligence on potential customers within your Total Addressable Market (TAM) and back your predictions with real data.
Let’s say you’re trying to pitch a new CRM software startup. Head into SparkToro and search for “My Audience frequently talks about ‘CRM’”.
That’s quite a large amount of people! Most of my SparkToro results tend to be under 50,000 people
SparkToro’s found quite a large number of accounts that discuss that topic, so you can dig into their demographics:
You can see people’s typical job functions and employer industries
You can see that this audience is split between 3 main industries: “Information Technology and Services” (24%), “Computer Software” (14%), and “Marketing and Advertising” (11%).
Before making geographically-targeted content or landing pages… make sure people live in those places
You can also figure out where these people are located, helping you pitch why you want to target certain geographies for releasing your new product.
Competitor Analysis
Whatever industry you work in, you probably try to keep a pretty close eye on your competitors. For example, this poster wants to figure out how to see what marketing channels their competitors use to promote their products and services:
SparkToro is great for competitor analysis across marketing channels!
SparkToro can help you with competitor analysis in two ways:
Quickly locate a company’s social media accounts, website, podcast shows, and YouTube channels.
Estimate the reach & effectiveness of a competitor’s marketing channels.
For example, let’s say you’re trying to compete with the payment processing company Stripe.
If you run a SparkToro search for “Analyze a specific website or social account: ‘Stripe’”, you can quickly locate relevant URLs for their social media accounts:
You can see a quick overview of key information about any site or social account in SparkToro’s database
If you select “Add to List” and then navigate to the “Lists” tab, you can select that List and then click on “Get Contact Info” next to Stripe’s record. This will get you the full list of those social media profiles with their full URLs:
Some links that SparkToro provides for Stripe
Now, if you go back and search for “My Audience frequently visits the website: ‘stripe.com’” you can explore the results to find:
Social media accounts of Stripe employees and associated organizations (with their respective following size and URLs).
Podcasts that Stripe might host or frequently appear on (in this case, Stripe doesn’t seem to invest into podcasts as a marketing channel).
YouTube channels hosted by Stripe, its employees, or creators who might talk about Stripe.
SubReddits frequented by Stripe’s users, where you can then search for “Stripe” and see how often they pop up in posts and comments.
Figuring out a GTM Plan
When you’re preparing to launch a new product to market, knowing who your prospective customers are and how they behave online is key to determining your strategy and tactics.
Returning to our friend Aparna Allam, SparkToro’s insights help you check who is actually likely to engage with your product and find any gaps between that group and the group that you thought you were building your product for:
“Going with your gut can get you far enough, but it won't always get you all the way there. And confirmation bias is a very real hurdle.
I want to see if there’s synergy or a gap between who we're talking to / building for and who is actually looking for a solution in our space. Are any groups that we should be converting going to our competitors instead?
Overlaying my expertise with SparkToro's analysis allows me to make data-informed decisions.”
You might often be surprised by what you find.
For example, when I was looking up people who visit data science and data analytics publications, I was extremely surprised by the results.
I noticed that a lot of the people who visit the website “datanami.com” also listen to podcasts produced by Gartner:
People who visit the data science website Datanami.com also like Gartner podcasts
Then, I ran a comparison between the two audiences via SparkToro’s “Compare Audiences” feature and discovered that both groups are also interested in cybersecurity and IT:
A comparison between people who follow Gartner’s “Peer Insights” account and datanami.com
This shows me that there might be significant opportunities in creating content about cybersecurity use cases for data analytics software, or in pitching IT publications for guest posts or collaborations.
Ads
I personally don’t work with ads, but I’ve asked a couple of marketing friends who do for their opinion on how SparkToro can benefit their ad campaigns.
Conversion Ad Campaigns
If you’re running conversion ad campaigns, hoping to increase sales & trial sign-ups, then Justin Reed, a paid social consultant who runs The Upside Agency, has the following advice:
“Discover the trends to take advantage of. Right now, all we really do is just talk about the features or price point or products within our ad creative. Instead, with something like SparkToro you can leverage the creative to do your targeting for you. For example, you can figure out what language your target customers use through SparkToro’s “Text Insights” and then implement those words and phrases in your ad copy and on your visuals.
You can find these little subsets of people who you can advertise to based on the problem they have. Figure out, okay, out of our current customers, what problem are we solving that we didn't think of? And how can we find more people like that?
The paid ads industry is shifting away from demographics and putting more emphasis on psychographics. This means you’re analyzing audience behavior, audience interests, values, and then try to resonate more with what they care about. Instead of talking about how cool and shiny your product is, you can create ads for making a deeper connection between your brand and its audience.”
For this type of analysis, you can use SparkToro’s regular audience research interface to adapt your ad creative.
