The Best of SparkToro

Anyone can make it. Most of it is at least OK. Some of it's pretty good. A few folks are already sharpening their skills at prompting AIs to generate

Rand hates the phrase “high-quality content.” Quality is entirely subjective. And because it’s subjective, it’s impossible to measure, let alone find

Two years ago today, at the nerve-wracking start of a global pandemic, we launched SparkToro. Since then, we've learned a lot, and uncovered plenty of

It's been almost two months since my last post here. For those of you who pay attention to the digital marketing world, the infrequency of updates may be

We've passed a milestone in Google's evolution from search engine to walled-garden. In June of 2019, for the first time, a majority of all browser-based

In August of 2019, I published research from now-defunct clickstream data provider, Jumpshot, showing that 50.33% of all Google searches ended without a

You've heard the marketing analytics spiel before. It goes something like: Marketing journeys are long, complicated, multi-channel paths. Tracking them is

Cold outreach is typically seen as a numbers game: hit as many inboxes as you can, assuming 5% or fewer will convert. But I’ve never agreed with that

I have a bone to pick with buyer personas, but it’s only because I like them (in contrast to Rand who doesn’t like them; yes, we can disagree). My

I've ranted endlessly about how marketing leaders refuse to invest in hard-to-measure marketing channels like PR, media, native social, events, many types

I've long been bullish on episodic content; in fact, I think it's likely the best kind of long-term content investment most online brands can make. The

It's 2017, and you convince your executives to be early adopters of the #Web3 trend. Blockchain-based product investments, marketing with NFTs, perhaps

Despite studying content that overachieves for years, it's only in the past few months that I've stumbled into a mental model I've called: Hook, Line, and

It could be a chicken or egg situation: Maybe the platforms have made us lazy, or we’ve trained their algorithms to reward platform-native content — as

TL;DR - From May 13-15, 2022, SparkToro and Followerwonk conducted a rigorous, joint analysis of 44,058 public Twitter accounts active in the last 90

The SparkToro team got an exciting surprise on Sunday evening: a mention of our research on Last Week Tonight by John Oliver. The full episode, Big Tech

Over the last couple weeks, I've talked to dozens of startup founders, small business owners, and web marketers of all kinds. Folks are scared, and

There's no question I get more when presenting on startup marketing than this: "I feel so overwhelmed... Where do I even start?" It's a fair response, one