Where to Find The Right Audiences for Your Brand Stories With Rand Fishkin

You can find over the past nine years and 516 episodes of The Business of Story brilliance from story artists around the world on how to tell a captivating brand and business story.

If you’ve followed their guidance, starting with the foundational story structure of the ABT (And, But, Therefore) narrative framework, then you’ve enjoyed greater engagement and conversion.

But even your best stories might be falling flat because knowing when, where and to whom you’re telling your story is as, if not more, important than he story itself.

Rand Fishkin, cofounder and CEO of SparkToro and author of Lost & Founder: A Painfully Honest Guide to the Startup World, shows you how to find your ideal audiences and how to deliver your stories in the way they want to receive them.

You may know Rand from his days leading Moz, but now he’s on a mission to democratize audience intelligence with a tool that bypasses the Google-Facebook duopoly.

He reveals how SparkToro sheds light on your ideal customer’s true interests—where they go, who they follow, and what actually drives their decisions—without costing you a fortune in ads or third-party research.

If you’re tired of digital marketing guesswork and want to make your storytelling truly resonate, then stay tuned as we explore how to find your audience before you try to move them. Because knowing who you’re talking to is half the storytelling battle.

What’s In It For You:

• Digital storytelling strategies are increasingly reliant on SEO for growth.
• How the Google/Facebook duopoly has strangled audience research.
• Why SparkToro is democratizing audience research and SEO.
• E-commerce trends reveal valuable insights into consumer behavior.
• The SparkToro brand story revealed through the StoryCycle Genie™
• AI tools should complement, not replace, human creativity.

Chapters:

Links:

• SparkToro
• Lost & Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World
• Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog
• Rand on Facebook
• Rand on Slideshare 
• Rand on Quora 
• Rand on Pinterest
• StoryCycle Genie™

Popular Related Episodes You’ll Love:

• How to Get Your Story Found Online with Mike Huber
• How to Reel In Your Audiences With Your Stories with Steve Multer
• Heroes: How to Understand Your Customers to Build a Tribe Chapter 2 of Brand Bewitchery

Your Storytelling Resources:

 

 

Connect with me:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/parkhowell/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/BusinessOfStory

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0ssjBuBiQjG9PHRgq4Fu6A

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ParkHowell

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/parkhowell/

Website: https://businessofstory.com/abt/

Transcript of Show:

Rand Fishkin Transcript

Park Howell (00:01.345)

Hello, Rand, welcome to the show. And you’re coming to one of my, from one of my all time favorite places, I grew up, Seattle, Washington. And you mentioned it’s spring there and beautiful the other day and rainy today. And that’s just the way goes in the Northwest. Did you grow up there?

Rand Fishkin (00:03.47)

Thanks for having me, Park. Good to be here.

Rand Fishkin (00:19.648)

For sure.

I did, yeah, actually I’ve never lived anywhere else. When I was very, very little, my parents had an apartment in New York, but yeah, only spent a few summers out there before they sold it.

Park Howell (00:35.369)

Yeah, so you’ve made your life and your home there in Seattle where a beautiful place to be. But I appreciate you being with us today because it occurred to me in the 517 shows we’ve done here over the last nine years when we are teaching people how to become better storytellers. One area we’ve never really focused on is your sweet spot. And that is, OK, I might be able to tell my story, but how do I know I’m telling it to the right audience?

where where do I find my audience and that’s your specialty.

Rand Fishkin (01:10.318)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s right. So we built a whole company around this, SparkToro, because my co-founder Casey and I had this big frustration of how do you figure out whether landscaping professionals in California are on Pinterest or Reddit or LinkedIn and what social accounts they follow and what YouTube channels they listen to, what podcasts they’re subscribing to, what websites they visit, what keywords they search for. All of that data was…

guesswork. And so we thought, hey, maybe there’s a way with some clever math and some good programming and some good data sources to actually make that transparent and available to anybody. You don’t need to hire a market research firm and pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars to do inaccurate surveys. People have on their profiles on the internet, they say what they are and who they are. They say what they care about.

Park Howell (02:05.153)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (02:06.764)

And then you can see their interactions. You see what they like, what they subscribe to, what they follow, what they link to, what they talk about. So we figured if you could index that data at scale, we would be able to provide an answer to this. And that’s what SparkTorrent does.

Park Howell (02:22.071)

So before, the past, I’m guessing you really, to get that kind of information, had to rely on Google and Facebook. I know you kind of talk about them as a duopoly that would get this and your spark Toro kind of doesn’t end around that. Is that right?

