Name: SparkToro Office Hours: Audience Research Masterclass
Uploaded: 2025-05-29T18:23:10.738Z
Duration: 1 h 20 min 56 s
Description: SparkToro Office Hours: Audience Research Masterclass

Transcript for "SparkToro Office Hours: Audience Research Masterclass": On stage we go. We are here. Oh, man. That was right, Amanda. Hi, friends. Hi, folks. So, I I have been working nonstop, which is unlike me, but not doing not doing chill work at all. And, but as a result as a result, I I think that, SparkToro's had its one of its best months in a while, which actually I attribute 99% of to Casey. No offense. But like No. It's absolutely Casey. It's totally it's totally Casey, that new. And Monty, actually. Monty, our designer. He I just I was just chatting with him because we're thinking about using him for alert mouse too. Have you guys I'm saying this like you can respond to me. Just pretend that we're having a conversation, everyone. Have have you seen this guy, Monty Hayden? He does such wonderful work. I'm gonna send you his dribble even though this is probably not in my interest because now he'll be too busy to do any work for us. But Monty Hayden is the guy who designed the new version of SparkToro, and he's just a wonderful and such an efficient, fast, competent, visual UI UX designer, and it's so hard to find people like that. It's really hard. Just just wild. Like, Adam and Nathan and I for alert mouse, we were trying to find somebody else who did this, and we went we went down all the list because we're like, well, we should be responsible. And, you know, when you're trying to find a consultant or a, an agency or a a provider, you're like, well, we should consider multiple potential options. So he tried to build a list, and at the end of it, we were like, well, that's nine dead ends in Monty. So we reached out to him. He's like, yeah. I'd love to work with you again. Why why are it's hard to find reliable, relatively affordable people who do the work that you need. I don't think AI is gonna take jobs. I I just there's too much work and not enough people to do the jobs. I just don't see AI taking the jobs. I can't. Oh, yeah. It's it's impossible. I I I keep reading about it. My here's my this is what I truly believe, Amanda. I truly believe that all the, every time the CEO of Anthropic or, you know, someone who works, on on OpenAI or somebody at Google working on Gemini, every single time they say, the world needs to get ready because AI is about to take all the jobs. That is just marketing. That is their sales pitch. They are trying to scare people who aren't especially companies and teams that aren't yet using AI into using and adopting AI and being scared of not using it because they think that they're gonna get disintermediated or destroyed by the companies that do use it well. I think every one of them knows that the last two thousand years of human history has produced tons of inventions that have removed more labor than AI, and yet the job market has grown every single time. And so I think it is pure marketing. And I think, unfortunately, it is super effing effective. The press loves to cover statements from someone who works in AI saying that jobs are gonna go away because of it. And so they have just they, like, they found a bell and they're like, oh, dang. I can just ring this bell and then I get more money? So they just keep ringing the bell. I can ring this bell and I get more money. That that is my that is my theory, and I'm sticking to it. I like that theory. What brings us together today? What brings us together? Well, you know what? In a way, it's Casey again. He brings us together. One, is he even here? He probably is not here, like, in the chat. Sometimes he lurks in our webinars, like, in the chat, and sometimes afterwards, he'll be like, yeah. I was there. I'm like, why did you say it's the best. No. But today, we are here because of Casey, because of all these well, I guess what spurred it was the a bunch of these incredible changes in SparkToro. We have, like, at least 10 new products or features, in our tool. And it has well, it had me rethinking, like, our the blog post that we have, our audience research guide. And now I'm thinking, like, oh, I have to update that now because we have so much stuff, like, so much stuff in our product. Yeah. But the but things that I think will fundamentally change how people do audience research if they do it all. And so one reason I wanted to have this webinar was to be like, hey. We we we've completely redone the tool. And so I think now is a really good time to revisit audience research as a whole topic and to be, like, here's how you do it. And then, by the way, here's how you can use SparkToro to do it. Please forgive me. I'm the VP of marketing at at SparkToro. So, yeah, I'm gonna talk about SparkToro. Awesome. I love it. And and I also think I think we've put together, like, our most cogent, cohesive theory of what's happening to the Internet. And because of that, you know, the the, like, zero click everything, end of attribution, death of traffic, like, all those things combining together, rise of AI, blah blah blah, and all those things together equal new world of audience research. So great timing. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sometimes I when I when, you know, when I'm working on the next blog post or in this case, like, this presentation, sometimes I'm kind of, like, I feel that sort of analysis paralysis of, like I feel like a lot of this, like, the marketing industry where it's going, our tool, it feels, like, too big sometimes or sometimes I mean, my gosh. Rand knows this better than anybody that, like, I might end up procrasti working where I'm like, uh-huh. Gotta do that. How about instead I start a podcast first? Or how about instead we instead of doing instead of working on the rest of the the new SparkToroial, like, help articles and stuff, how about we do a webinar instead? Like, all these things that I think are productive but might not be the thing that needs to get done now. But trust me. We're in trust me. It'll be fine. It'll be fine. It's gonna be great. Not chill, and I'm frantic. And my old friend I got to review the slide deck that you made last night, and I know you all haven't seen it yet. But friends, it's it's really it's really good. I I'm very excited. We we should get into it. We should. And by the way, I wanna say my old friend, David Yin, is in the chat, and I haven't seen him in forever, and I just wanted to say hi. Hi, David. Okay. We will get into it. And, friends, I'm I'm kind of nervous. So please Nice. Be nervous. It's just you and me here. There's nobody I know. There's no one to be nervous about. Yeah. You. Oh, I don't know. I am I'm very picky. Yeah. If anyone has ever had to present in front of Rand Fishkin. One, he is mean. He's so mean and no. I just didn't remember this. Okay. And I also forgot how to screen share here. Okay. I promise change the interface a lot. Yeah. Okay. I promise I'm about to be, like, 1% less annoying in, like, ten seconds. Okay. Alright, friends. Before we get started, Rhea's like, I don't know if that's true. But just 1% is a very small number. You're a little bit alarmed. Alright. So we have our slides going, I think. But before we get started, little bit of housekeeping. First thing is use the chat. So friends, drop your notes, questions, comments directly in the chat. We Rand and I try to keep an eye on them, and sometimes we'll try to address questions real time. If you like, drop some questions in the q and a just because it helps it helps other people see the questions, and then they can upvote things if they're like, yeah. I really want you to ask that question or answer that question. They can upvote things. It helps us keep track. And then finally, the recording. Are we gonna are we gonna send the recording? Are we going to send the slides? Yes. We are. There there's a recording? But yeah. The GoldPASS keep a recording for this? Yeah. It turns out these things yeah. There's a recording, and we have it, and then you all can have it by way of registering for this webinar. It's pretty exciting. Alright. Moe asks, slides feel a little bit small. Oh, we could change the layout, I think. That is a good idea. Can you change the layout? That's probably better. Oh, okay. That's good. Yeah. There we go. Excellent suggestion, Moe. Thank you, Moe. Alright. And with that, we will get started. Okay. Last thing. Seriously, you will get the recording. You will get the slides. The recording or the replay here will be available probably, like, ten minutes after this webcast ends. And then we also email it to you probably by end of day today. Alright. And friends, thank you for joining us. Looking at the chat now. Joshua, long time listener, first time caller. Well, thanks for calling in today. Alright. Yes. So you can ask you can ask questions in the q and a anytime. So there's that little q and a, message near the chat, and you can use the chat to chat about things that are going on, but we'll we'll do our best not to be thrown off by the chat. So feel free to use and engage with it. And then q and a is the place where, at the end, we will try and answer all the