SparkToro: Audience intelligence for content marketers

Published 23/04/2020
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If you’re a content marketer, you are likely familiar with the importance of audience intelligence in your overall marketing strategy. Not only do you need to know who your target audience is, but also what channels they use, what devices and formats they prefer to use to consume content and how they respond to different types of messaging. Well, this is where SparkToro comes in.
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SparkToro is a tool that allows content marketers to collect audience intelligence data effortlessly. It offers a variety of features that make it easy to get the information you need, including:


  • A database of over 1 billion online profiles, so you can easily find your target audience
  • The ability to research any topic and see which channels your audience is using to discuss it
  • Detailed demographic information on your audience, so you can segment them more effectively
  • And much more!


In short, SparkToro is marketed as a tool for content marketers who want to get the most out of their audience research.


It’s no small ambition, then, but how does the software stack up? Well, we've used it frequently and shared our thoughts on the platform below. 


Note - What follows is in this article is, as always, our honest opinion. No money has changed hands and there is absolutely no obligation for us to write anything. 


TL:DR


If you’re serious about developing a successful content marketing strategy, then you need to start using SparkToro today.


Audience intelligence is really, really important. 


We all agree that when it comes to content marketing, the more you know about your target audience, the better, right? You can create content that’s more relevant, engaging and valuable to your audience (and likely more successful) if you know what and who they engage with, and where they're consuming it.


Well, SparkToro claims to help marketers identify the people, the websites, the YouTube channels and the podcasts that are influencing your target audience. So you know where better to spend your efforts and your marketing bucks when it comes to creating content, outreach, advertising and more.


How does it work?


SparkToro takes the social accounts, websites, phrases and hashtags that you search for on the website, that are relevant to your target audience, and spits out an index of really useful, insightful information about that audience, such as;-


  • Who do they follow?
  • What websites do they visit?
  • Which hashtags do they use?
  • What keywords do they use in their profiles?
  • What Podcasts do they listen to?
  • Which YouTube channels do they watch?


All of the information you gather can be exported and saved elsewhere, so you can access it at any time, and you can save specific results to lists directly on SparkToro too. This way you don’t have to keep performing the same searches over and over again. 


What did we do with it? 


To make everything a little clearer, it might be useful to show you one example of what we did with SparkToro, and why. 


A bit of context first, though. 


Converge is a publishing platform that allows B2B businesses to amplify their content effortlessly.


And, while our members publish content on our platform relating to a wide range of industries, the content Converge shares is nearly always to do with content marketing or content amplification. Our ideal members are also content marketers so, any time we can be speaking to content marketers about content amplification we consider that a win. 


For this example, we chose the ‘My Audience frequently talks about’ option from the ‘Audience Intelligence’ page drop down menu. The other options are: ‘My Audience uses these word(s) in their profile’, ‘My Audience follows the social account’, ‘My Audience frequently visits the website’ and ‘ My Audience frequently uses the hashtag’. 


The keyphrase we picked was - no surprises here - ‘content marketing’. 



After we typed it in and hit ‘Search’, SparkToro's database found 39,507 people that talk about content marketing and, below that, what this audience talks about online (including top words in their bios, top hashtags used, and frequently used phrases), what this audience follows, visits, and engages-with (including social accounts/websites they follow most and some high engagement, hidden gems), and what this audience watches, listens-to, and reads (including podcasts they listen to, press accounts they read and YouTube channels they subscribe to).



As you can imagine these sorts of results are gold dust, and they provided us with a ton of really useful data that we could use in our marketing plans. Oh, and SparkToro also shows you the percentage of people that engage with any particular account, website, podcast, etc. So, for example, we were told that 39.9% of the 64,374 people SparkToro found talking about content marketing follow the 'Content Marketing Institute'.


The frequently used hashtags was a great insight - as was the frequently used phrases - to let us know what else we can be tagging our social content and promotions with, and which phrases to target and build high-value content around. 


And - bonus - all this information was shared really, really fast. 


