A series of guides on SparkToro, the audience research platform for marketers. This series covers how we use SparkToro, why we love it at our agency, and why we think SparkToro is different to other marketing tools. This is our introduction explaining to other marketers what they can find in this series and the way we think about software.

SparkToro helps me conduct content audits, compare my clients against their competitors, quickly understand new markets and industries, and plan out content marketing campaigns (strategy, tactics, topics, and research for specific pieces). This post will show you how I use SparkToro when working with clients on content marketing projects, including some of my personal preferences.

Learn about a variety of use cases for SparkToro, the audience research software. Includes examples across different types of marketing, PR, content creation, and simply some nifty ways to play with cool audience data.
Includes best tips, and specific recommendations for how to use SparkToro's software for those situations.

The way marketers usually think of their software breaks down in front of a more unorthodox tool like SparkToro. Sure, you can run some cool searches and get fun numbers about your audience. But will you know what to do with that information?

I want to present you with a manifesto of sorts - a different approach to your marketing research and to working with your marketing technology stack.

The key to this approach? Stop searching for easy answers from your marketing tools. When you take tactical recommendations from another source (human or software), you are sacrificing a level of control within your work. To properly adapt your marketing campaigns to your business, learn how to design both strategy and tactics from scratch.

And SparkToro is one of the only marketing tools that can help you figure out both strategy and tactics. So to get value from SparkToro's audience research data, think about marketing like a cook: each data point is like a different ingredient within your kitchen and you are the chef cooking a delicious meal.

We put together this half-documentation, half-guide on all of SparkToro's features and options. I've added screenshots of all the main interface options and explanations of what everything does. Includes interface Options, Dashboard, Audience Research, Types of Searches (Audience Research Options), Types of Results & Audience Information, and more.