questions related to all the slides and data that we're showing today. Yeah. Perfect. Alright. Let's get started. We are going to dive into our audience research master class. So it's called a master class. I I originally had it as, like, one zero one, but you know what? This is a master class because we're gonna talk a lot about the tools you can use, how you can use them, and we're really diving deep into SparkToro. Alright. But first, friends, we need to talk about the elephant in the room. What are the biggest problems with audience research? I mean, as a person who does marketing for an audience research company, my point point of view is I wish more people knew about it. So that's one problem, which more people knew about it. But, also, I think it's this it's a much bigger systemic problem. So one, there's no universal standard. Right? Like, if you are doing keyword research, everybody kind of knows what that is. Right? Everybody knows, oh, I'm gonna use Moz or Ahrefs. I'm gonna look for high volume keywords, blah blah blah. Like, everyone kinda knows what that is. There isn't really a universal standard for what audience researches. And when there's no universal standard, it means it's not clear who owns it. Like, I mentioned keyword research. Clearly, SEO or content marketing owns that. That that's pretty clear cut. For something like audience research where a lot of it well, it essentially informs your entire marketing strategy. It's not clear who owns it. Like, is it the CMO? Is it the VP? Because it's not just content marketing's problem and it's not just demand generation's problem. And so when nobody owns audience research, it doesn't get done. Right? There's no clear owner. Nobody knows the main purpose of it, and so it's not going to get done. Plus, even if you do get it done, what do you do next? Like, you know all these really interesting things about your audience, about what they're doing online, how they self describe, the podcast they listen to, but then what? Right? Every project's action items are different. So having a let's just say having a list of all the influential podcasts in your audience, that's gonna look a lot different to your PR team versus your content marketing team versus your performance marketing team. Right? Like, your PR team is thinking, what a great outreach list. Content marketing is thinking, I wonder if we can I wonder if I can learn from these podcasts? Maybe that'll inform some of the blog posts that I write. Maybe I can cite these these podcasts. And performance marketing is probably thinking, cool. Let's do let's do some advise on some of these podcasts. But the data is really cool. Right? You get a lot of really interesting data when you do really good audience research. But the thing to remember is that it really needs to have real impact. Like, you're not looking up cool things for the sake of looking up cool things. Like, you need it to have a real impact on your marketing strategy as a whole. Alright. And there's also this issue of knowledge of your audience hasn't mattered this much since the pre Internet era and why. So, like, why do we care? Why do we need to do this? Because it used to be easy. It used to be easy. Right? It used to be easy. There was like there was like there was like twenty years where Google was growing so fast that you could just put it all into SEO and content or all performance marketing, Facebook, and all the social networks growing so fast. You just put it all into social. You don't have to do research. Like, you don't have to know where who's my audience? Where are they? How do they behave? Blah blah blah. You just throw money and time at these platforms and get it out. And now nope. Nope. Not now. And not now, especially in this world of in our zero click marketing world, zero click everything. Right? We have all the platforms hoarding traffic for themselves. We have Google, especially now with AI mode. Right? Like, trying to put as much of the insights, all the value directly on their own on their own pages instead of sending out the traffic. And now we have to optimize for all those things or we should, we could. I don't know. There's also the depth of attribution. Right? These the the attribution sources that we had that we had come to know and love are becoming less and less accurate if we're even able to attribute things correctly. Oops. There. Let's just go with it. Decision making is now happening or now we know, especially, that it happens off platform. Right? Nobody really follows this cohesive customer funnel. Right? It's kind of like a customer shit show. I don't know. You know, it's my my friend, Jessica Jalowick calls it the brand vortex, where it's like it's not so much of this funnel that people get put get pushed down through. It's this vortex of things that happen in it is total chaos. If you're lucky or if you do your job really well, you can kind of pull people into this vortex, but then they're going to convert when they're ready. They can't they're not going to convert because they thought, like, oh, so Kate this case study finally met me where I am in my inbox. I'm going to give them the monies. How that works? One of my most embarrassing confessions, Amanda and everybody here, is that for the first eighteen months of SparkToro's life, I did demos. Like, if you wrote in and you said, hey, I'd like a demo of SparkToro. Can you show it to me? Can you show it to my team? I would do those demos. I probably did four to 10 a week, and I like to think that I'm a relatively thoughtful and capable person, and it was really interesting to meet a lot of customers and teams. My conversion rate after the first hundred demos, which was which was, like, the first six months or something, was two people signed up for SparkToro. And Rand said, Rand, five people are signing up for SparkToro every day who don't get demos. Why are you doing demos? You must be terrible at this. I think you're anti converting people into buying SparkToro. Like, you must be selling them on not purchasing the product. And so what we what we did after that and, Amanda, you know this because when you joined the team, this was like our protocol, is we stopped doing demos, and we said we will we will not do a demo. Just play with the free version like everyone else. Mhmm. Because our our basic, like, insight from this was that if you ask for a demo, it means that you couldn't figure out SparkToro, like, it wasn't self explanatory to you, or the problem that you were having around audience research wasn't acute enough for you to need SparkToro right now. And, yep, it's one of those, every time we we we probably get, what, two requests for a demo every day. Yeah. And now we we just tell everybody, like, sorry, no demos. And it seems to be going much better. It does. And It's the weirdest thing. No. It's it's true. You you know, when we had, I don't know. I guess maybe I'll say, like, in the last part of last year where we had more, like, uncertainty around our tool and while Casey was rebuilding it, like, there were just things that were kind of influx. And the few times that I or when people would ask to for demos, there were a few times that I was, like, I don't know. I just felt like I had to do them because I felt like, well, I don't know. Maybe this will help something. Yeah. And At the point, like, the company who writes in, sometimes the company writing in was so impressive, and I like them so much. Yeah. I'd be like, oh my god. They're that that person or team, like, wants wants to demo I wanna talk to them. Like, let's have a conversation. Oh, totally. Yeah. I mean, I had I had a fascinating conversation with, like, the Disney people when they wrote in, but oh, actually, maybe they did end up buying. But anyway, it doesn't it doesn't matter. Like, they might have been the exception to the rule. But, like Yeah. You know, a lot of the a lot of those conversations were great and meaningful, but also didn't sell SparkToro. Yeah. And maybe one thing I'll say is, you know, one of the little, like, red flags when people ask for a demo, it's so we'll go back to our my first slide, by the way, which is when more and more people join that demo call, like, oh, can I have so and so on my team? And then I'm gonna add this person and this person. I think they'll benefit greatly from this call. I start to be like, oh, like, they're definitely not gonna buy. Like, the more people that join this call, the worse. And look, the more the merrier usually. And by the way, we do have a conference coming up this fall, Spark Together. The more the merrier, seriously. Right. Right. Buy a ticket, please. No. But the more people that would that join the demo call, the more I'm like, oh, this isn't gonna work because they're inviting all these peep all these people because there's no clear stakeholder here. Because the the person organizing the call is like, great. We can all use it, which makes me think decision maker. Yeah. No one's gonna use it. Conversely conversely, the and this this might be advice for any for all the people in the chat who are like, wait. What is going on with the, is this good for other SaaS companies? What we did find though is that when people sign