Guide to SparkToro Part 1: How I Use SparkToro for Content Marketing Projects

As a content marketer, I use SparkToro for most of my client work. 

SparkToro, an incredible audience research tool, helps me:

• Conduct content audits

• Compare my clients against their competitors

• Understand new markets and industries

• 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.

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Note: If you want to check out the other SparkToro guides in this series, you can find their links and descriptions here.

License: feel free to implement this advice in your own work and link to this page as you wish, but this content cannot be copied or replicated without explicit permission and credit to Mariya Delano and Kalyna Marketing.

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What Questions Should Content Marketers Ask?

Whenever I’m approaching a new content marketing project, I start by figuring out what questions I want to ask.

Many marketers misunderstand strategy or fixate too much on the wrong questions before they actually take a step back and think through why they are making certain assumptions.

For example, if you’re trying to build a content strategy I think it’s a mistake to ask “how often should I post on LinkedIn?”. That question, simple as it may seem, implies that you’ve already answered the following:

• Why do I want to get more attention?

• Who do I want that attention from?

• Are the people who I’m trying to reach on LinkedIn?

• Do I have the resources to dedicate to regularly posting quality content on LinkedIn?

• What kinds of posts do the people I’m trying to reach engaging with on LinkedIn right now?

• How can I embed my unique voice and perspective into the posts that I create on LinkedIn?

Only after you’ve considered all of those questions can you begin thinking about posting time, frequency, and current algorithm preferences. Otherwise you’re skipping steps and picking out the color of your house paint before you’ve even begun to lay cement for your foundation.

Instead, you need to conduct proper, in-depth audience research.

• Who are you trying to talk to?

• How will those people help you achieve your business objectives?

• What will those people resonate with?

As we dive into my preferred workflow, remember that I often think about content in terms of ”what question is this answering?” and “what are the right questions to be asking?”.

Why Is Marketing So Frustrating Lately?

A lot of this workflow is a bit unusual, and I can hear some of you asking why it’s even necessary. 

You probably like your existing methods and tools. If you’ve been in the field long enough, your previous workflow has definitely brought you some success. So why would you even consider changing your habits?

Because many companies who hire content marketers are unhappy with the services they receive. Every single time I get on a discovery call, I hear the same story: they’ve hired marketers before, those marketers did not understand their product, they may have worked together for months and not gotten any results, and everything felt rushed, lazy, and unoriginal. Copy and paste. On and on it goes, an endless line of replaceable clients on one side and marketing consultants on the other, trapping us all in a hell-scape of misery and frustration.

Why Nothing is Working

As marketers, we know our side of the equation: we’re frustrated, overburdened, and confused. Most of our projects don’t get enough budgets, our clients don’t specify what they want, and all of our marketing tools are giving us data that we can’t figure out how to act on. Tactics that worked yesterday (like pumping all of your budget into SEO or paid ads) don’t produce the same results. We spend all of our time working, and yet none of it is achieving our desired outcomes.

What’s the client side of things? Listening to these people on discovery calls, I can tell you they are just as frustrated and perplexed as we are. They can’t understand why marketers are telling them one thing, but the performance of their campaigns shows another. They are trying to navigate our crazy world of specialties, tools, and frameworks and they feel like they are drowning too.

Client Frustrations

When speaking with prospects, existing clients, and even some family members who’ve hired marketers before, I notice a few common themes:

• Lack of a coherent story behind why certain marketing tactics were chosen and why campaigns did or didn’t perform.

• Endless cycle of promising that the exact same tactic and channel will work if we invest a bit more time or money (or produce a few more blog posts).

• No cohesion between disparate data points, platforms, and campaigns. Every project and piece of content is treated separately, and there’s no sense of cohesively building a brand identity or a holistic strategy.

• No results haphazard tactics lead to haphazard results. No amount of graph cropping or data manipulation will make up for the fact that no new sales & leads are coming in.

• Lack of topical expertise within a client’s industry or vertical. I constantly hear that clients have found marketers can either write or understand technical detail, but not both.

• Blind copying of what’s already out there. Think “skyscraper technique” for SEO or bundles of LinkedIn post templates. Just because something worked for someone else, that doesn’t mean it will work for you.

In-Depth Audience Research Is Your Golden Ticket

Every single one of those frustrations is something that our team has managed to solve. Our approach, initially built on my previous background as an English major and a writing instructor, has always been to dive deep into each client, industry, and topic. We try to understand what makes a specific group of people tick on a deep emotional level, and our analysis reflects that.

