Office Hours: Audience Research Masterclass

We are here.

Hi, friends.

Hi, folks. So,

I have been

working nonstop, which is unlike me, but

not doing chill work at all, and

but as a result,

I think that

SparkToro's had one of its best months in a while, which actually I attribute

99% of to Casey. Oh, yeah.

No, it's absolutely Casey. It's totally Casey, that new.

And Monty, actually. Monty, our designer.

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 you seen this guy, Monty Hayden? He does such wonderful work. I'm going to 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 wild. Like Adam and Nathan and I, for alert mouse,

we were trying to find somebody else who did this, and we went down

all the lists, because we were like, well, we should be responsible. And when you're trying to find a consultant

or an agency or a provider, you're like, well,

we should consider multiple potential options. So we tried to build

the list, and at the end of it, we were like, well, that's nine dead

ends and Monty. So we reached out to him. He's like, yeah, I'd love to work with you again.

It's

hard to find reliable, relatively affordable people

who do the work that you need. I don't think AI is going to take

jobs. 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 impossible.

I keep reading about it. Here's my this is what I truly

believe, Amanda. I truly believe that all the.

Every time the CEO of Anthropic or someone

who works on open AI 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 going to get disintermediated or destroyed

by the companies that do use it. Well, I think every one of

them knows that the last 2000 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 going to 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 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, 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, what?

It's the best. No, but today we are here because of

Casey, because of all these. Well, I guess what spurred it was

a bunch of these incredible changes in Sparktoro. We have like

at least 10 new products or features in our tool.

And it had me rethinking

the blog posts 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 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'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 and the VP of marketing

at Sparktoro. So, yeah, I'm going to talk about Sparktoro.

Awesome. I love it.

And I also 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 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.

Yeah. Sometimes I,

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 procrastinating working where I'm like, uh-huh, got to 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 new Sparktoro 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, Rand, trust me. It'll be fine. It'll be fine.

It's going to be great. This is not chill and I'm frantic. Well, Amanda, 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 really good.

I'm very excited. We should get into it. We should. And by the way,

I want to 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 kind of nervous.

So please be nice.

It's just you and me here. There's no one to be nervous about.

Yeah, you. Oh, that's true. I am.

I'm very picky.

I don't know if anyone has ever had to present in front of Rand Fishkin.

One, he's mean. He's so mean.

I just get nervous. Okay. And I also forgot how to screen share here.

They do change the interface a lot.

Yeah. Okay. I promise I'm about to be like 1% less annoying

in like 10 seconds. Okay.

All right, friends. Before we get started, Rand's like, hmm, I don't know that's true.

1% is a very small number.

You're a little bit alarmed. All right.

So we have our slides going, I think. But before we get started, a little bit of

housekeeping. First thing is use the chat.

So friends drop your notes, questions, comments directly

in the chat. 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&A

just because it helps other people see the questions and 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 going to

send the recording? Are we going to send the slides? Yes, we are.

There's a recording? Yeah. Does GoldCast 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.

All right.

Mo asks, slides feel a little bit small.

We could change the layout, I think. That is a good idea.

Can you change the layout? That's probably

better. There we go. Excellent

suggestion, Mo. Thank you, Mo. All right. And with that, we will get started.

OK, last thing. Seriously, you will get the recording. You will get

the slides. The recording or the replay

here will be available probably like 10 minutes after this webcast

ends. And then we also email it to you probably by end of day today.

All right. 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. All right.

Yeah, so you can ask questions in the Q&A anytime.

So there's that little Q&A message near the chat.

And you can use the chat to chat about things

that are going on, but 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&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. All right. Let's get started. We are going to

dive into our audience research masterclass. So it's called a

masterclass. I originally had it as like 101. But you know what?

This is a masterclass because we're going to talk a lot about the tools you

can use, how you can use them. And we're really diving deep into Sparktoro.

All right. 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 of view

is I wish more people knew about it. So that's one problem. I wish more people knew about it.

But also, I think 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. Everybody knows

I'm going to use Moz or Ahrefs. I'm going to look for high volume keywords, blah, blah,

blah. Like everyone kind of knows what that is. There isn't really a universal

standard for what audience research is.

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's pretty clear cut.

But 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

marketing purpose of it, and so it's not going to get done.

Plus, even if you do get it done, well, 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?

Every project's action items are different.

So let's just say having a list of all the influential podcasts

in your audience, that's going to 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, huh, 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 podcasts.