Rand Fishkin (02:39.682)

Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know Park, how, you know, how long you’ve been doing digital marketing. But if you remember like maybe 10, 15 years ago, you used to be able to log into, for example, your, your Facebook account and it would show you, a thing called, called Facebook insights. And it would tell you about the people who visited your page and what other pages they visited, what else they liked and subscribed, demographic details about the audience that was liking your page and interacting with your content.

Park Howell (02:56.211)

Right.

Rand Fishkin (03:09.886)

LinkedIn used to do similar. still have LinkedIn still has a little bit of that. So you can see some details about which posts people like and who they are. Reddit used to have data about that. Twitter used to offer data about that. All of them post Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2016. Almost all the social networks took that, that kind of data away. Google analytics is similar. It’s become a, you know, sort of a product for

analytics experts and has hidden a ton of the data that used to be available, including the keywords that send you traffic, right? Google took that away. Was that 2012, 13? So a lot of these kinds of pieces of information that used to be available are now hidden behind the scenes. And these tech monopolies are using that power to sell advertising. They’re basically saying, hey, entrepreneurs out there, hey, businesses.

Park Howell (03:48.79)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (04:06.112)

If you want data or if you want to show your ads to the right audiences, you’ve got to pay us. You can’t just do it yourself. There’s no way to figure it out and we’re not going to help you figure it out. In fact, we want to make it harder so that you have to give us money. And I guess that makes sense for their bottom line, but I think it sucks and I think it’s a problem worth solving.

Park Howell (04:24.087)

Well, and you’ve seen in news lately where people are claiming Zuckerberg are coming after ad agencies and basically saying you don’t need them anymore. Let just let Facebook do your thing for you because they control the kingdom of data. Yet you with Spark Toro somehow are able to go in and scrape that. That’s a horrible word. Harvested maybe is better, but.

Rand Fishkin (04:48.29)

Yeah, no, no, no. No, no, I kind of like scraping, right? I think that big tech companies scrape all day. All Google is is a scraper. It just scrapes the internet. They call it crawling and indexing, but it’s no different than scraping or stealing, right? Every AI company is just scraping the internet and stealing content. In fact, the big AI companies are indexing, well, indexing scraping.

Park Howell (04:57.089)

Mm-hmm.

Park Howell (05:16.791)

Thank you.

Rand Fishkin (05:16.97)

things that are private things like books and magazines and you know even even television shows transcripts that should be protected under copyright but the AI companies have managed to sort of avoid that so far and I think by Donating the right amounts of money to the right members of you know, the administration they’ve been able to avoid scrutiny and and you know Be above the law which which really sucks

Park Howell (05:37.78)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (05:46.764)

But I think, you know, this means that it’s up to us, right? It’s up to us founders and entrepreneurs to go figure out clever ways around this because look, Facebook, you know, Zuckerberg is not making a false claim. You can go to Facebook or Google and you can give them your advertising and marketing dollars and they will put your ads in front of people who are likely to become customers. But I would say two things about that. One,

a huge number of the people that they’re going to put your ads in front of that they’re going to charge you money to reach would have bought from you anyway. And they know that. And because those people would have bought from you anyway, it’s, it looks awesome in their data set, right? Like when they show you analytics and they say, Oh, you had 500 customers last month, 410 of them came from Facebook ads, meaning Facebook showed

your ad to them somewhere along their online journey. And that’s because Facebook has such reach across the internet and knows where everyone goes before they buy, and they’re able to show those ads. Would 390 of those 410 people have bought from you anyway? Yes, probably. Maybe Facebook is adding a marginal 20. Maybe it’s worth it for the amount you’re paying to get those marginal 20 new customers, but I don’t know.

I think for a ton of people, they turn off a bunch of their ads and they see performance stay very similar. That is pretty frustrating, but very few people are willing to test that. The second thing that I’d say about this is Facebook and Google’s incentive park is to make 99.99 cents for every $1 that you make, right? So they’re essentially trying to take all the margin out of everyone’s business.

and force them to put that towards advertising. That’s their whole business model, right? They’re sort of an extractive entity in this way and make it harder for you to have a good margin on your business. And they sort of want every other company in the world to be barely surviving profitable while they are intensely profitable and growing their own. That’s the way that advertising giants like them operate.

Park Howell (08:00.075)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (08:07.97)

Look, if you want better margins, you need to be able to invest in brand marketing and organic marketing and content and social and email and SEO and all of these alternative channels that don’t cost you 99 cents for every dollar you make. That’s the key to building a business that’s not completely reliant on these tech giants and won’t be put out of business when their ad prices go up.