When I first found SparkToro around a year ago, it fit into my existing process with no friction. SparkToro’s audience insights simply allowed me to perform the same research faster and at scale. The only thing I was missing for a while was the ability to analyze Reddit, and SparkToro’s team added that feature only a couple of months later.

Start with People

SparkToro is an audience research tool which, by definition, helps you analyze the people who you’re trying to reach. 

But I think this point is a lot more profound than that term suggests. When you’re analyzing the people who make up your audience, as opposed to search keywords, trending hashtags, or popular companies within your niche – you’re researching the complicated, ineffable, and frustrating world of messy human behavior. People will never give you simple answers like “these are the 5 words you should use to rank first on Google” or “plop your value proposition into this template to grow your Twitter following by 400%”. 

So when you look at SparkToro, remember that all of the pretty graphs, numbers, and results are there to help you analyze the people behind them. You won’t get most of SparkToro’s value if you never leave its interface or simply export the results to a CSV file and then paste them into your project management system.

To truly benefit from SparkToro, you need to accept that researching people will require a lot of thinking, uncertainty, and spending time on dead ends. 

I don’t have a single “SparkToro workflow” because every time I open this software, I am expecting an adventure. Different data points will jump out at me from day to day or search to search. Different sections of their results will be useful depending on what I’m trying to do or the exact audience I’m analyzing.

My SparkToro workflow is always an attempt to find something unexpected and to back it up with some numbers when I’m asked to justify my decisions.

Locating Popular Content

If you’re running any type of content or competitive audit, you need to know what content is already popular and resonating with the people you’re trying to reach.

But here’s a problem: SEO tools and keyword traffic estimates are often lagging behind actual visitor behavior and can be quite inaccurate in their results. You can see a detailed breakdown of these issues in SparkToro’s own report on the topic. Because of these inaccuracies, I don’t really trust most of those tools to locate popular content.

Instead, I’ve developed a way to use SparkToro for locating popular and well-performing content on a given topic.

Why Keyword Research Isn’t Helpful

For instance, if I am trying to determine popular topics about data analytics, I can take a well-known company in that industry (such as Snowflake) and then run a keyword analysis on that site using an SEO tool (here I’m using a Chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere):

A screenshot from Keywords Everywhere showing top ranking keywords for the website www.snowflake.com

As with most searches on specific company sites, many of their top performing keywords are branded (“Snowflake”, “Snowflake stock”, etc.). This isn’t particularly useful for me if I’m trying to devise a strategy for a client who is Snowflake’s direct competitor.

I do get certain non-branded phrases, such as “etl” or “data pipeline”, and this is where most common SEO tactics would tell you to go. You could pair one of those keywords with common long-tail combinations, such as these recommendations from Keywords Everywhere:

Screenshot from Keywords Everywhere showing keyword ideas and long-tail variations for “etl”

But are these keywords actually that popular? If I look at the actual Google search results for “etl”, all I see are definitions of this term:

Google Search results for the query “etl”

It’s pretty hard to produce an original or improved definition for a term that’s already been beaten to death by established players. And if you work mostly on blog articles and social media posts like we do at Kalyna, this keyword is completely useless.

How to Find Popular Content with SparkToro

What do I do instead to figure out what content is trending?

Run a SparkToro search for a specific competitor or search term (here we will be using Snowflake’s social account as our example).

A SparkToro search interface looking for people who follow Snowflake’s social media account

Find top sources within the “Websites” and “Social” sections of SparkToro’s results (I often filter for “Hidden Gems” or below a certain audience size to get rid of generic results like “Jeff Bezos”). Here I’m searching for sites and accounts with high relevance (via “Percent of Audience”) and still decent reach (via “Social Followers” or “Linking Websites”).

A sample of SparkToro’s search results showing some social media accounts followed by people who also follow Snowflake

In this example, I’d be curious to look at all of the accounts on the screenshot above.

Look at these accounts’ recent social activity and search for posts with high engagement. (If we’re looking at websites, I search for a “trending” or “popular” section on their blog). In this example, I found an interesting post that was retweeted by one of the accounts from our previous screenshot (Dr. Hassan Rashidi):

A sample tweet that I find interesting and would probably explore further

Sure, this post is by no means viral, but it has higher than average engagement compared to all of the other posts and accounts I just looked at and it’s directly relevant to my target topic (data analytics). I would use this both to look further into the terms used (“data contextualization” or “enterprise visibility”) or into the original source (HighByte and IIoT World).