up and pay and then request a, hey. Could you onboard me? Like, could you walk me through the product? Give us, like, a demonstration after we've already purchased. Those are great. And those people tend to have high retention and low churn. Yeah. The more the the more on those calls, the merrier because that means more people from the team are using the product to solve their various problems in their various departments. So I just want you can get a demo with SparkToro, but only if you are already a customer. And then we found that the the the data suggests that it works really well. It's just the pre qualification. Anyway, that this is all just to say that if you don't know your audience, but both, you know, on the broad web, like, what's their broad web behavior, but also on stuff like this. What's their selling and buying and usage behavior or decision making behavior? You're gonna have a bad time. Right? Like, we had we had a we had a bad nine months of Rand being incredibly busy selling nothing. It's true. Alright. And our last point here, the last issue is, you know, on that notion of, like, why all this matters is now the the most recent reason is the LLMification of how people find things. So this is, you know, going to continue to disrupt the traditional search as we know it. Right? Because people are finding products, services, recommendations on these LLMs. Right? I know it's it's still, like, the overall market share of, like, chat g p t and these things. It's still very low. But among those early adopters, things are changing. Right? Like, for I think the yeah. I think that people finding things through AI is mostly Google. Like, it's mostly Google's AI, and it is it is Yeah. The AI overview. Than a I think more than a third of all Google searches have some AI features in them now. So there you go. As a user, Rand, how often is that helpful for you? It's hard to say. I mean Yeah. First off, I think marketers, people people like us who are and people who have joined this should be very careful in assuming that their behavior is like anyone else's on the Internet. Mhmm. And so I hesitate to give my personal one as though it's reflective of broad behavior, but, I find them moderately helpful in the same way that I found the old, instant answers program from Google helpful and not much more. Mhmm. That makes sense to me. Yeah. I'm finding it's I'm finding that it's most helpful for what I call low stakes research, which is research that only affects me and that I can easily verify. Yeah. Like, I, you know, like, I use it for like, I was shopping for a plastic free water bottle for my toddler. And so that's something that's, like, well, that only affects me. I'm not, like, trying to be the thought leader in water bottles, so it's fine. But it was it was it made it a that shopping experience was a lot faster for me because I got to see a bunch of options. And then some of them were wrong, like, they still contained plastic, the ingredient I didn't want or the material I didn't want, but it was easy for me to just look it up. Like, I was like, great. I have this starting point of a list. Now I can just make sure that, you know, it's correct or not correct. Alright. LLMification of things. And oops. I clicked the wrong thing. Sorry. Okay. So more on these zero click searches. Gosh. So this is the this is the study that we run or that Rand Fishkin runs almost every year now on zero click searches. This is the most recent one. So last year, we want, you know, we want we Rand Fishkin did the updated research on what happens after people after Americans Google things. Right? So we know that, what happens I'm, like, kinda fuzzy on this. About 60% or close to 60% of searches end without a click. Right? That's a lot of searches. But then of the search of the clicks that do happen, about a quarter of them go to a Google owned entity, like YouTube, maps, images. Right? Some kind of Google I I that that number is climbing. That is the number that is the number that's climbing. Could you give us a sneak peek of the new research? Are you not comfortable yet? I don't yeah. I don't have the latest from DATOS, but they are gathering it for me right now. So it should be should be there soon. I heard from, Stanislav on their data team, so I should have a new one of these soon. Yeah. Well, cool. Alright. So we know that there are more of these zero click searches. Oh, I already said these things. About a quarter of them go to, like, Google owned a a quarter to a third go to Google owned entities. Mhmm. And then for the the social platforms, right, no links allowed. We know that you can't you can't put links in your Instagram captions. Right? Like, we have creators who will they might type a short link into their Instagram caption, but this assumes that you will remember a m z n dot m a r you know, like, no. No one's gonna type that. TikTok, you can't do that at all. Right? That's why you that's why you have this increasing trend of creators or people saying on videos, like, you know where to find the link or you know where to go because they don't even wanna say go to my link or, like, click over here. Yeah. And then on LinkedIn, you got people like me, people like Marcela here who are doing the whole link in the comments below stuff. And even then, I I've been feeling like in the recent, I don't know, the recent couple months, I'll say, that even LinkedIn seems to be trying to find ways to crack down on this. But it's tough because if you post the link directly into your post, you're already going to lose reach. Then if you mention the link in your comments, they're going to, you know, downvote you for spam. But, really, you're just trying to provide the content that your audience would like to see, you know, like and I've I've been experimenting with this, in the recent several weeks of, like, different ways of doing this. Like, for one, like, sometimes I'll tell people, like, hey. Google the title of this blog post. Right? That'll work. Right? It works, but it that's a lot of friction. Sometimes I'll do link in the comments below, but I've noticed that it it seems like LinkedIn's algorithm doesn't like that. Like, when I when I put the link in the comments right away, it's like I had to wait an hour or two. At which point, there are many people who are like, hey, lady. Where's the link? Please post it. And then most recently, this was for this webinar yesterday, I I said, like, hey. Leave a comment, and I'll send you the way to sign up. So I started doing that, which I thought, like, this will be an interesting test. And, like, on one hand, you could say, well, maybe your content wasn't that good, and that's why it didn't perform well. And, like, normally, I would agree. But in this case, I was seeing that when I first posted my post, I was getting likes and comments. Like, it was, like, like, a normal influx of things. I had, like, I think, like, 30 likes within half an hour, which is, like, pretty solid. But then once I started dropping the comment oh, sorry. The links into the replies, the the reach tanked. Like, I think like I said, I had, like, 30 likes or so within thirty minutes. If you were to find my post from yesterday, it probably has, like, 32 likes now. Like, I think I think LinkedIn, like, was like, hey. I don't know what you're doing, you Jamoke. We're taking you out of here. So, you know, point is Yep. There's only there's only one workaround, and that's have someone else leave the link for you. Yep. Next time, Rand, I'm just gonna ask you to do it. Yep. That's that's that's the cheat code right now. That's the cheat code. The cheat code is to have Rand Fishkin with his, like, hundreds of thousands of followers. LinkedIn is is strange. It will show comments I leave to more people than posts that I put up sometimes. And I think, you know, there are all all of these social algorithms are just trained around engagement. And one of the things to realize is that when you put a link in a social post, you are naturally going to reduce engagement because some percent of the people are gonna leave. And the some percent of the people who are gonna leave the post were the highest in the most interested people because they clicked it. And so those are the people that would have liked, commented, shared, engaged, viewed. That's the it's a fundamental problem when you're when you're fighting against these these algorithms. And we're this is true on LinkedIn. It's true on Reddit. It's true on threads. True on Blue Sky. Blue Sky doesn't even have a bias against links, but because a link will take someone off of Blue Sky, you don't get the engagement you were going to otherwise. Interesting. By the way, I want to say, Tyler Adams' comment in the chat here. It left. Oh, no. It got Yeah. Be no. That's exactly right. Be the change. Yeah. Be the change you wanna see. If you see a post without a link, go drop that link in there for them. Alright. Okay. The last one here, I think this is the last one on social. When, you know, Elon Musk bought Twitter or now it's x, and he showed the algorithm, like, this shows that like, this little screenshot here shows that, posts with links are marked as definite spam vector. So proof that Twitter doesn't like links either. Now the what do I have here? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Back in the day, like, the, the audience research that you had to do, right, in that previous era we were talking about, Amanda, could be done through analytics. Like, it really could because because almost every website told you and platform told you which traffic they sent you, where it came from, and what and if it was Google, they would tell you what keyword they searched for. And so when you wanted to understand the audience of people who are coming to your website or to someone else's website if you're a consultant or agency, you just looked at access to their analytics. And you could see, here are all the websites that they visit. Here's all the search searches they perform. Here's the content on my site they're interested in. Here's how often they come back. Back in the day, like, analytics was enough audience research for most of the tactical needs, especially in in sort of search and content. Not anymore. Like Not anymore. And so Yeah. Here, we'll we'll use ourselves as an example. So this is from our Google Analytics, and it says that 76% of our visitors are coming from direct. Really? Like, these hundreds of thousands of people are going, I'm gonna go to SparkToro.com. I don't think so. Yeah. But but the truth is so this was also some research that ran it. I think it was last year on dark social and the way traffic is and the way that these are two different studies. And the way traffic flows around the web. So one, we found that both direct and organic search are hiding tons of true sources that send visits. And I put this slide in here because I had to I had to double down on this point, Amanda. Branded search, which I bet if you go to your, Google search console and you look at the percent of all the searches that are for your brand or branded products or or your name if you're a creator or something, you will find that a ton of it, 40%, fifty %, maybe 60 or 70, is for terms and phrases that are branded. And Google did nothing to create that demand. And your SEO and your rankings and your content didn't create that demand either. The thing that created that demand was something outside of Google. Just I I it frustrates me to no end when people look at their analytics and say, oh, Google's sending most of our traffic, so let's put most of our budget and effort toward Google without first confirming, are are you sure it was Google? Are you sure it wasn't people searching for your brand? Because that's not Google. Right. You don't get branded search by way of spending on SEM, you know. That's not how you get branded search. Branded search is really just a navigational query where somebody knows where they want to go. So So they're going to Google because they're like, I need to get to this website for whatever reason, not because Google told me to. Yep. So it's just it's just hiding the true source of refer data. Right? Like, there is there was something that nudged the person to search for the brand, but you don't know what it is, and Google is obfuscating it. Obfuscating it? Obfuscating it. That's so Obfuscating it. Thank you. Alright. So now on that dark social study that I referenced, we know that if any of these social platforms are sending you traffic, your analytics is going to report those visits as direct. So if you happen to get a link from from TikTok, like, somebody goes to your website by way of TikTok, that referral string is 100% hidden. It's showing us direct traffic. And same with WhatsApp, Discord, Mastodon, Slack. Right? Even, like, 75% of Facebook message Facebook Messenger messages, DMs, and Instagram, even 14% of LinkedIn, you know, like sorry. The the the traffic that's coming from LinkedIn, fourteen percent of that is showing up as hidden and marked out. I heard this is higher now. Now we need higher. Yeah. We need to redo that study because I think I've heard that the LinkedIn number is higher. Yeah. Oh, gosh. Right. So now you're now you're thinking that, like, oh, we got all this direct traffic, not knowing that it could be any of these, you know, any any one of these or maybe it's multiple, any one of these social, platforms. And then finally, in this other study on, this is, you know, some SparkToro data research on the way that traffic flows around the web. The main thing to know here is when you look at the sites that send reversals reversals that send referrals versus received visits. So one way to look at this or that's the that's how I explain it, Rand, and maybe you'll hate this, and here we go, is, like, sure, when you're looking at all the categories of things, search does send it technically does send the most traffic when traffic is being sent. Right? If you include branded search, people searching for your brand on Google and clicking through, okay, that's referral traffic. But one thing to know is but or to keep in mind, especially as a marketer where your, you know, time, attention, energy is only so finite, Where are people actually spending their time online? So while search may be sending some traffic, people aren't hanging out on search. People are mostly overwhelmingly hanging out on social networks and productivity, productivity channels. And put another way, here, this is the same data put into a pie chart. It's most people are spending time on social productivity apps, which would include, right, which would include, like, Microsoft Office Suite, Google Business Suite, I think, Dropbox, GitHub, Chat GPT. Like, that that all counts as productivity, followed by news, ecommerce, and then it's search. Right? That that's like one, two, three, four, five, fifth place. So think now you have to go you really have to go where your audience is. How can you get visibility in the social platforms and the news sites or the websites where people are already paying attention? And when you're thinking about where your audience is spending time, one thing to remember is your audience doesn't always equal your customer. Right? I we think of your customer as the subset of your audience. So here, you're gonna have your broadest your broad industry, your community. Right? That's your big circle here. Within there, you have your potential customers or your, you know, your total addressable market. And then from there, you have that that little slice of your current customers. But these aren't the only people who matter. You also have your potential, the potential people you can reach as your content consumers. So these are basically the people who will read, watch, consume your content, but they might not necessarily be a customer because part of that could be, like, you know, competitors, reporters, analysts. From there, you also have your potential amplifiers. I wanted to say influencers, but that's a little bit too I feel like too confusing because then you start thinking about the traditional lifestyle influencer. But I'm talking about amplifiers, which could be anybody. It could be anything. It could be niche publications. It could be, like it could be your mom talking to you, potential amplifier. Right? These are all the people who are, in your broader audience. So we have to care about the people in our whole audience, not just the people, you know, with the wallets. So that brings us to audience research. Right? How do you influence all these people? How do you get in front of all these people? How do you communicate to them in a meaningful way and at scale? Through audience research. So what is that? Right? He talked about how, like, there isn't really a clear stakeholder. There's no standard for which it gets done. It's how well, what is it then? So audience research is it's understanding a group of people, like who they are, what they like, how they behave so that you can make products and services that they actually want and improve how you market it to them. Right? It's this process of understanding, making things people want, and improving how you market or communicate to them. Now we have to say, it's not the same as market research. These two are very different and, you know, we really believe they both have a place. They're just very different. How so? So you have market research and audience research. Market research is landscape centric. It gives you the lay of the land. Audience research is people centric. It's about the people themselves. Right? You use market research to identify a target market. You use audience research to identify and better understand a target audience. Finally or couple of things here. For market research, your data sources tend to be things like industry reports, field studies, economic data, even trade publications. But for audience research, your data sources are the people themselves. Right? It's the people like, it's it's how they talk. It's how they behave. It's what how they describe how they self describe online. And finally, market research is most useful in early strategy. Right? When you're trying to identify markets, identifying new opportunities for building things, and audience research is most useful for go to market strategy. Right? Once you have the product, once you have some of these once you've identified the early potential, now audience research will help you figure out the marketing strategy. Right? It'll help you figure out how to position your product, how to talk to your customers, how to think about your content marketing strategy. And now here at SparkToro, our very biased opinion, I suppose, is we really recommend that you use audience research. Right? So, yes, market research, but also audience research because this will help you solve real business and marketing problems, not just as a checklist task. You can do this in ways that improve, that reach, resonate, and improve the results of your marketing. And we think that you should measure over testing rather than trying to prove attribution. Right? Measure things through testing, see how things are going. Don't just try to prove attribution. Alright. And now we gotta get into some myths here. Right? We gotta get into some myths that derail audience research because you might be thinking about things like, well, can't I just run a survey? Can't I just talk to my customers? Yes and no. So the first myth. First myth. You might but survey data tells us everything. These photos these photos, Amanda. Just You know, it's part of my whole, like, do things that don't scale strategy. It's I need some slides that are not just colorful bubbles. I'll just take pictures. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. It's chef's kiss. It's just perfect. Oh, the survey data. Right? It's well, 95% of survey respondents said they read The Wall Street Journal. Is it true? Well, if we look into SparkToro, we can see the influential press and media, and we can see you know, these are the influential press and media outlets among people with the term marketing director in their profiles. Right? So we can see that it's, you know, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, kind of. Ah, here it is. Okay. So we know that it's things like Substack. Right? Substack, I think that's interesting. It's more popular now than it was last year, especially among marketing directors. But here you can see, like, sure, Wall Street Journal, but I had to scroll I had to scroll so far to find the Wall Street Journal because yeah. I saw your thing here, and I'm like, oh, I'll put I'll go find where the Wall Street Journal is. That's, like, scrolling for pages and pages until I found oh, yeah. I guess some marketing directors read the Wall Street Journal, but it is not a high number. It's not. And I I like to cite the Wall Street Journal because one, everybody always talks about how they read it, but they don't. But also it's it's kind of a fun segue into to Morning Brew, you know, the newsletter where, you know, when when, Alex Lieberman and Austin Reif were college students starting Morning Brew, they started it as a very manual list. Like, they passed around the sheet and said put in your email address and then we'll send you a newsletter. And it was basically founded on this notion that college students were saying, like, yeah, I read the Wall Street Journal or I should at least. And so more more morning brew is it's kind of become the Wall Street Journal for millennials at this point. You know? Yeah. And so they were they were addressing this need of our people were saying, like, oh, I should read this or, like, I do read this. But now they today, people who were saying that might might might actually be reading Morning Brew. My favorite my favorite survey example, this is I'm not allowed to have revealed a company, but I tell the story. Amanda's heard me tell the story a lot, but maybe some of you haven't heard it. So early in SparkToro's, existence, this company, it's a b to c. They sell a food product. So they're they're in the consumer space. Direct to consumer, they also sell in grocery stores. And I convinced them that they should put because we were talking about survey data, and they were saying essentially, well, attribution may be challenging, but we can just ask people where they where they heard about us. And so I said, okay. Great. Can you do me a favor? In your how did you hear about us, say Alton Brown and Martha Stewart. Like, I want you to add those as options for the answers. Alton Brown had never talked about this product. Martha Stewart had never mentioned this product. But I put them we we put them in there. I agreed they agreed to let you know, add them into the survey responses. And 30% of their customers said, yeah. That's how I heard about them. And I was like, see? You see? You cannot you cannot rely on survey data about how did you hear about us. How did you hear about us is a terrible question. People cannot do it. Like, they fundamentally, it's not reasonable to ask people. It's not because they lie. Nobody who clicked Martha Stewart was lying. They were just like, oh, yeah. I've heard of Martha Stewart. I know her. I like her. Whatever. Like, sure. That's probably how I heard about you. Because I couldn't actually remember how they heard about them. So anyway, don't attribute your budget based on how did you hear about us. Yep. I'm not even sure you should ask. I don't I'm not I'm not totally sure if there's value in asking. Our next myth. We know our audience because we know our customers. Well, not really. Either your customers and your audience could still be really different people. Like, for one, I did I was doing a bunch of SparkToro research last night as I was doing this presentation, and I was seeing, like, there are some key differences in people who self describe as marketing directors and what they're searching for online compared to, the data that I found, like, on people who registered for this webinar. Like, I took our registration list and I uploaded it into SparkToro. It's really cool. And so I got to see, like, the actual keywords that people are searching for on aggregate. Don't worry. It's not your personal stuff. And I got to see a lot of a lot of the the aggregate kind of influences. And so for one, like, search keywords among marketing directors are about ads and PR. Now our customer search keywords, like, SparkToro customer specifically, their search keywords tend to be more content marketing specific. Right? So, like, sure, content marketing is broadly about marketing, but it's very different from somebody who's searching for ad campaigns and PR ideas. Third myth, traffic sources will tell us where to focus. Right? Remember, Google is getting all that credit or giving themselves all the credit. Right? So we know look at all this. This this is supposedly our referral traffic, like, over this past month or so. Our top refers are supposedly, right, direct Google, our own blog and email, and then LinkedIn. But I don't really know what to do with this information. Rather I mean, I like, this doesn't this doesn't really inform or change how I'm going to do things anyway. It's sort of this, like, call. Yeah. I mean, like, as we talked about, direct and Google and accounts. Google direct and email. Right? Those are all Yeah. All of all of the top four are just hiding what actually drove the person there. Yeah. Exactly. Myth four. Interviews and focus groups are enough. They're enough. Right? But I like them. They're useful, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're useful, but, like, not as a thing that, like, that's not the thing that you do. Right? There are other things you have to do. Like, marketing directors, for instance, they have a surprising amount of interest in ORM, sales, customer loyalty, crisis comms, PR. But those topics don't come up in interviews and focus groups. Right? Like, they're like, they're I don't know that anyone would tell you that they're passionate about crisis comms unless they work in crisis comms. But Yeah. I think this is the that this is one of the things that I love about passively collected data from people's real behavior versus their answers to questions. Because if you say, what's top of mind for you five marketing directors? You you'll get a lot of good answers, but it will not be comprehensive and it will tend to be the things that are sort of top of mind for everyone. And so that stuff that the world is already talking about as opposed to opportunities that you would not have found. Yeah. And finally, the last myth. You only need to do research once. People don't change that much. Right? I don't know, friends. Alright. So remember, these are the this is the influence influential press and media among people with the term marketing director in their profiles. This is just an example of one thing that does change or has been changing over time. Despite that hype, right, of sub sex over, it's still more popular than it was last year. With this group of people, like, overall, it's less popular. But with marketing directors, it's more popular. Yeah. And if you're if you're marketing to marketing directors, that's important. Right? You don't in a way, that's what you I mean, that's what you want. You wanna find these opportunities that you're like, yes. That's where that's where my target audience is. That's what they're doing. I gotta figure out a way to be there. Right? You you don't really care what the broader population is doing unless you're marketing to an