And performance marketing is probably thinking, cool, let's do some

ad buys 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?

There was like 20 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 grow so fast, you just put it all into social. You didn't have to do

research. You didn't have to know 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.

We have all the platforms hoarding traffic for themselves.

We have Google, especially now with AI mode,

trying to put as much of the insights, all the

value directly 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 death of attribution.

The attribution sources

that we had come to know and love are becoming less and less

accurate, if we're even able to attribute things correctly.

Oops. Eh, let's just go

with it. Decision-making is now happening, or

now we know, especially, that it happens off-platform. Nobody really

follows this cohesive customer funnel. It's kind of like

a customer shit show. I don't know.

My friend

Jessica Jalowicz calls it the brand vortex, where it's like

it's not so much of this funnel that people get pushed down through.

It's this vortex of things that happen in it. It's 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're not going to convert because they felt like, oh, this case

study finally met me where I am in my inbox.

I'm going to give them the monies. Not how that works.

One of my most embarrassing confessions, Amanda and

everybody here, is that for the first 18 months

of Sparktoro's life, I did demos. 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 4 to

10 a week. 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 100 demos,

which was like the first six months or something, was

two people signed up for Sparktoro. And Casey 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. You must be selling them on not purchasing the product.

And so 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 not do a demo. Just play with the free version

like everyone else. Because our basic

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'd probably get, what, two requests for a demo

every day? And now we just tell everybody, like, sorry,

no demos. And it seems to be going much better.

It does. It's the weirdest thing. No, it's true.

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

uncertainty around our tool while Casey was rebuilding it. There were

just things that were kind of in flux. And the few times that I, or when people

would ask 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.

Or like the company who writes in. Sometimes the company writing in was so impressive

and I liked them so much. I'd be like, oh my god, they're, that

person or team wants a demo. I want to talk to them. Like, let's have a conversation.

Oh, totally.

I had a fascinating conversation with the Disney people when they

wrote in, but, oh, actually maybe they did end up

buying. But anyway, it doesn't matter. They might have been the exception

to the rule. But like, you know, a lot of the, a lot of those conversations

were great and meaningful, but also didn't sell

SparkTor. 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, this will go back to

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 going

to 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

going to 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, SparkTogether. The more the merrier.

Seriously. Buy a ticket, please. No, but the more people

that join the demo call, the more I'm like, oh, this isn't going to work.

Because they're inviting all these people because there's no clear

stakeholder here. Because the person organizing the call

is like, great, we can all use it, which makes me think. Yeah, who's the decision

maker? Yeah, no one's going to use it. Conversely,

conversely, and this might be advice for

all the people in the chat who are like, wait, what is going on? 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.

And 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 of SparkToro, but only if you are already a

customer. And then we found that the data suggests

that it works really well. It's just the pre-

qualification. Anyway, this is all just to say that

if you don't know your audience, both

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 going to have a bad time.

Right? Like we had a bad nine months

of Rand being incredibly busy selling nothing.

It's true. All right. And our last point here,

the last issue is on that notion

of why all this matters is now the most recent

reason is the LLM-ification of how people find

things. So this is going to continue to disrupt

the traditional search as we know it, right? Because people are

finding products, services, recommendations

on these LLMs. I know it's still like the overall market

share of like chat GPT in these things is still very low,

but among those early adopters, things are changing, right?

I think that people finding things through AI is mostly Google.

Like it's mostly Google's AI and it is

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, first off,

I think marketers, people like us and people who have joined this

should be very careful in assuming that their behavior is like anyone else's

on the Internet. 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.

That makes sense to me.

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.

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

trying to be the thought leader in water bottles, so it's fine.

But it made that shopping experience a lot

faster for me because I got to see a bunch of options. And then

some of them were wrong. 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. I was like, great, I have

this starting point of the list. Now I can just make sure that it's correct

or not correct. All right.

And oops, I clicked the wrong thing. Sorry.

OK, so more on these zero-click

searches. Gosh, this is a study that we run or that Rand runs

almost every year now on zero-click searches. This is the most recent

one. So last year, we

ran the updated research on what happens after people

after Americans Google things. Right. So we know that

what happens. I'm like kind of fuzzy on this.

About 60 percent or close

to 60 percent 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.

That number is climbing. That is the

number that's climbing. Could you give us a sneak peek at 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.

All right. 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 and a quarter to a third go to Google-owned entities.

And then for 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-K.

You know, like, no, no one's going to type that.

Tick tock. 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 want to say go

to my link or like click over here. Yeah.