Check Reddit results on SparkToro to find subReddit communities to analyze for top posts and links gaining traction.

A sample of subReddit results from SparkToro for people who follow Snowflake on social media

In this case, I could look at the “Top” posts for this week in the “data engineering” subReddit:

At the time of writing the first draft, these were top posts that week on r/dataengineering

Here I am immediately noticing that people are talking about “DBT Cloud support” and “Data Mesh”. I could look for these terms directly or go into the comments for these discussions to get further context and find links to content these users recommend.

Now that I’ve found some terms I want to research, I often run some Google searches and check what’s actually ranking right now:

Some search results when looking for “data mesh” on Google

The second result on this page is an article from 2020, and I can already tell that this is a rapidly changing industry topic. I could pitch a client to write about certain recent trends and changes since that 2020 article was published, and we could even link to it directly and compliment the creator for a potential amplification opportunity. I would also check what that site has been publishing since and what the writer has been posting about on their social media.

I can also go back to SparkToro and check the “Text Insights” tab for more relevant phrases, which I can then run further Google or social media searches for from within SparkToro’s interface:

Yes, you can launch Google searches for specific terms just by clicking on a button inside SparkToro!

How to Do Customer Research Without Interviews

For a lot of our work, I need to understand what resonates with a client’s target customer base. But how can I figure this out without speaking to them directly?

(Note: talking to members of your target audience will always be best. But sometimes you aren’t able to set up those conversations because of budget or time constraints. I also often try to do this research before setting up direct interviews.)

SparkToro lets you conduct a targeted audience audit with public online sources.

Find where your target audience goes online.

This is what the top part of your search results will look like in the “Overview” tab

Shortlist 3-5 links per category across: specific industry websites, media outlets (think TechCrunch for startup founders or DarkReading for cybersecurity professionals), forums (think Hacker News), discussion boards (subReddits), content creators (podcasts, YouTube channels, or individual social media accounts). SparkToro allows you to save all of these sources to a specific list that you can then access again as needed.

When you make a list in SparkToro, you can return to any results that you thought were worth saving in a convenient interface

Go through the sources you’ve found and look at their URL, searching for posts with the most engagement (places like LinkedIn, Reddit or YouTube give you direct statistics, with other sites look for the “popular” section or use another tool like BuzzSumo or SimilarWeb).

Isn’t it convenient when websites actually tell you what content is popular? I wish we could do that with Squarespace.

Deconstruct the style of those popular posts. Look at format (paragraph length, sentence style), word choice, argument structure (types of evidence used, sources referenced, types of arguments, how much detail supports each point), length, visuals. We have a public Notion template for conducting this type of in-depth content analysis.

A screenshot from our Notion template “Analyzing Competitor Content”

Deconstruct the topics of those popular posts. (You can also use SparkToro’s “Text Insights” section to get a bird’s eye view of these patterns.) Things I look for include:

• What do people find most compelling? 

• Search for topics people get emotional about (ranting about negative things or getting really excited and raving about positive things)

• Indicators of change (discussions of trends, recent updates, questions about changes)

• References to other discussions on other platforms (whenever people reference a blog or a newsletter to make their point you should go and check out that original source).

Use all of this analysis to compare those posts against your own or those of your top competitors. If there are style or topic differences, can you justify your choices beyond "that's how we like it"?

Use SparkToro’s data and analyze the sources within those results to make content which will make your readers say that you read their mind… even if you never talked to them.

Further Watching: A WalkThrough of My Content Audit Methodology

If you want to see what all of this actually looks like (including all of the confusion, frustration, and dead end searches), I made an accompanying video walking through the “best practices” SEO analysis and then my preferred audience analysis framework (with SparkToro) that you can watch here:

Always Add Context

The best way I can describe my workflow and how it’s different from what most marketers do is this: SparkToro helps me add context and focus on analyzing the people behind those numbers. I don’t take anything for granted (including Google search rankings or supposed “top websites” lists) and instead I try to see what the real people in my target audiences actually want to talk about (and how!). 

This way of exploring audience data is frustrating, but it’s much more rewarding. And if you’re trying to create truly unique content with a strong point of view, this is the best way to do so.

Learn about the SparkToro guide series by checking out the introduction or learning about more use cases for SparkToro’s data.