For example, people who frequently visit the website “www.datasciencecentral.com” have been using the hashtag “#informationsecurity” more often in the past few weeks, so if you were targeting this group you could run an ad campaign using the same term:
Often, you’ll be surprised by some of SparkToro’s text insights.
Brand Awareness Ad Campaigns
If you’re running ads with the long-term goal of increasing brand awareness, then my friend Aparna Allam (who we mentioned before within this post) also has some advice:
“The data from SparkToro helps me understand where my existing audience congregates.
I can go in and make an informed decision on which subset to target.
Want to know who listens to certain podcasts, or follows certain publications? What conversations are happening on LinkedIn pages or Reddit threads? There is a lot to be learned from titles, hashtags, words in bios, preferred platforms, or geographic distribution.
SparkToro also helps me get a sense of the geographic density of our audience. As a business rolls out new locations, this data would inform ad budgets."
SEO Research
When you work with any SEO keyword research tool, you get pretty limited information.
Typically, one of those tools will provide you with the total search volume, estimated traffic per query, and rankings for a specific website. But none of this information will help you figure out if the people searching for that particular term are the actual audience you’d like to target.
For example, if we run an Ahrefs search for keyword ideas similar to “payments processor”, we will see something like this:
So many SEO keyword ideas are too literal for my taste
Even if we take out all of the branded or non-applicable keywords, we’re left with a very generic list of insights. Sure, “payment gateway vs payment processor” might have pretty good keyword volume. But who’s actually searching for those words?
If I am trying to rank my B2B payment processor software company, I don’t want to rank for terms used by consumers, competitors, or students.
So I can run a SparkToro search for that term and see who is actually using that language:
Before you try to make content for an audience, make sure they are the people you want to target
That’s strange. People who use the term “payment processor” most often engaged with social accounts and websites that are related to crypto. My hypothetical payment processing company doesn’t serve that market. Let’s run a comparison between people who use the term “payment processor” and those who talk about “crypto”:
Both the people who are interested in the term “payment processor” and the term “crypto” are very similar
Even looking at the differences between these audiences, we see that almost all of their engagement is in fact related to crypto payments. So I would think twice before trying to rank for the term” payment processor” and most of its long-tail keyword variations.
Networking & Finding Brand Ambassadors
“Permissionless Co-Marketing”
I really love the concept that Amanda introduced a year ago that she named “Permissionless Co-Marketing”. She sums up this approach as follows:
"It is the deliberate effort of aligning yourself with other brands by promoting them in your work. It’s the inverse of earned media — where you’re the one organically mentioning someone else. The payoff is earning goodwill and potential reciprocation.”
If you publicly align yourself with other companies and creators that you agree with, you will elevate your own brand as a result. And, if you do it right, you will often get amplification from those companies and creators without expensive PR or outreach campaigns.
Networking
Connections run the world. Getting a warm intro to that prospective client you’ve been trying to land or to that large creator who you’ve been trying to invite to your podcast can open up doors that would have otherwise never been possible.
I attribute most of my current professional success to my purposeful and consistent efforts to cultivate my network. For example, I recently spoke at a SaaS conference, and I got that chance because I happened to ask about speaking opportunities in a small marketing group. One of the organizers behind that event happened to be in the group and she invited me to speak.
But “networking” is almost a dirty word in many professional contexts. It brings up the terrible associations of typical “networking events”: standing in a tight outfit and painful shoes in front of one of those tiny circular table, as you nurse the drink you grabbed simply to have something to do with your hands, and an endless line of equally forgettable faces ask you the same two questions:
“So, what do you do?”
“What brings you to this event?”.
Cocktail mixers are my worst nightmare. I usually leave early after getting way too drunk (to try and ease my social anxiety) and then call my husband to tell him about how I was too awkward to make any new business connections… yet again.
SparkToro can help you build a strong network of relevant connections while skipping the misery of small talk and painful shoes.
As Amanda described in her guide to cold outreach, you can begin by making a list of relevant individuals with whom you’d like to connect. I’d recommend searching for a specific topic or hashtag (like “#digitalmarketing” if you’re a marketer like me) and then heading to “Social” results and filtering for “Only Gems” and accounts with under 50,000 followers:
You can filter your social media results to only show accounts with high engagement and a certain audience size
Hm, this Heidi Cohen person seems like she talks about similar things to what I work on. Perhaps I should go and follow her on social media and see what she is talking about.
Then, and this is my secret sauce, you go back to SparkToro to figure out how to meaningfully engage with each one of those individuals.
If we’re trying to connect with Heidi, we can run another SparkToro search for the people who follow her:
Here are the podcast shows that are followed by people who also follow the social account of a specific person
Maybe I could listen to some of these podcasts and then see if Heidi is posting something related to one of the topics that I learned about in one of those shows. Then, I could comment under Heidi’s posts and mention that particular show and the episode that I think related to her point.