Park Howell (08:35.479)

Mm hmm. What woke me up to it? You’re right in the heart of it. And I’m kind of jumping in and out of digital marketing and really understanding the ins and outs. Bob Hoffman, don’t know if you follow him, the ad contrarian out of San Francisco. One of the best emails out there, used to send them out about weekly, but now it’s sporadically. He wrote a terrific little book called Ad Scam. And it was from all of his research around the world of just

Rand Fishkin (08:48.757)

yeah, I’ve heard of him, yeah.

Park Howell (09:03.127)

very much of what you’re talking about there. And he claims an ad scam and then backs it up that only $3 out of every $100 you spend in digital marketing and Google and Facebook actually reaches an audience of interest for you. $3 out of 100. I mean, that’s amazing. Do you think that? Do you believe that?

Rand Fishkin (09:27.906)

Let’s see, I think if it’s rephrased, I probably agree with it, which is that I would say it would not surprise me to find that three dollars out of every hundred ads marginal new customers and new revenue that you otherwise wouldn’t have received anyway. One of my favorite examples of this part, which I’m sure you’ve seen tons of times, right, is you search for a brand in Google. You know, you go to Google and you search for, I don’t know, true value hardware.

And Google says to True Value Hardware, essentially like, that’s a nice brand you got there. It would be a shame if one of your competitors were to be ranking above you. You don’t want that to happen, right? You better pay us some protection money. And that, I’m born in New Jersey, so, know. There is no mobster who has ever extorted.

Park Howell (10:16.469)

That was one of the best mobsters I’ve heard in nine years. Nice work.

Rand Fishkin (10:24.234)

on the scale that Google extorts with brand advertising, right? They essentially say, someone comes to Google and searches for your brand. What they want is to go to your website. It’s very obvious. 99 times out of 100, they just want to go to your website and they search Google to make sure that they get to the right web address. And Google essentially is charging the equivalent of mafia protection money to make sure that

you have to pay for your own brand to be at the top of the search results. Otherwise they’ll put Lowe’s and Home Depot and five other home improvement stores above true value. true value, someone will have to scroll down to find true value in the results for a true value search. that, I think that’s dark and evil. think that, you know,

anybody with the soul and ethics would say, no, you’re not allowed to bid on your competitors brands or, you know, we’re going to put, you can bid all you want, but we’re always going to put the canonical website that we know people are going to, we’re always going to put that at the top. think that would be a reasonable and ethical thing to do. If I were a government entity, I would require that. Right. I would basically say, Hey, Google, you’re a monopoly. You own the internet. Guess what?

You need to put, when people are searching for something and you absolutely know that 99 out of 100, you got to put that at the top. think I wish the EU would do that with GDPR and stuff like that. Anyway, that aside, those dollars that True Value is spending to be at the top of the results for their own brand search, which many of you listeners are almost certainly paying Google to do as well, that’s adding no marginal value to your business. You’re paying that extortion money to Google.

simply to get customers you were already going to get. And Facebook is quite similar with a lot of their advertising practices, showing ads in places where they know people were going to already show up before they purchased your brand.

Park Howell (12:27.551)

Yeah. Now we’ll search get replaced by chat GPT and open AI. And the reason why I asked that is I was called last week about a speaking training gig out on the East Coast and did not know this client customer at all. And I asked him, how did you find me? It’s usually website SEO. And this was the first time they actually said chat GPT. We asked them who are the top three storytellers in this. And they were very specific of what they’re looking for. And I was happily.

Yeah, I was happy to hear that I showed up and I was curious then, does that all of a start becoming a thing and totally erodes Google’s search market?

Rand Fishkin (13:08.05)

I, I think it will take a small chunk of market share over the next five to 10 years. Yeah, absolutely. And I think it will probably take it in some sectors and spaces, but not others. and so it’s, you know, again, this is, this is one of the things that, that we believe is really important to help people with is you, you need to know whether your audience is using these tools more or less than average.

Park Howell (13:22.198)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (13:36.108)

are using them more or less than Google. For right now, we just looked at the data with our clickstream data provider Dados in, was that March of this year? And Google is still 373 times larger than ChatGBT is in terms of search volumes. So yeah, I mean, for every 374 people that come to you, one of them is going to come from ChatGBT, right? But could that…

Park Howell (13:52.31)

Yeah.

Yep.

Right, right.