entire population. Yeah. I think I think this is one of the most useful things about audience research versus market research. So market research would say, stubs substack, you know, was rising quickly for, like, its first eight, ten years, then it sort of plateaued. And now thanks to competition and and and other things, you know, it's down slightly from its highs. And for a lot of marketers, unfortunately, they think, oh, that I should pull back on my, whatever, spend or my efforts to get into Substack newsletters or my, you know, contributions to other people's Substacks. And that you you should not do that. You should absolutely not do that. You should go look at whether your audience is doing same thing with AI. Right? Like, everybody's like, oh, I need to get into chat g p t and perplexity and Gemini. Maybe. Like, go look. Maybe. Go look and make sure that you are prioritizing the right one because it could be that Pinterest, Reddit, and YouTube are way bigger for your audience than ChatGPT is. Yep. Exactly. Which brings us to our next topic. So how do you find all this out? How do you actually do the audience research? Well, here is your toolkit. This is all of it. You do all these things. You can do social listening, online monitoring, social media discovery, competitor analysis, community and focus groups, customer and prospect interviews. And, by the way, it's pink and blue because I kinda just had this as, like, the pink things are things that are, more qualitative, and the blue things here are more quantitative. I don't know. It made sense when I was making it. I was I was gonna ask you what was the difference between pink and blue. Yeah. Like, interviews are more qualitative, but something like, you know, going through first party data, that's, like, very, like, very, like, hard metrics. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And how do you do this? Or, like, how like, can you use one tool to do to do, like, multiples of these? Of course. So you can use the same tool multiple ways. For instance, BuzzSumo can help you with these two things. Right? You can use BuzzSumo for your social listening, online monitoring, and competitor analysis. Right? That's great. You can also use Google for some of these things. Right? You can use it for social listening, get Google alerts. You can run, like, Google you can use Google forms to run your own surveys and polls to analyze search intent analysis and do your whole website and content data analysis. And, of course, come on, guys. VP marketing here. SparkToro can help you with a bunch of these. Right? So SparkToro can help you with all of these things, social listening, social media discovery, competitor analysis. It can help you with community and focus groups, all of this really good stuff. Now I feel like that's a lot. Right? To just say, like, hey. Like, do all of this. This is all the audience research. Like, sure. But, like, what can you do with the research? Like, what are how do you think about the categories or the pillars in which audience research is effective? Or, like, what can you learn from it? So one area of audience research that you can really learn from is you can discover behaviors and conversations. Right? So like I said, like, sure, you can use SparkToro for this. You can use SparkToro to find the social networks that are more and less popular among your audience or, to find the popular social accounts or subreddits in your niche. Something I like to do is because I know my art my audience is on LinkedIn, I have a LinkedIn saved search, right, or, like, where I I just had I I wanted the search field and then I filter by posts, latest, past week, and then from a short list of people that people whose content I really don't want to miss. And so this has become I have never thought to do this. This when I saw this in your slide deck, I was like, damn. That is genius. Why don't I have that? I should have, like, three of these. There's, like, three different groups and things. Like, I care about the indie game stuff for Stackbar. I care about stuff for SparkToro. Yeah. Yeah. This is Absolutely. Very clever. Can you can you share an example of it? Do you have a a URL? Oh, it's customized to each user. Yeah. Yeah. I I yeah. I I can't drop my URL because it'll go to my account. But Okay. Yeah. I mean, like, look on Instagram, you can make a Finsta or, like, a fake Instagram account. Not fake, but, like, a separate Instagram account for, like, your business needs. And then it'll you know, over time, you'll get kind of this feed that's specific to your Instagram, like, the content you want there. You can't really do that on LinkedIn. I mean, like, you could, but then you'd be some weirdo with a fake account. But in this case, like Rand described, he has a couple of niche interests or, like, not niche interests, but, like, like, key professional areas. You can you can save multiples of these lists and just put them in your bookmarks. And so now you'll have, like, your your your feed of, like, oh, my indie gaming feed, my leadership feed. Where do you go to start this? Do you go to search to start this? I do. Yeah. Like, I go to LinkedIn, and I just I just type in whatever for a search. Like, just type in, like, Rand Fishkin. Okay. Just press to get to the custom the advanced search. And then Okay. At the top, you can change those filters or those chips. Ah, I see. Yeah. You can yeah. There's no, like, actual URL, I don't think, for LinkedIn advanced search. You just have to, like, do a search. Alright. Next area oh, see, in in SparkToro, you can find subreddits that your audience hangs out in. And Reese says, the chat slowed down if everyone wants to go do this. That's so funny. Ryan Stone said, I I do this and I put you in, and it says no results found. I wonder if, like, you're filtering, Ryan, for posts, not people because wait. Because one thing is so post latest past week from member. So, like, the first one is content type. I use post so I can see people's posts. And don't worry about the don't worry about the people until your fourth chip or filter. Okay. Sorry. Alright. So on SparkToro, you can find influential subreddits. So I know that people with the term marketing director are hanging out in the marketing subreddit, entrepreneur, startups. Well, in the marketing subreddit, these are some really interesting discussions. People are talking about, hey. Other departments keep criticizing our marketing, and I have a department of one. How do I handle this? Right? That's an extremely, like, specific, you know, highly relevant kind of discussion. Number two, what else can you do, like, through audience research? You can you can analyze content and performance. Right? So here's an example, or, like, thinking about how to do audience research. You can analyze content and performance. So this is from our Google search console. How Rand pointed out, like, a lot of the first searches are, like, variations of SparkToro, all branded search. But people are searching for, like, zero click content. That's how they find us as they should because we invented it. Well, we didn't invent it. We invented the term the terminology. You named it. How about that? Yeah. Yeah. I named I named this baby. Finally, you can learn directly from people. You know? And we do this all the time at SparkToro. Like, we really, really value the feedback that we get on our tool, on our product, on our marketing. And then, hey. I think it's a superpower to have, people from product and marketing talking to customers, not just customer service, talking to customers. That's that's my soapbox, and I'm gonna stay on it. Yeah. Alright. So how do you use SparkToro for this? So since we're coming up on the end here, I'll I'm gonna give you a sneak peek at what SparkToro actually shows you. This is literally about you. So this is when I took our we had, like, over we had, like, 1,100 registrants to this webinar, which is awesome. I uploaded it into SparkToro to see, like, what custom insights we can get. So this is about all of you guys. So our audience here, you know, pretty kind of it's, you know, mostly male, if anything, but pretty good split here. We know the top industries that you are in. Sounds diverse in terms of industry, compared to not just marketing people. Yeah. A lot of, like, info, tech and services, hospital and health care. Like, that's that's super interesting to see how diverse this is. We can see, like, people's kind of, you know, salary salary distribution and years of experience. I think this is from LinkedIn. Is that right, Rand? Yeah. This is all this is all LinkedIn matching. Mhmm. We can also see social networks. Remember I mentioned that you can see the social networks that are more and less used by your by your audience relative to, the average web user. So for instance, YouTube here, it's number one. A lot of people use YouTube. No question. But of people of of you all in this chat, all of you who registered, you don't use YouTube more than the average web user. What you do is you use Reddit, TikTok, and GitHub quite a bit more than the average web user. Sorry. I just didn't answer the question here. Yeah. We're coming up on time, but we still have