When you engage with people in a kind way that’s relevant to their interests and areas of expertise, you’re a lot more likely to get a positive response.
Saving Relevant Contacts, Publications, and Shows to Lists
If you’ve run searches and found relevant results (people to contact, phrases to search, websites to audit, etc.) you need to remember what they are and quickly locate all of their relevant information again. For this purpose, you can use SparkToro’s “Lists” feature.
While looking through your search results, select the ones you’d like to save by using that checkbox field on the left-hand side, and then press the “Add to List” button at the top of your results interface.
If you click on “Add to List”, you’ll get a nice dropdown lists of lists. Nifty!
Once you select a list (or create a new one!), you can then head to the “Lists” tab above your search bar.
The “Lists” tab lets you manage – you guessed it – lists
Here you’ll see all of your current lists along with some basic information like the number of items you’ve saved to each list, the list’s owner, and initials of all users that you’ve granted access to that list.
Clicking on our demo “Networking” list, you can see that the social accounts from my previous search have been saved in a similar interface to the main search.
Lists allow you to save key results across social accounts, websites, YouTube, Press, Text Insights, and Reddit
If you’re on certain paid plans, you can also click on the magic blue button that says “Get Contact Info” to find an account’s relevant links and (if possible) their email address.
You can also export either your entire list or certain items from it to a CSV file with all key information like the account name, description, links, SparkScore, number of followers, etc.
Getting Buy-In for Marketing Campaigns
Rand wrote a fantastic post about the decreasing effectiveness of provable marketing attribution (i.e. “30% of views for this webpage came from LinkedIn”) and how we need a new framework for measuring the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns:
If you’re trying to get buy-in for something unorthodox (like pulling away from investing your entire marketing budget into paid ads or standard SEO-optimized blog posts), then SparkToro’s data can help you back up your claims.
For example, if you want to try out a podcast strategy, then you can use SparkToro’s results on how many people in your target audience listen to any given show and pitch that number to your client or boss. (E.g. ”40% of our audience listen to “Content Inc with Joe Pulizzi” so we should pitch to have our head of marketing appear on that show.”)
Preparing to Interview Someone (Journalists, Media, PR, Comms, etc.)
If you want to ask good questions, you should research your audience
If your job involves figuring out what questions to ask a specific individual or group of people (such as the poster whose question I included above), then SparkToro can help you narrow down the best questions to ask.
I’d spend my time browsing through the places that my audience most commonly engages with, and probably pay a lot of attention to the Reddit section of SparkToro’s results:
You can quickly learn a lot more about a group of people by visiting the communities where they talk with each other
If I know that the people who follow the person I’m interviewing frequent the “ecommerce” subReddit, I can go search for the most commonly asked questions within that community and see if I can ask some version of those questions to my interviewee.
PR Outreach
One of the Slack communities I’m in is mostly populated by PR and Comms professionals. Their main channel is constantly populated by questions like these:
A question about finding business reporters who like a particular book and live in a particular place
A question about finding reporters and creators who deal with a particular topic
Both of these posters could make their lives much easier with SparkToro.
You can simply look for people who match your desired parameters (including location!) and then look through the “Press” and “Social” tabs of your results to build a list of individuals. On some of SparkToro’s plans, you can even get contact information and emails for every single account on your list!
Jumping On Trends
Amanda already gave fantastic advice on “trendjacking”, the practice of jumping on trends and timely topics in a purposeful, strategic, and unique way.
For this particular use case, you should understand how SparkToro’s results are actually generated. When you run any search, you can hover over the amount of people in your audience (the bright blue “3,617” on the screenshot below) and see the following message:
SparkToro’s interface is hiding quite a few pop-up messages about the product, just like this one
Essentially, SparkToro’s data is always pretty recent. At worst, you’re seeing results from up to 120 days ago. But most of the time (in my experience) these results are timely whenever I look any audience up.
So if you wanted to find some trends to hop on to, you can run a search and then look for:
Hashtags used - search for these hashtags on social media platforms to see recent posts
Social accounts - look through recent posts and shares by these accounts
Websites - browse through recent blog posts on company websites and publications
Podcasts - look through recent show episodes to see what topics they’re covering
YouTube - look through recently uploaded videos and scan their titles, thumbnails, and descriptions for trends
Reddit - visit those subReddits and filter for “Top: This Week” and “Top: This Month”.
Content Creation (For Non-Marketers)
I often think back to this breakdown from Rand’s post “Who Will Amplify This and Why”:
Jeez, Rand, who even remembers Clubhouse anymore? (The rest of this graphic is still great though!)
Rand also wrote a good guide on how to use SparkToro’s data for creating episodic content (such as podcasts, YouTube videos, or other regularly recurring content). But I think his advice can be expanded using one of SparkToro’s newer features – Reddit analysis.