Rand Fishkin (14:03.63)

That could be different in your sector, right? It might be one out of a hundred or even one out of 50. And next year could be one out of 25, depending on your sector. I looked at this recently for folks who are in retirement communities, for example. in retirement communities, AOL is still much, much more popular than chat GBT.

Park Howell (14:12.321)

Yeah.

Park Howell (14:29.569)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (14:31.126)

is often people’s homepage, right? Like if I go to my grandpa’s retirement community, a lot of people that, you know, have a computer there, like their homepage is still AOL. And because that’s what they got comfortable with, you know, 20 years ago and the AOL keeps marketing to them and serving them and, you know, providing software for those kinds of people. So you got to know your audience rather than looking at some, you know, the homepage of tech meme or hacker news and being like, chat GPT is going to

Take over Google. Slow your roll. Like make sure your audience is in that audience. I think this is, you know, one of the frustrations of any hype cycle. You know, like five years ago we would have been chatting about, gosh, is web three and sort of the world of crypto, is that going to take over Google? And 10 years ago we might’ve been chatting about whether, you know, Baidu was going to take over Google. And yeah, so.

Park Howell (15:06.433)

Yeah.

Park Howell (15:28.863)

Yeah. Well, and so far we’ve been talking pretty much about being found online, advertising, digital marketing and an SEO. But Spark Toro, correct me if I’m wrong, is about finding your audience online, using online to figure out where your audience is so you know how to directly target your storytelling to them. Is that fair enough?

Rand Fishkin (15:51.01)

Yeah, that’s it. That’s exactly right. Yeah. So the whole value proposition is essentially who is my audience and where are they and what are they doing? So, you you, you go to spark Toro and you might say something like, yeah, my audience is, you know, landscapers in Arizona or my audience is interior designers in California, or I’m trying to reach, heads of commercial real estate nationwide who, are helping people, you know, helping businesses choose which

real estate properties to invest in. And, SparkToro can tell you about all those different audiences and their demographics and behaviors, you know, gender, age, geographic distribution, job roles, titles, how much money they make on average, what words they use in their profiles, and then which websites they visit more or less than average, what social networks are they on, what search tools and AI tools are they using and how much, all those kinds of things.

Park Howell (16:49.961)

And you can get that purely by scraping the web of what people are happening here. Okay.

Rand Fishkin (16:54.07)

No, not entirely. not entirely. So, so we have, we have sort of four core data sources. Two of those are pretty directly scraping the rep, right? So we, we crawl, for example, is, is business a story on YouTube? Yeah. So I’m sure you’re in our index, right? And so we, we, we crawl YouTube and I think we have two and a half, three million channels from YouTube, maybe more. also crawl Spotify. We crawl Apple podcasts.

Park Howell (17:08.981)

Yes, yes we are. Yep.

Rand Fishkin (17:23.17)

And we build a big index of YouTube channels and podcasts. We also crawl the web and we build a big index of websites. And then we try and connect up which websites are connected to which podcasts and which YouTube channels. We, we buy data for LinkedIn, public LinkedIn profiles. we get that from lead fuse, which great company. We buy email data from hunter.io. We buy, Google search data. We could crawl it ourselves, but.

There’s a great company called Market Muse that we buy some Google data from. So essentially all the sites that rank for hundreds of millions of keywords in Google and which sites and all that. And then I think our secret sauce, although it’s not secret, I talk about it all the time, is a clickstream data provider. So clickstream, if you’re not familiar, Park, is basically, we buy from Datos, but similar web is a popular one, com score, Nielsen.

You remember the old Nielsen TV families from like the 1950s?

Park Howell (18:18.231)

God, Well, my agency, Park & Co, started in 95 and we are very much of a traditional agency. And so, yes, we relied on Nielsen heavily. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (18:29.74)

Yeah. Yeah. So Neil Nielsen has a division called net ratings and they use clickstream data as well. Collect clickstream data as well. And essentially what clickstream is for the internet is what Nielsen, you know, set top boxes were in the 1950s. So it’s, essentially people who’ve opted in and said like, can anonymously aggregate my data. And in exchange, you know, sometimes they get like, I don’t know, free HBO or they, you know, they get some

some sort of promotion of some kind, a payment, I don’t know what. And on all their devices, right, mobile and desktop, they are able to see every URL that their panelists visit in what order. So, you we know that you went to Facebook and then you browsed Rans page and then you went over to, you know, Business of Stories YouTube channel and you clicked on the…

Park Howell (18:58.849)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (19:24.568)

You know, the episode that he was on, and then you went to Spark Toro and then you tried the free version of Spark Toro. Like they can see that whole click stream for 10 million plus devices. And with that data, we’re able to build essentially we connect that up with the like LinkedIn profile data and the crawl data. And through math and code, we are able to like build this model of people who have these attributes.

visit these websites, listen to these podcasts, have these words and phrases in their bio or in these geographies. And that’s essentially how SparkTorah works. There’s nothing secret about it or magical. It’s just connecting data sources and making them, you know, presenting them logically.