And then on LinkedIn, you got people like me, people like Marcella

here who are doing the whole link in the comments below

stuff. And even then, I've been feeling like in the recent

I don't know, the recent couple of 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

would like to see, you know, like, and 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 that's a lot of friction. Sometimes

I'll do link in the comments below. But I've noticed that 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 have 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

this would be an interesting test. And like on one hand, you could

say, well, maybe your content wasn't that good. And that's why I didn't perform well. And 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

a normal influx of things. I had like I think like 30 likes

within half an hour, which is a pretty solid. But then once I

started dropping the comment, sorry, the links into the replies,

the reach tanked. Like I think like I said, I had like 30

likes or so within 30 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 joke.

We're taking you out of here. So, you know.

Point is, there's only there's only one workaround and that's have someone else

leave the link for you. Yep. Next time, man, I'm just going to ask

you to do it. Yeah, 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 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

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 going to leave.

And the some percent of the people who are going to 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 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. Yeah. No, that's

exactly right. Be the change. Yeah. Be the change you want to see.

If you see a post without a link, go drop that link in there for them.

All right. OK, 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 show that

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.

What do I have here? OK. 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 you're really good 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 were coming to your

website or to someone else's website, if you were 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 sort of search and content. Not anymore. Not

anymore. And so here 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 going to go to Spructoro.com. I don't think so.

But the truth is, so this was also some research that Rand did, 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 your name, if you're a creator or something, you will

find that a ton of it, 40%, 50%, 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.

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 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. 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 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. 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? Yes. Obfuscating it. Obfuscating.

Obfuscating it. Thank you. All right.

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 TikTok, like somebody

goes to your website by way of TikTok, that referral

string is 100% hidden. It's showing as direct traffic.

And same with WhatsApp, Discord, Mastodon, Slack, right? Even like

75% of Facebook Messenger

messages, DMs on Instagram, even

14% of LinkedIn, you know, like, sorry,

the traffic that's coming from LinkedIn, 14% of that is showing up as

hidden and marked as direct. I heard this is higher now. Now it's higher.

Yeah, we need to redo that study because I've heard that the LinkedIn number is higher.

Oh gosh. Right. So 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 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 Spark Toro DATOS 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, not reversals, that send referrals versus

received visits. So one way to look at this

or this is 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, 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

channels. And put another way, here, this is the

same data put into a pie chart. Most people are spending time on social

productivity apps, which would include

Microsoft Office Suite, Google Business Suite, I think,

Dropbox, GitHub, ChatGPT, that all

counts as productivity, followed by news, e-commerce,

and then it's search, right? That's like, one, two, three,

four, five, six, 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? We think of

your customer as the subset of your audience. So here you're going to have your

first, your broad industry or community, right? That's your big circle here.

Within there, you have your potential customers or your total addressable

market. And then from there, you have 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, 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, 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,

a 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 how they

talk. It's how they behave. It's 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,

identify new opportunities for building things.

And audience research is most useful for go to market strategy.

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 here

at Spectoro, our very biased opinion, I suppose,

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.

All right. And now we got to get into

some myths here, right? We got to 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.

But survey data tells us

everything. These photos, these photos, Amanda.

You know, it's part of my whole, like, do things

that don't scale strategy. I need some slides that are not just

colorful bubbles. I'll just take pictures.

I love it. It's chef's kiss.

Perfect. The survey data, right?

It's well, 95 percent of survey respondents said they read The Wall Street Journal.

Is it true? Well, if we look into Spartoro, 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 a 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. OK, so we know that it's things like Substack, right? Substack. I think it'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 like to cite The Wall Street Journal because one and everybody

always talks about how they read it, but they don't. But also it's

kind of a fun segue into 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. They passed around a 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 Morning Brew is it's kind

of become The Wall Street Journal for millennials

at this point, you know, and so they were addressing this need of

where people were saying like, oh, I should read this or like I do read this.

But now today, people who are saying that might

actually be reading Morning Brew. My favorite my favorite survey example.

This is I'm not allowed to reveal the 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 B2C. They sell a food product. So 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, OK, 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 put them in there. I agree. They agreed

to add them into the survey responses and 30

percent 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 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 was 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 aggregate kind of influences.

And so for one, like search keywords among marketing directors are about

ads and PR. Now our customers search keywords, like

SparkToro customers 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 is supposedly our referral

traffic like over this past month or so. Our top

referrers 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. Right. I mean, like this doesn't this doesn't really inform

or change how I'm going to do things anyway. It's sort of like

all. Yeah. I mean, like as we talked about direct and Google

and accounts that Google direct and email. Right.