the floor for the next half hour. So just a few more minutes here. We can do we can do q and a for anyone who can stay. And, of course, if you need to run, please run. Of course, you'll get the recording in your email. You'll get the deck. The recording will include the q and a so you can come back. Yeah. And it's like Amanda Natividad here says, clearly, we hate Facebook. Right. We we we use all of us here in the chat, friends, we don't use Facebook as much as the average web user. That's for darn sure. Yep. Alright. And now search in AI tools. These are the search in AI tools that we use here. So a lot of us are using chat g p t. A lot of us. And we're really using it. We are using Yahoo less than the average web user. Right? So this is something I like here too is seeing that we use archive. Is more than the average web user because we know how to get behind paywalls. We need to I think that's I think that's archive.org. Is that oh, I thought it was that is. No? Oh. I think if you hover on it, it'll say. Okay. I think it's the Internet. Say. Oh, okay. Sorry. Which is no surprise. Right? Marketers and content creators use archive a lot more than most. Yeah. Yeah. Cathy asks, how would you know that we use these when at Reddit you might use a different email than on LinkedIn? Oh, we are not yeah. We are not, using the email to connect to you know, we don't know what people what email people log into Reddit with, or anything like that. So the way the way that it works is it has I'll try and give the very fast version of this, but there's a there's a video you can watch if you want more. Essentially, it's clickstream data, which comes from Daedos, plus, LinkedIn data, which, we buy from LeadFuse, so few hundred million accounts there, and then, Google search data, so the keywords and the domains that come up for them, and then fourth, our own crawl of other social platforms, including YouTube and podcasts and the open web, and then a bunch of math behind the scenes to marry those in predictive ways that the Clickstream data can then validate for us. So that's the that's the modeling behind SparkToro. Cool. That is helpful. Okay. And then these are the trending keywords among us here. So I thought trending keywords would be fun because this is basically the stuff that we've been searching for over this past quarter or was it last quarter, Rand? Last quarter. Yeah. A lot of us were searching for, like, best mining base location. Britney Britney Mahomes' siblings. Right? These are just kinda funny to see, like, because this was very different from the general profile of marketing director, which is just it's just funny to see. Right? Like, I think it kinda goes to show too, like, how, how unique our community is and, like, how Well, it's, yeah, this is gonna be because because the group that was analyzed is small and quite diverse in behavior and background, what you tend to see in trending keywords are things that are popular broadly. So, like, these are these tend to be, like, topics of interest in the in the world rather than things that only marketers care about. Right. Yeah. And then here we go. So as we think about the place that audience research has within our marketing strategies, right, and where market research lives. I like to think of it as for market research, it serves as your map, and then you continue with audience research, which is your compass that heads keeps you in the right direction. Then you have your binoculars, which is SparkToro, and then your hat, which is your marketing strategy. I don't know. This is not an AI generated photo, so I had to just figure out, like, these all these single have a place. They do. They really do. You do need a hat on your expedition. Okay? So now what? Alright. What do we do with this now? Okay. We've given you a lot. We've talked about a lot of the, like, here's why you need to do audience research. Here's how to do it. Here are these, like, 11 different ways. What to do now? Okay. Now start with one to two methods. Just pick one or two. Don't wait for perfect data. It's not always gonna be perfect. Build a regular cadence. Right? So, like, commit to doing something quarterly. Maybe it's going to be a quarterly SparkToro search. Maybe it'll be quarterly customer interviews. Maybe it's both. Like, why wouldn't it be both? Right? And then share the insights. Do not keep them siloed. The most important thing you can do really is, I like to say, like, don't surprise your bosses. Don't surprise your colleagues. Keep them in the loop. And I have a deck for this. I'll show you my big deck. Just kidding. It's a regular sized deck. It's not that big. I do have a deck that'll help you, present your audience research highlights. This is you can make a copy of this. I think you can find this on your website on our website too, on our blog. So that will help you, like, figure out, like, how to, you know, where to screenshot things, where they live, how to present them to your team. And then finally, I will leave you with one framework so that after you do all of your audience research, you can then put it into content ideas. I have one framework for you, but you gotta read my blog post for, you know, for the rest of the frameworks. I think I have, like, five or six of them in the blog post. I gotta put it here. Content ideas, blog post. Sorry. I should be more professional. K. There it is. That does look professional. It looks really good. Right? Okay. Yeah. I think that gold gas. This is the problem solutions framework. So describe your problem. Explain the stakes or the consequences if you don't address the problem. Provide three to five actually practical or tactical solutions, include steps for implementation, and add some measurement criteria for success. So I made a fake example last night. This was late. This is specific to me and probably just a small percentage of you. As a parent, right, packing lunch for your kid takes too much time and work. That's the problem that I have. Now what are the stakes or the consequences? Well, paying for a hot lunch is expensive, and your kid is picky anyway, and they might not even eat all of it. So what is the point in paying for it? So what is your solution? It might be suck it up and do it anyway. Listen to my new podcast, Meme Team, while you get organized. How do you get organized? Make a spreadsheet of your kids, like, 12 favorite items, and then randomize it to create a menu. And then finally, here's the measurement of criteria for success. Make your kid, help you, and then slowly delegate one small task at a time. Right? So that's that's there you have your your problem and solutions framework. K. If you have any questions, support@sparktoro.com. If you have hate mail, don't worry. I read every single one. This, you can email me at amanda@sparktoro.com. And with that, yeah, I forgot Rand had a conflict. Okay. If anyone has questions, I can address them here. I'm gonna stop sharing. Okay. And, yes, you will get these slides. Just to reiterate, the recording is gonna be available on this very page, a few minutes after this ends. I will also, send you that recording and your slide and these slides. And, finally, if you have any friends that you wanna, you know, send this content to, they still have to sign up because you need a magic link to enter the webinar. So just send them the registration page. They can still sign up. It's still gonna be free. Oh, Alex is here. Hey, Alex. Alex Bo. And, Dave, you're a real one. Also kind of the chat. Josh Ellis asks, are all LLMs accounted for besides chat GPT and the audience usage report? I think you're asking about, like, when when I showed the search and AI tools that people use. Yes. The other LLMs are accounted for. Like, perplexity is there, Claude. Yeah. They are there. But we do also use chat GPT's API to help us with some of the, some of the content idea, like, idea generators. So you will see that once you run some SparkToro queries. Abid asks, would you recommend any more resources online to learn more about audience research? Mostly, SparkToro. There is a blog post version of this presentation that's extremely meaty. I published that earlier this year. It is a really good starting point, especially because I do specifically mention the other tools that are useful in conducting audience research, like how you could use BuzzSumo, the place that, like, keyword research tools like Ahrefs has in audience research. I'm also gonna say Ahrefs, like, they have great content about, content marketing in general, and I'm sure they have some stuff to say about audience research as well. That's a good one. A couple other areas or ways I would think about audience research too is think about the, like, the broad categories of how people find things and then if you can learn more about those things. So for instance, Google search. Right? Google search is, that's how people find things. Think about the things you can use from Google that are free, like Google Trends, for instance, that is free. That can help to inform your audience research. And then thank you, Robert, for asking for that link. I'm dropping it here in the ticker too. Audience research guide. And then I'm probably gonna take