If I run a show where I talk about debugging code, I can analyze the people who frequently use the word “debugging” in their social media activity.
Let’s say I’m planning my next episode. I can head over to the “Reddit” section of my results and see where my desired audience congregates:
Which of your friends could you give a “data hoarder” armchair diagnosis?
Hm, this Data Hoarder community seems interesting. Sure, it’s only followed by 4% of people who talk about debugging, but that’s still nearly 700 people (out of a total audience of 17,459 accounts). And then I could potentially reach a bunch of other individuals from the 671,043 people who frequent that community.
If I look at some of the top posts in that community this week, I’ll come across some truly fascinating discussions, like this one:
I adore discovering people’s insanely elaborate personal projects (Hint: right now you’re reading mine!)
This person has put together a huge archive of pre-release game material. And they had to write their own tool for organizing all of that information! Maybe this could make a fascinating story for my next podcast episode.
Learning Something New
I often get lost in SparkToro simply looking through random results and learning a bunch of cool new facts.
For example, two days ago while I was working on this series of guides, I ended up going down a bunch of sites related to software engineering and computer science. Here’s my Mastodon post about what I discovered:
Yes, marketing tools can be fun!
I wouldn’t have found most of these sites if I was simply running Google searches or scrolling through my social media feeds. Yet SparkToro’s results made for a very enjoyable (although distractible) evening.
Finding Cool Sites and Accounts In A Niche
You can also use SparkToro to find niche sites, social media accounts, and podcasts related to an existing site or account.
When you try to search for niche topics on Google, your results will only show large corporations and sites that everyone already knows about. But what if you are looking for amazing and specific blogs run by small groups or individuals?
Sparktoro can help you search for similar resources if you look for “My audience frequently visits the website” with that one niche blog’s URL.
For example, a while ago I posted on Mastodon asking for resources to learn about data visualization.
One of the replies recommended that I check out the site stephanieevergreen.com. I loved the blog, and to find more sites like it I ran a SparkToro search for people who visit it:
Look at all of these sites I can explore now that I’ve filtered my results to only show “Hidden Gems”!
Finding Partnerships and Distribution Opportunities
Rand published this diagram in a post talking about content creation, but I think that the ideas here are applicable much more broadly:
The particular line I’m drawn to there is as follows:
“The biggest mistake creators make is ignoring this group (Potential Amplifiers) and targeting their episodes / content entirely to these groups (Potential and Current Audience)”
It’s logical that by targeting people with larger platforms who already have an influence over the people you’d like to reach, you can use those borrowed platforms to expand your own audience to those people. And Rand’s view is supported by recent academic research. As we see in “Finding Goldilocks Influencers” by Wies et al. published last year in American Marketing Association’s Journal of Marketing:
“Brands should empower especially high-indegree influencers to create original content in their own style, instead of repeating the brand's official communications.”
What Kind of “Influencers” Do You Want to Find?
There are more nuances as to which “influencers” or, in SparkToro’s preferred terms, “sources of influence” you should be selecting for your own campaigns. Back to the “Finding Goldilocks Influencers” paper, we can see that there’s a sweet spot in audience size that will get you the best possible reach & engagement:
“In contrast with popular views, our finding of an inverted U-shaped relationship between indegree and engagement suggests that influencers with intermediate indegree represent the engagement “sweet spot” as they provide a decently large, still engaged audience. Depending on the engagement metric, we observe turning points between 1,124,221 followers (mentions) and 1,877,936 followers (likes).”
Another academic paper called “Influencer Marketing Effectiveness” by Leung et al. also shows us that we want to look for influential people who are similar to the brand we’re trying to promote, but not “too similar”:
Sorry for the blurry image, but I couldn’t zoom into the paper PDF more than this
Here are the definitions for what this graph is measuring:
Follower-brand fit: a measurement of how much the interests of an online creator’s audience align with the products and services offered by a brand. Specifically measured as a percentage of the creator’s total followers.
Engagement elasticity a measurement of “the percentage change in consumer engagement due to a 1% increase in influencer marketing spend”.
Essentially, you want to look for social media profiles and creators who are pretty similar to your brand, but still have enough differences to expose you to a sufficient number of new eyes. The “Compare Audiences” feature and “Percent of Audience” metric within SparkToro’s results can help you with this.
Conclusion
Even though this post is already nearly 5,000 words long, I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of all the ways you can use SparkToro’s data. But I hope that this overview helped you see that there are so many different ways to use SparkToro in your work, professional development, and even free time.
Learn about the SparkToro guide series by checking out the introduction, check out my manifesto on why you should approach marketing & SparkToro’s data like a cook, or the reference guide to all of SparkToro’s features.