Those are all of all of the top four are just hiding

what actually drove the person there. Yeah.

Exactly. Myth for interviews and focus

groups are enough. They're enough. Right.

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 RM 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 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'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.

All right. So remember, these are the this is the influence. Influential press and media

among people with a 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 subsex 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 want to 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 got to figure out a

way to be there. Right. 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

Stubbs, Substack, you know, was rising quickly for

like its first eight, 10 years. Then it sort of plateaued. And now, thanks

to competition and other things, you know, it's down

slightly from its highs. And for a lot of marketers, unfortunately, they

think, oh, I should pull back on my whatever spend

or my efforts to get into Substack newsletters or my contributions

to other people's Substacks. And that you should

not do that. You should absolutely not do that. You should go look at whether your

audience is doing the same thing with AI. Right. Everybody's like, oh, I need to get into

ChatGPT and Perplexity and Gemini. Maybe

go look, go look and make sure that you are prioritizing

the right one, because it could be the 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 kind of 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 going to ask you what was the difference between pink and blue?

Yeah, like interviews are more qualitative, but something like

going through first party data, that's very

hard metrics. Right. Yeah. And how do you do this?

Or 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. 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 some Google alerts. You can run like Google. You can use Google

forms to run your own surveys and polls to analyze search 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 just had I went to 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. 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. I think I care about the indie game stuff for Snackbar.

I care about stuff for SparkToro. Yeah. Yeah. This is

very clever. Can you share an example of it?

Do you have a URL? Oh, it's customized to each

user. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I can't drop my URL because it'll go to my account.

But 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 key professional areas.

You can save multiples of these lists and just put them in your bookmarks.

And so now you'll have like 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 type in

whatever for a search, like just type in like Rand Fishkin. Okay.

And then I get to the custom, the advanced search. And then 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.

All right. Next area.

Oh, see in SparkToro, you can find subreddits that your audience

hangs out in. And Reese says

the chat slowed down as everyone went to go do this.

That's so funny. Ryan Stone says

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 posts latest past week from member.

So like the first one is content type. I use

posts 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. All right. 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 have a department of one. How do I handle this? Right. That's an

extremely like specific, 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 terminology. You named it. How about that? Yeah.

I named I named this baby. Finally, you can learn

from people 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. 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 going to stay on it. Yeah.

All right. So how do you use SparkToro for this? So since we're coming up on the

end here, I'm going to 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 eleven hundred registrants to this webinar, which is awesome.

I uploaded it into SparkToro to see 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 mostly male,

if anything, but pretty good split here. We know the top industries

that you are in. It's quite diverse

in terms of industry. It's really diverse. It's not just marketing people.

Yeah. A lot of like info, tech and services,

hospital and health care. That's that's super interesting to see how

diverse this is. We can see like people's kind of

salary distribution and years of experience. I think this is from

LinkedIn. Is that right? Yeah, this is all this is all LinkedIn matching.

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 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 can't answer the question here.

We're coming up on time, but we still have the floor for the next half hour.

So we can do Q&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&A so you can come back. Yeah. And it's funny.

Amanda Cruiser here says clearly we hate Facebook. Right. 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. Yeah. All right. And now search and I tools. These

are the search and I tools that we use here. So a lot

of us are using chat GPT, 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 if we need to.

I think that's I think that's archive.org. Is that? Oh, I thought

it was that is now. Oh, I think if you hover on it, it'll say

OK. I think it's the Internet. OK. Sorry. Which is no surprise.

Right. Marketers and content creators use archive a lot more than

most. Yeah. Yeah. Kathy

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 click

stream data which comes from data plus LinkedIn data,

which we buy from Leadfuse.

So a few hundred million accounts there and then Google search data.

So the keywords and the domains that come up for them and then

forth 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 SparkTor. Cool.

That is helpful. OK.

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. Brittany

Brittany Mahomes siblings. These are just kind of 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 kind of goes to show to

like how how unique our community

is and like how it's. Yeah, this is going to 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 keeps you in the right direction.

Then you have your binoculars, which is spectral.

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 things all have a place. They do. They really do. You need a hat on your expedition.

OK, so now what? What do we do

with this now? OK, we've given you a lot.

We've talked about a lot of the like here's why you do audience research.

Here's how to do it. Here are these like 11 different ways. What to do now.