Why is all of this important to us? 


When it comes to creating content, we want to make sure that the content we’re creating will resonate with our target audience, and provide them with genuine value. By understanding which websites and media channels they frequent, we can get a better idea of the sort of content they’re after. 


It also provides us with a list of media channels to speak to about content collaborations, paid advertising or sponsorship opportunities. If we know that our target audience is engaging with these channels often, we know that getting visibility on them is a priority. 


We also don’t want to spend hours and hours finding all this information out manually, so having the tool do all the legwork for us, without any bias issues to worry about, is great. 


What’s our opinion? 


It’s safe to say that we liked the tool at launch, but we love it today. It continues to save us a lot of time finding the places our audience hang out and who they hang out with - the hidden gem feature showing "less famous" social accounts and people with high engagement levels is particularly nice. As such, we're now far more certain about the social profiles, websites, YouTube channels and podcasts we should be engaging with or marketing with. As well as some additional hashtags we could be adding to our social content. And that means we're a lot happier about where our marketing dollars are going.


Knowing who our audience likes to follow, and the websites they like to visit also gives us a better idea of the type of content they find valuable - which means we can spend our precious time creating stuff we are pretty sure is going to resonate with them (and then maybe share it on the websites SparkToro has highlighted for us, and invite the people our audience follow to contribute to it and maybe even share it).


It saves us time, points us in the right direction and helps us make better content and marketing decisions - how's that for a business case.


Will you find this product useful? 


We think if you say yes to any one of the questions below, you should find some value in this product and should, at the very least, sign up for the free account. If you say yes to two or more, you’ll definitely find value in it. 


  • Do you need to search for social media influencers, podcasts, or YouTube channels relating to your industry or niche for outreach and marketing/advertising purposes?
  • Do you want to know where and with whom your audience spend their time away from your website to better understand them and the content they’re looking for?
  • Do you want to better understand your client’s or competitor’s audiences and have the information shown to you in an easily digestible way? 
  • Do you want to save a ton of time when it comes to pulling together all of the above? Seriously. We mean hours of legwork. 


Let’s talk about the price. 


But what does all of this cost? As we all know, the actual price of anything is rarely the issue, it’s the value you get, or lack of value, from the thing you’re purchasing that makes something a good deal or expensive. 


Note - We can only talk about cost from our point of view, as a small content amplification company. So, while we will jump into each of the costs, bear in mind where we're coming from.



Tiers (monthly cost):


First of all, there is a freemium version of SparkToro, so any business can give this tool a try, but it is, understandably, restrictive. To get the most value from SparkToro, you’ll have to pay. Below are the most up-to-date options.


Free - $0 per month*

Starter - $50 per month*

Standard - $150 per month*

Premium - $300 per month*


*There are savings of 25% to be made if you purchase your plan annually rather than monthly.


The option most applicable to us is the 'Starter' option. And the absolute lowest we can expect to pay for that option over 12 months is $450, (if billed yearly) or $50 per month if we go for that option. 


Paying monthly costs more over 12 months, obviously, but gives you greater flexibility with payments. Especially if you don’t think you’d need access to SparkToro for the full year. 


We spend a lot of time creating content, so having a better understanding of the sort of content our audience wants and expects, as well as knowing which websites, podcasts and

YouTube channels we should look to guest post, appear on or advertise with, is hugely beneficial. 


You can spend a lot of time and money creating and promoting the wrong content, likely a lot more than $50 per month.


But would we need access 12 months at a time? Honestly, probably not. Instead, we’d likely turn the tap on and off for this type of tool. Paying for it for one or two months at a time when planning our content, outreach and advertising strategies, and then dipping back into it when needed throughout the year as well. 


In our opinion, paying for the year up front would be best for agencies and small businesses that deal with social media, content and advertising for multiple clients. If we offered a service like that, paying for this tool for the full year would be an absolute no-brainer.


We hope you’ve found this SparkToro review useful. If you’d like to check it out for yourself, just click the button below to visit their site and give it a try.

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