Is SparkToro the Answer to Understanding Your Audience?
By: Christina Garnett
Tags: Social Listening, Marketing, Research, Digital Marketing, Social Media

Is SparkToro the Answer to Understanding Your Audience?

A review of Rand Fishkin’s latest tool.

How well do you know your audience? Even in the best of times, marketers and sales teams are continually working to increase trust, conversions, and more. The core of doing this well is through audience understanding. Knowing your target audience’s pain points, needs, and online behavior fuels strategic plans to not only reach potential customers but provide them with a service or product that feels so needed that it no longer feels like a sales pitch. It feels meant for them. That is the power of aligning with your audience.

But how on earth do you get to that place? Social listening and audience research offer the opportunity to find out how your audience is talking about you, your competitors, industry, and more as well as getting information through social media as well as through surveys. The problem is that audience research has innate biases based on hoping that those who participate are honest in their survey answers, and that also doesn’t showcase a full breakdown of other correlations you might find interest.

As an advocate for social listening, I see the priceless nature of brands being able to dive into conversations, to hear directly from consumers — focusing efforts to ensure they are truly customer-centric and creating the best possible experience. Audience research is the perfect supplement to these efforts, offering the missing piece, so you have a complete audience POV. While social listening has advancing tools, metrics, and dashboards, market research feels more antiquated. Here comes SparkToro to the rescue with audience intelligence.

What does your audience do online?

A screenshot of the audience insights search dashboard in SparkToro.

Moz founder Rand Fishkin’s latest tool feels like the perfect progression project from the SEO thought leader. With his original work through Moz, he educated future SEOs through his White Board Friday series in addition to his tools to help aid optimization. This new tool takes the importance of data to improve the content and shifts it into how the consumers live online. When someone is talking about a specific keyword, or they follow a particular social media account, what do they have in common with others doing the same thing?

What hashtags are used most by those who talk about marketing?

SparkToro can supplement the information you gain from social listening and creates a full digital ecosystem view. Not only are you able to see what hashtags are used by those who are talking about specific keywords, but it also shares what social accounts, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels are also followed.

Which YouTube channels are “marketing” audiences subscribing to?

What do I do with this?

With this information, you can have a better understanding of what keywords to use in content, who you could reach out to for partnerships or sponsored features. You can see your target customers through their digital touchpoints. Many marketers would argue that it is crucial to be where your target audience is, and they leave it at the social channel level. If your audience is on Twitter, you need to be on Twitter, etc. You need to go deeper. As more and more brands go digital, being there isn’t enough. You need to place your content on the platform strategically, so it isn’t just there, but it’s seen and engaged with. Knowing how and who your audience engages with provides the needed data to position your content where it is most likely to create impact.

While testing the tool, I searched for keywords as well as social accounts to dive into what exactly is provided. As a digital marketer, I immediately started with a search for “marketing” to see if other uses acted like me. Would I be surprised by the findings? The dashboard loaded quicky and offered a left menu where I could choose between an overview versus a social, websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels dashboards. In addition to the data, it offered quick spreadsheet downloads of findings for the channel-specific data.

Where are these “marketing” audiences?

For those wanting a tool that offers a clean interface with robust data options that don’t overwhelm, SparkToro offers an audience research option that gets that today’s consumers are online. Instead of administering tedious surveys, hoping you get enough nonbiased data, this tool crawls to find out what people are doing and talking about online. The data exists and creates the needed ingredients to inform future strategies.

Have multiple audiences? You can create lists and make sure you can see the data showcase how they live online. Want to compare? SparkToro lets you compare audiences to see just how different they are as well as provide the opportunity to find correlations if they exist.

How can marketers use this to improve their audience reach?

Create a list of keywords: What would your audience search for if they wanted your product or service? What are the topics you talk about in your marketing?

Use SparkToro to search for these keywords. Now look at the journalism questions: Who, what, why, when, and how. What can you learn about your audience based on their online behavior?

Look at the accounts they follow, the websites they visit, the podcasts they listen to, and the YouTube channels they subscribe to. Now you know where “they live” online.

Look for commonalities and opportunities. Do you have anything in common with the current accounts/brands they are engaging with? How is their content similar? Different? What value do they offer to the people who follow them?

Know your value. What do you offer for people who like and follow you? What do they gain? There is an obscene amount of content pushed out digitally. How are you different and able to provide value is crucial to maximizing not only your following and engagement but your relationship with each person who sees your content.

Collaborate and form strategic partnerships. Now that you know where your target audience is spending their time, see who could be a great collaborative partner. You could sponsor a podcast, guest write on their blog, collaborate on a webinar. Find opportunities to work and “share” awareness with each other.

You have to care. Optimization and research can take time but in the end you need to want to be better not just for the metrics but for your audience. They can tell when you want to grow with them vs just wanted a check.

We are making more and more decisions online, and that data is driving a more personalized experience. With tools like SparkToro, marketers are empowered to make future decisions based on the audience they want to reach. This tool takes out a lot of the guesswork as well as the tedious nature of traditional market and audience research. If you wish for your online audience to find you, you need to understand them first. SparkToro is a great place to start on that path towards deeper audience understanding.

It seems Rand has moved from search engine optimization to content marketing optimization. As a lover of data, I’m glad to see he’s leading the way.

Disclaimer: I received press review access to try out SparkToro for this review.