I was graciously granted a week of premium access to hot new audience research tool SparkToro in exchange for this sincere review. I’ve been following this project for some time, so was stoked to get in there and take a look around premium level features.
This review is not paid aside from premium level access for a week, yay me!
Speaking of me, I’ve been a marketer for around 15 years, and am currently a Social Media Ads Strategist at a boutique digital marketing agency. I’m also a blogger so my look under the hood included evaluating content and audience opportunities for my blog, as well as taking a look at audiences for a handful of my current clients. So let’s get into it.
What is SparkToro?
From the “How SparkToro Works” video on their product page: “SparkToro is an audience intelligence tool that gathers billions of web and social profiles, aggregates them, and gives you the power to search across them… …for example if you want to reach players of Dungeons & Dragons, SparkToro can tell you a ton about what else this group follows, listens to, reads, watches, visits, and more.”
To note, this is a nine minute video so there’s obvs a lot more to it than this, but this was the quote that resonated most with me.
How did I test SparkToro?
Blog writer hat:
I searched for myself. Hahaha no seriously I did, and it spoke to my followers obsession with universal basic income (UBI¹). I was super active in digitally supporting pro-UBI presidential candidate Andrew Yang and my follower interests show it — my head started whirring thinking about the implications for this tool for political advertising, but I digress.
I then searched for another popular topic on my blog, breathing and cold water guru, Wim Hof. This revealed other interests of Wim fans, info I’ll likely use to improve the ‘read next’ section in articles about Wim.
Obviously people who follow Wim are going to be into health and wellness, but there’s an overlap with nutrition I haven’t tapped into yet. E.g., I’ll share nutrition content alongside my Wim content.
Social Ads Strategist Hat
For several of my clients I attempted to determine, “what interests should I target.”
Similar to what I did for Wim above, I ran my client’s social profiles through SparkToro, and I think what was most exciting is that there were several “why didn’t I see this before moments.” One of my clients has lots of fans who also like Etsy. This is an interest I can target on Facebook Ads which I haven’t hit yet.
Another client has a huge percentage of their clients visiting and following Realtor.com. Guess what, this client is not in the real estate industry, so I just unlocked a fabulous audience to target. But I can go further, I can use the overlap tool to see what people who follow Realtor.com and my client have in common, and boom, I’m getting new accounts and interests to follow, engage with and develop content for.
One of the things SparkToro claims to do is accelerate audience research. I’d say this claim is fair. I could see my agency running all clients through SparkToro to find key aspects of their audiences to target and create niche content for.
What could be improved?
I get the sense this tool was designed to be intuitive, reductive even which I love. I was able to get in, and start extracting actionable data in my first five minutes of use. I don’t have a lot to gripe about, but a hole I’m seeing for multinational clients especially, is the ability to exclude geos (e.g., geos they don’t ship to), on the flip it would be nice to get reports for multiple geos, but right now you can only select one geo (down to zip or city level which is actually pretty cool).
This isn’t a deal breaker, and most marketers I know break up campaigns by country any way, so excluding becomes moot.
Conclusion: SparkToro; Yay or Nay?
This marketer and writer gives it a resounding Yay!
Despite my “what could be improved” section above, we are literally only a week out from the SparkToro launch. Even in the days since I’ve created an account it appears that there’s been some UX and UI enhancements. Knowing the founders (who have been in tech and martech for some time), I doubt that this is a product that will stop improving.
The information I’ve extracted in a few short days will likely make my social ads campaigns more successful and my blog stickier. The free plan would be just enough for lite ongoing blog audience intel, but the basic level at 100 searches / month would likely be necessary at an agency.
I could see a lot of medium size companies and larger brands the types that sponsor podcasts and dip into influencer marketing will really benefit from SparkToro.
I can’t wait to see how this tool develops. I’m a fan.