VP Marketing at SparkToro | Can keep hydrangeas alive in a vase for 10 days

I'm currently VP Marketing for audience research startup, SparkToro. I also co-host the Meme Team podcast, where Sonia Baschez and I discuss the marketing logic behind viral moments.

I've spoken at conferences like AdWorld, MozCon, and SaaStock. I've guest lectured at Columbia Business School, Cornell University, Stanford University, and University of Washington. In my spare time, I teach Content Marketing 201 which I host on Maven. I'm also a Le Cordon Bleu-trained chef, and a former journalist.

Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of my profile to see the top 100 lists that I am not in.

Amanda Natividad

If you need something uncontroversial to discuss with your relatives at Thanksgiving dinner... you could always talk about B2B sales.

VP Marketing at SparkToro | Originator of "Zero-Click Content"

Good news: you don’t need a 40-page audience research deck to pick your next content channel.

You can "guess and test" your way there. Here are two paths marketers can take:

1) Use tools (like SparkToro) to see where your audience actually hangs out

2) Or, when you don’t have budget/access, run a thoughtful guess-and-test experiment instead.

What “guess and test” looks like in practice:

Step 1: Make a reasonable guess.
In B2B, assuming your audience is on LinkedIn is usually a safe starting point.

Step 2: Start tiny.
Record a short, limited-series podcast in a meeting room. Spin up a short LinkedIn series. Run a scrappy webinar. Nothing that needs a studio or a 3-month plan.

Step 3: Watch for directional signals.
Are the right people engaging? Do guests/partners share it? Is sales hearing “I saw your post/podcast…” on calls?

Step 4: Decide.
If you see traction, then invest more deeply. If you don’t, kill it without guilt and try a different format or channel.

Your job isn’t to be perfectly right upfront. Your job is to learn quickly enough that you know where to be excellent. (Of course... a tool like SparkToro can help you do all this a heckuva lot faster. 🙃)

I recently joined Dreamdata's Attributed podcast where we got into how Dreamdata did exactly this with their podcast and other “un-attributable” stunts that still clearly moved the needle. Link below.

Rand Fishkin

Founder/Wizard of Moz

SparkToro CEO. Author of Lost & Founder. Feminist. I love underdogs, cooking, & helping people do better marketing

In 2018, I started SparkToro, software that makes audience research accessible to everyone. I'm also cofounder of indie game maker, Snackbar Studio, author of Lost and Founder: (2018), prev founded & led Moz (2001-17) and am a frequent keynote speaker on marketing and entrepreneurship. But, I'm probably best known as the amateur chef husband of renowned author, Geraldine DeRuiter.

Cofounder & CEO

I co-founded SparkToro (with Casey Henry) to enable high quality audience research for marketers, PR folks, entrepreneurs, and product builders without the need for expensive, time-consuming, inaccurate surveys or impossible-to-scale manual research.

I'm calling it. Britney Muller's post here yesterday is the most important short piece on AI you'll read this year. Why? 👇👇👇

Cofounder of SparkToro, Alertmouse, & Snackbar Studio. Author of Lost & Founder. Feminist. I love underdogs, cooking, & helping people do better marketing

The marketing "funnel" isn't dead, at least not from the perspective of site owners seeking an analogy of the business-side experience. BUT... if you're seeking analogies for buyer behavior, the funnel really doesn't work anymore.

IMO it's more like a pinball machine. Potential buyers bounce between sources of influence, researching, observing, asking, searching, and browsing before, after, and during the decision-making process. This week's new #5minutewhiteboard breaks down how this works (and hopefully convinces your boss/team/client to stop thinking of buyer journeys as linear, funnel-like processes) 👇

If you somehow missed our joint report with Datos, A Semrush Company from 2 weeks ago:
 - AI tools continue to grow
 - But they're not taking market share from traditional search
 - Zero-click searches continue to rise (based on this + the recent Pew study, I suspect we're now >2/3rds of Google searches ending without a click)
 - Gemini and ChatGPT appear to be the breakout winners in AI. The other LLMs' growth has stalled.
 - The EU continues to adopt AI faster than the US (still surprises me!)
Full report link below 👇

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The Battle

Amanda Natividad

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