clips from this webinar and put them into that blog post. Cool. I don't think I saw any questions in the q oh, I did see or are questions in the q and a. Okay. I'm gonna see which ones here are, I'm gonna sort by most upvotes. Okay. Carolina asks, if attribution is dead, how do we approach reporting by marketing channel? Should we approach it by platform instead of traditional marketing channels? That's interesting. Well, I think our overall point of view is think about how you can look at measurement and incremental lift, not just attribution by channel to channel. So things like if you're able to test a certain campaign or do a certain campaign or test or I don't wanna say test. That's too complicated or too let's just say if you're able to do a certain marketing campaign, can you then look at overall lift in traffic, in, conversions, how people are finding you? Can you look back at things and like, what what what do you have in place that enables you to look back on campaigns and know, oh, that was impactful? So for for instance, for us, really hard to get to track ROI of attending an event, right, or, like, having a booth or speaking at a conference. But for us, we we tend we mark on our calendars, obviously, when we're gonna be at these events, And I'll know if we have a nice lift in SparkToro searches or more sign ups the day after I speak at a conference, then it's I can reasonably assume that it was because of that conference that we got a little boost. Okay. So David's asking, it seems like Amanda and Rand have been publishing on the SparkToro blog more often lately. How are you all thinking about the company blog fitting into your marketing mix these days, and how does that influence the type of audience research that you're doing? Oh, that's a fun question. I think about the way that I try to think about this is I really try to blog as often as I can. If I don't blog for a while, it's usually because I'm just too, like, busy and I've just been doing other things. But I try to do it as often as I can because I like to think of it as, here's the permanent place where this thought resides. You know, like, I I might have, like, a hot take on LinkedIn or something. It might do well. But then that that will that to me isn't great. That posted well on LinkedIn. That to me is a signal of, oh, people care about this topic. They feel seen or they want more information on this. I'm going to put a little more thought and, like, refine this writing a little bit better and put it into a blog post. And then that way, if in the future and hopefully, people are searching. If in the future people are searching for this content, then they'll find it on the blog. So I see it as, like, this kind of long term play. And how does it influence the research that I'm doing? I think it's a it's very, like, it's very fluid. Like, a lot of what I do a lot of the research that I do informs the blog, but then the blog itself informs the, like, the research in that. Once I do a blog post and then I start seeing how it performs, then I realize, oh, people really needed this. Like, for instance, this audience research guide that I wrote, like, now it it ranks really high in search. A lot of people find it. I think a lot of people are finding it organically, and that really showed me, like, there really is, like, a a dearth of content on audience research, and I gotta do more of it. Let's go back to the chat here. Alright. How do you look for data on audiences that don't have a clear job function? Good question. So, the different kinds of SparkToro searches you can run are not just specific to how somebody might self describe online. Like, that's only one factor. So let me take you to my let me take you to my dashboard here. Folks are still here. How do you share the screen? Okay. No. Why don't I know how to share my screen all of a sudden? Oh, here it is. I'm sorry. This is so annoying. Okay. Alright. So you can do different kinds of searches. You can do you can search for your audience based on the keywords they are searching for. So it's not gonna be a job title, but somebody might be searching for things like how not to kill indoor plants. Right? That could be that doesn't say anything about your job, but it says everything about your pain point. You can search by people who visit a certain website. So many people who are searching who go to the website morning brew, that is one search you can do. You can do profile contains, you know, how people self describe. You can do visits the URL, which is really cool because this was how I got some SparkToro customer data or customer insights, which was, yeah, I can I can run an analysis of people who go to sparktoro.com, but that's gonna be different from people who go to sparktoro.com/product/dashboard? Because people who come to this dashboard are users of our tool. It's not the same person who's coming to our homepage to scope us out. So that's a that's gonna be really helpful where you I mean, you can you don't have to do this if for your SaaS company, but, like, if you have a specific URL, we can now crawl that. And then finally, custom audience. You can upload a list. Oh, these are some existing ones that I have. You can upload a list. Like, the registration list was, like, over just around a thousand people. It depends on, like, is a thousand people, like, indicative of the customer base? I don't know. Right? I I I kinda say, like, try it anyway and then email us if you don't like what you see. You know, like, email us if you're like, I don't know if this doesn't make sense. We're happy to help. And then the thing I wanna show here am I allowed to do this? I'm allowed. Well, Brandon and Casey aren't here, so dads are not here. I can do whatever I want. We have conversational queries. This is really cool. So if you go to, custom audiences and then describe your audience, you can describe your audience in conversational language, and then we will basically run a custom report for you. So maybe it's like, my audience is interested in fitness and longevity longevity, but they're not bodybuilders. Right? So this is a certain type of fitness oriented person. Right? They're interested in fitness longevity. Maybe they're thinking about protein. They're not thinking about, like, how can I gain a hundred pounds of muscle? So but they're not a bodybuilder. Let's just try this. So now the tool is thinking, and it's going to give a custom report based on this. Okay. This will be the last sort of demo thing that I offer, because I feel like I'm losing you. Okay. Looks like you're describing people who prioritize maintaining fitness and healthy habits. Blah blah blah. Here, behavioral breadcrumbs decoded. Click the button below to save and view the data. Let's go. Alright. So it's loading. So these are the people interested in fitness and longevity, not so much bodybuilding. It's kind of interesting. Gender and employer industries are still loading, but we can already see the social networks. So the social networks that this audience uses, they really use Medium more than the average web user. They use Pinterest, x, Quora, TikTok more than the average web user. They're really using ChatGPT and archive.org. Here are some of the websites that they frequent, FoundMyFitness, longevity Technology. We have some hidden gems, like primalkitchen.com. We know they're podcasts. They're YouTube channels. Right? These are this is the content that they consume or or are influenced by, and these are their highest affinity keywords. So these are the keywords that signal highest affinity with them. So they're curious about tennis equipment for beginners. Right? Thigh exercises without using equipment. Gosh. These are so specific. I love that. These are still loading. Susan is asking, does this work across countries? It only works in North America and The UK. So US, Canada, and UK. We hope to roll out other regions at some point, but so far, it's just those regions. Oh, here. So gender, it's interestingly enough, it is mostly women who are interested in fitness and longevity. Right. See if I can go to search keywords. Yeah. So these are the keywords oh, these are the keywords that they're searching for online. They're searching for tennis equipment for beginners. That's so interesting. And then we can start to see things like sorry. Here's the last thing I'll show you. Relevant topics and content ideas. Lynn Linda's asking, can you segment can you segment data by gender? I don't think so. No. Oh, sorry. I was I wasn't laughing at you, Linda. I was laughing at the next question from, Temetope. The men wanna die. This is funny. So some relevant topics here would be things like holistic health approaches, strength training techniques, nutritional supplements. So you can imagine these as, like, the kind of starting point for your keyword research. So yeah. With that, like I said, any questions on the tool, please email us at support@sparktoro.com. Hate mail goes to me, amanda@sparktoro.com. And, yeah, that's all we have for now. To the 81 of you who are still here, thank you for joining us. Thank you everyone for joining, and we'll see you soon. Email us, pop in the chat. Chantelle. Okay. Bye, friends. See you next time.