OK, now start with one to two methods. Just pick one or two.

Don't wait for perfect data. It's not always going to 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. 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, 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 figure out how to

write a 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've got to read

my blog post for the rest

of the frameworks. I think I have like five or six of them in the blog post.

I've got to put it here.

Content ideas blog post. Sorry, I should be more

professional.

That does look professional. It looks really good, right?

Yeah, good job, Goldcast. 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 kid's 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 problem and solutions

framework. OK, if you have any questions, support at

Sparktoro.com. If you have hate mail, don't worry. I read every single one.

This you can email me at Amanda at Sparktoro.com.

And with that. Yeah, I forgot

I had a conflict. OK, if anyone has

questions, I can address them here. I'm going to stop sharing.

OK, and yes, you will get these slides. Just to

reiterate, the recording is going to 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 want to send this

content to, they still have to sign up because you need a magic link to enter

the webinar. So just set in the registration page. They can still sign up. It's still going to be free.

Oh, Alex is here. Hey, Alex. And

Dave, you're a real one. Also kind of the chat.

Josh Ellis asks, are all LLMs accounted for besides chat

GPT in the audience usage report? I think you're asking

about like when when I showed the search

and A.I. tools that people use. Yes, the other

LLMs are accounted for like perplexities 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

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 by Sumo, the place that like

keyword research tools like Ahrefs has in audience research.

I'm also going to 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 could 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 going to take clips

from this webinar and put them into that blog post. Cool.

I don't think I saw any questions in the queue. Oh, I did see our questions

in the Q&A. OK, I'm going to see

which ones here are I'm going to sort

by most upvotes. OK.

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 want to 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 would you have in place that enables you to

look back on campaigns and know, oh, that was impactful? So 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 mark on our calendars, obviously, when we're

going to be at these events. And I'll know if we have a nice lift in

Sparktoro searches or more signups the day after I speak

at a conference, then 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 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 a permanent place where this thought resides.

I might have a hot take on LinkedIn or something. It might do well.

But then 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 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 very

fluid. A lot of what I do, a lot of the research that I

do informs the blog. But then the blog itself informs

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 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 dearth

of content on audience research. And I got to do more of it.

Let's go back to the chat here.

All right.

How do you look for

data on audiences that don't have a clear job function? Good

question. So the different kinds

of spectral searches you can run are not just specific

to how somebody might self-describe

online. That's only one factor. So let me take

you to my dashboard here.

Folks are still here.

How do you share the screen? Okay.

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.

All right. So you can do different kinds of searches.

You can search for your audience based on the keywords

they are searching for. So it's not going to be a job title,

but somebody might be searching for things like how not to kill

indoor plants. 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

how the URL contains how people self-describe.

You can do visits the URL, which is really cool

because this is how I got some SparkToro customer data

or customer insights, which was, yeah, I can run an analysis

of people who go to SparkToro.com, but that's going to be different

from people who go to SparkToro.com slash product slash

dashboard because people who come to this dashboard are users

of this tool. It's not the same person who's coming to our homepage to scope

us out. So that's going to be really helpful.

You don't have to do this for your SaaS company, but if you have

a specific URL, we can now crawl that. And then

finally, custom audience. You can upload a list

of these are some existing ones that I have. You can upload a list

like the registration list was just around a thousand people.

It depends on like, is a thousand

people indicative of the customer base? I don't

know. I kind of say try it anyway

and then email us if you don't like what you see. Email us if you're like,

I don't know. This doesn't make sense. We're happy to help.

I think I want to show here. Am I allowed to do this? I'm allowed.

Brandon and Casey aren't here. 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.

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, but 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.

Behavioral breadcrumbs decoded. Click the button

below to save and view the data. Let's go.

All right. 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 Web sites that they frequent. FoundMyFitness, Longevity.Technology.

We have some hidden gems like PrimalKitchen.com.

We know their podcasts, their

YouTube channels. This is the content that they consume 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 U.K. So U.S., Canada and U.K.

We hope to roll out other regions at some point, but so

far it's just those regions. Oh, here.

So gender is, interestingly enough, it is mostly

women who are interested in fitness and longevity.

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.

Linda's asking, can you segment

data by gender? I don't

think so, no. Sorry, I wasn't laughing at you, Linda. I was

laughing at the next question from Temetope. The men want to die.

That's just 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 at Spectro.com.

Hate mail goes to me, Amanda at Spectro.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, Chantel.

Okay. Bye, friends. See you next time.