Audience identification is incredibly important for driving campaign success across a broad range of digital platforms. Our marketing agency understands how critical it is to have a deep understanding of each client’s audience in order to develop an effective strategy.
By taking the time to carefully define each client’s target audience, we’re able to identify unique SEO, display advertising, and marketing opportunities that would have otherwise gone ignored.
How do we ensure we’re capturing the exact audience our clients value the most? Our marketing agency uses a marketing research and audience intelligence tool called SparkToro as one of our primary resources. SparkToro is incredibly effective at defining audience segments and identifying opportunities.
What Is SparkToro and How Does It Work?
Thorough market research used to be a tedious task that took months to complete, often relying on surveys, interviews, and even assumptions and guessing to help build an audience persona.
SparkToro is helping to change that by offering sophisticated data sets to help marketers and agencies.
What It Is
SparkToro is an audience intelligence platform that allows marketing agencies to build target audiences to better understand what they watch, follow, and read online. The tool crawls billions of websites and social accounts worldwide, aggregating profiles and creating relationships between each one to highlight how they interact with the internet.
This type of granular data is invaluable to our Charlotte based digital agency and the clients we serve. This tool enables instant access to information that would have otherwise cost thousands of dollars to obtain.
How It Works
We use SparkToro to search each audience according to specific topics. For example, our team may consider the following to inform our audience development strategy:
- What does your audience talk about?
- What words do they use in their profiles?
- What social accounts do they follow?
- What websites do they visit?
- What hashtags do they use?
The Search Results
If, for instance, your target audience is commercial property managers, a quick search will reveal all the social accounts they follow, websites they visit, podcasts they listen to, and much more.
We can even take it a step further by identifying audience insights based on top keywords used in their bio, hashtags they use or follow, and topics they discuss online.
SparkToro is an incredibly powerful tool for capturing audience insights and empowering businesses to better tailor their marketing strategy. For us, it’s one of the most important tools we use when creating a comprehensive digital marketing campaign.
How We Use SparkToro
Audience intelligence gained through SparkToro can be used for a number of different applications. Below we discuss how our agency applies SparkToro to four different digital marketing scenarios:
SparkToro for Display Advertising
The success of display ads is making sure your ad appears in front of the right people at the right time and knowing when and where your audience exists.
Providers like Facebook and Google allow you to identify your target audience based on their online behaviors and interactions. By using the insights gained through SparkToro, we take our targeting one step further by also understanding the social accounts they follow, websites they visit, and topics they read about. These lists can then be used to create affinity audiences within the aforementioned ad-serving platforms.
This allows us to better target who we want and our placements by helping the ad platform choose. Not only is this more effective, but it also empowers display ad agencies and their clients to have more control over the audience targeting process.
SparkToro for Social Media
Thanks to SparkToro’s ability to identify what social media accounts your audience follows, we now know which accounts your company needs to follow and engage with online. This is extremely helpful for social media marketing agencies. We use this data to inform our social media engagement strategy. For example, by identifying the accounts our clients’ target audience like, we can comment, like, and engage with fellow followers when these pages post new content. We can then use these accounts to tag them in our posts and increase our reach.
Not only great for engagement and reach, we can also use these accounts to inform our content strategy by seeing what types of content these pages post and which topics get the highest engagement. Our team can also identify any popular hashtags used within the target audience and begin incorporating them into our content creation strategy.
SparkToro for SEO
There are a few different ways in which SparkToro allows SEO Agencies to gain a competitive advantage with their campaign strategy.
One method is through topic list creation: Since we know which websites the target audience frequents, we can use these sites to understand their top pages, top linked-to content, and identify any gaps in content coverage that our clients could easily fill.
We then plug this information into a tool like ahrefs to gain a deeper understanding of these website and the specific terms and phrases for which they rank. This is how we generate content topic lists so we create content that is proven to be linkable, shareable, and relevant to the target audience.
An alternative method is through target link building: SparkToro can be used to identify the publications our audience reads the most, which allows us to identify link-building opportunities. By working to establish a relationship with the publications your audience is already reading, you’ll be able to improve your SEO performance by building relationships with these publications for potential future linking opportunities.
Not only that, but you can identify these publications for future content contribution opportunities that further build brand identity and authority.
SparkToro for Advertising Outlets
SparkToro also allows us to use the information gained about our audience to identify potential places to advertise content. One way we achieve this is through influencer campaigns: By targeting the influencer accounts that our audience follows, we can build a relationship with them to get content placed on their feeds and direct users back to our clients’ pages.
Alternatively, we can leverage SparkToro to detect ad placement opportunities. We can identify the platforms that your target audience uses the most to better understand which platforms we should pursue for ad placement. Then, we can see if these platforms allow sponsored or direct advertising.
We gain a competitive advantage for our clients with Spark Toro
SparkToro is an excellent tool to use to better understand your target audience. It allows our marketing agency to develop impactful audience segments, bringing tremendous value to our campaigns and client relationships. It’s important to understand, however, that SparkToro is not a standalone tool: Rather, it should complement a number of tools used to power digital campaign success. For the best campaign results, it’s always best to consult with an experienced marketing agency that has access to the latest audience intelligence and market research tools.
