Digital marketing strategies tend to revolve around familiar platforms like Google Ads, LinkedIn campaigns, and Facebook retargeting. They’re reliable platforms with measurable outcomes you can assess for ROI. But are these commonly used strategies always the best choice? Is it possible that by stepping beyond the familiarity, you’ll discover opportunities that offer even better results?
On the Data-Driven Decisions podcast, we spoke to Rand Fishkin about his company, SparkToro, a tool that helps marketers find exactly where their audience spends time so they can be more strategic with their marketing efforts. Rand shares that by finding niche communities and channels that have high relevance to your specific audiences, you can break through the noise and build trust.
Invest your time and energy more efficiently
Gathering and analyzing data helps marketing teams direct their time, money and energy to where it will have the most value. This has been the key theme throughout our conversations on the Data-Driven Decisions podcast and our host and Managing Director Zontee Hou’s book, Data-Driven Personalization.
There’s nothing more important when it comes to planning marketing campaigns and strategies than audience insight – we need to know everything that we possibly can about our audience, their content consumption behaviors and their favorite platforms.
Rand shares that what SparkToro does is help you focus your marketing strategy on the right places. It gives users a picture of your target audience’s online habits – the websites they like to use, the types of podcasts they listen to, or the influencers they follow. Armed with that information, marketers can be more targeted in their efforts.
“There are hundreds of billions of dollars of spend focused on the channels that claim to prove that their ads worked, as opposed to where do our customers actually spend time? Where do they engage? Where do they learn about products and services? Where do they try and solve their problems? Those are places that are almost always underinvested in and that’s what SparkToro is trying to show you.”
Rand shared some great examples of SparkToro users who have seen success with this redirected approach.
For example, a podcaster wanted to drive more sponsorship revenue and sought out guests that reach the audience their sponsors wanted to be in front of. They used SparkToro to look for people who are influential in the space with popular X accounts or YouTube channels and reach out to invite them on as guests. Those influencers then brought their audience to the podcast, which attracted sponsors, and therefore revenue for the podcast.
Another example that Rand shared is an event organizer in the technology space who uses SparkToro to find event speakers with audiences that will attract sponsors that the organizer can reach out to.
Both are great examples of how you can use audience data more effectively than investing in the more common approach of broad paid advertisements. Why? Because they focus on where the audience is already. In both these examples, the data lets you target potential leads right at the beginning of their customer journeys rather than later on when they’re more likely to come across your competitors.
Relying too much on paid ads vs. understanding the broader customer journey
Rand shares that a common mistake that marketers make when thinking about data is to opt for channels that have a clear way to measure attribution and ROI rather than channels that are more relevant to your audience. For example, marketers may focus too much on Google Ad results when customers are hearing about the brand elsewhere first. Rand explained:
“A ton of what happens in Google is actually a response to something else. So, people who performed a search query in Google, very rarely was that a spontaneous first-touch thing. It was like, oh, I heard about this software, so I went to Google and searched for it and clicked on it. And of course, the attribution looks like Google drove all the value. No, Google was just the middleman.”
The tendency to rely on paid advertising, specifically on Google, Meta or LinkedIn, may be seen as a safer bet. It’s clear and measurable. You invest and then the platform tells you how that investment paid off. These metrics are both familiar and can be conveniently packaged into reports to present to stakeholders.
The danger here is relying too much on that method and ignoring other parts of the customer journey. When marketers focus exclusively on these ‘safe bets,’ it’s easy to fall into a pattern of optimizing for what’s easy to measure rather than exploring other areas that could prove more effective.
The reality is that your customers may hear about your solution or brand elsewhere and simply come to Google to find you. Regardless, if they click on a Google Ad, you may see that as a win for Google Ads when really, they were already an engaged lead using Google as a middleman. While the result might be the same, you can miss out by not exploring what happened before they came to Google and using that as a new avenue for your marketing.
For example, a new lead may have heard about a solution or service like yours mentioned on their favorite industry podcast or through a conversation at a conference. If you knew about those places your potential audience was before coming to Google, you could utilize those space for more strategic marketing. That one person who came to Google after a conference could have been five people instead if marketing had been focused on the conference instead of just Google Ads.
Investing in zero-click marketing to drive results
Rand shared a great example in the podcast about Chartr, a data storytelling company that decided to focus on a specific Reddit community for its marketing. “r/dataisbeautiful” is a subreddit where users post and discuss data visualizations. Chartr simply started posting data graphics with no real branding efforts or call-to-action. The goal was to engage the community – people who might be interested in the same kind of things Chartr was posting about.
The best part for its marketing team? It was both more effective and cheaper than investing in paid advertising.
This is a prime example of zero-click marketing, a term coined by Amanda Natividad, SparkToro’s VP of Marketing. This marketing method shifts the focus on to delivering value directly on the platforms your audience visits – without forcing them to click through to your website. By creating content that stands on its own, you can engage users where they already are.
Imagine sharing an insightful post on LinkedIn, creating a discussion-worthy infographic for Reddit, or publishing a video series on YouTube. The goal isn’t to drive users back to your site but to build credibility and recognition within the spaces where your audience already spends time. Over time, this strategy helps establish trust and loyalty, ensuring that when your audience needs a product or service, your brand is top of mind.
Aligning data strategy with your goal
Rand makes it clear that he’s not against paid advertising on social platforms and Google, he says that if it’s working for you, then great. But alternative avenues are worth exploring beyond the more traditional, broader approach.
“If you find spending money there is really valuable, don’t let me stop you. But if you think to yourself, the top 10% of spend that I do at those places is probably bringing me no incremental customers, which is almost always the case, maybe redirect that to some more creative, thoughtful and audience data-driven forms of marketing.”
His advice for managing your data strategy is to think about your primary goals and the problems you’re trying to solve.
For example, if you’re trying to gain a deep understanding of how people think about your product, surveys and customer interviews are your best bet. If you want to learn which specific websites your audience visits, those same surveys and interviews are probably going to lead to biased results, and that’s where a tool like SparkToro can help.
His parting message in his conversation with Zontee on the podcast is to be aware that the data doesn’t tell you everything. It can uncover a lot about your audience and help you direct your attention more effectively, but there’s also a great deal that the data misses.
“ I’m not saying don’t be data-informed, but I think it pays to be responsible in your recognition of what problems data can solve and what it can’t solve.”
Part of SparkToro’s strategy is to conduct regular customer interviews. These help to uncover new insights and ideas that data can’t really capture. For example, data might show you where people click within an app, but it doesn’t provide insights into what people who don’t use the app want or what they’re frustrated with. In that example, just looking at the in-app data and optimizing your strategy accordingly leaves you with a blind spot. Instead, by learning more about your wider customer base and their experiences, you can refocus your marketing efforts and business strategies.
Redefining Your Marketing Approach
Rand’s conversation is a key reminder that achieving better results in marketing isn’t just about chasing numbers; it’s about being strategic with your attention and investing it where it makes the most sense. Data alone won’t drive results unless you use it to inform your strategies and get closer to your audience by building meaningful connections with content.
Want to learn more from Rand Fishkin? Listen to his episode on our podcast Data-Driven Decisions.
And, for a deeper dive into the impact of data in marketing and business, check out the rest of our limited series featuring Zontee Hou in conversation with top leaders from organizations like Salesforce and IBM, exploring how data influences not just marketing strategies but also company culture and cross-functional collaboration. Learn more about Zontee’s book Data-Driven Personalization and get an exclusive discount here.
Catch all eight episodes here.