Park Howell (20:06.646)

Mm-hmm.

So once they get to Spark Turo, then is that potential lead now not anonymous that you’ve been able to couple everything together? You know the stream is and it goes to LinkedIn and you say, well, that’s Park Howell’s LinkedIn page. We know this stream is Park Howell.

Rand Fishkin (20:18.615)

no.

Rand Fishkin (20:25.026)

Yeah. we, I guess technically on the backend, we would be able to see a bunch of public LinkedIn profiles that we’ve matched up for a, for a given thing, but we don’t expose any of that. And I guess technically that’s public data, right? Like if you’re LinkedIn, if you’re LinkedIn profile is private, we can’t see it. Like we’ll never know. But if you’re LinkedIn profile, which most are most are public, if Google can see it and you search, you know,

Park Howell (20:37.303)

Mm-hmm.

Park Howell (20:41.481)

Right, if you’re already out there.

Rand Fishkin (20:53.016)

Park Howell on Google and your LinkedIn profile comes up. That’s essentially exactly the same data that Spark Toro has. So it’s, it’s all public stuff, which is really good for us. Cause we don’t have to worry about personally identifiable information or, know, violating EU GDPR laws or California privacy laws or Canada’s privacy laws. Cause we’re essentially doing only what Google does only ever displaying publicly available information.

Park Howell (20:59.446)

Mm-hmm.

Park Howell (21:18.795)

Gotcha. Okay. So in a very self-serving move on my part, can we walk through how it works using our new story cycle Genie? We are just launching this AI tool and we have three specific audiences that we want to be talking to. you know, of course, without Spark Toro, I’m sitting here going, all right, so how do I find these people? I think I know where they are. I’m going to go to my local, you know, my core market, but then I need to go from there. But, you know, I’m going to do a lot of

Rand Fishkin (21:31.548)

cool.

Park Howell (21:48.535)

So, say for instance, our number one audience, it’s a very big group, it’s SMB, small to medium-sized businesses, typically doing under 10 million because I learned that 95 % of North American companies do 10 million or less in revenue. And so we want to democratize like you have. We want to democratize branding and make it very accessible that they can do it immediately. So,

Rand Fishkin (22:05.442)

Yeah. Yeah.

Park Howell (22:16.417)

How do I find in that gigantic market of SMBs the ideal customer for me to talk to for this launch using Spark Toro?

Rand Fishkin (22:28.32)

Yeah. Yeah. Great question. So, so before you use Spark Toro Park, my recommendation would be to choose a smaller, tighter niche audience. I think unfortunately too many business owners get this idea, probably from venture capital world, that they’re supposed to target a giant audience. And that’s a terrible, terrible idea. Unless you need to be a billion dollar company and you’ve raised tens of millions of dollars and you you’ve got to grow fast enough.

Park Howell (22:49.239)

You’re right.

Rand Fishkin (22:56.958)

I would strongly, strongly urge you to pick one particular niche. For example, if you told me that, hey, we’re going to serve CEOs and founders of small businesses that are running e-commerce companies in the United States. Okay. Now, now we’re like targeting a particular niche. And you know what the great part about that is? E-commerce founders have very different interests, very specific interests and needs.

Park Howell (23:13.185)

Perfect.

Rand Fishkin (23:24.556)

Versus other kinds of founders and so you can create content reports Videos you can interview people from that world that will attract the right audience as opposed to all SMBs Which you know, how are you gonna get the HVAC operator in Texas to care about the same thing? That the e-commerce founder in Seattle cares about that. They have almost no interest overlap and so

Park Howell (23:49.847)

other than my AC went out and I needed the HVAC guy to come and fix it. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Rand Fishkin (23:54.22)

Yeah, but the HVAC guy probably doesn’t need that because he’s already, he can fix it himself. Right. I say he only because I looked at HVAC business owners recently, and I think it’s like 90 plus percent are male in our data set. so statistically speaking, yeah, that’s who it is. But, you know, I think this is one, once you’ve identified those sub markets and you might say, Hey, Rand, I want to go after five different ones. That’s great too. Right. You could say, Hey, I’m going after.

Park Howell (24:06.507)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that doesn’t surprise me.

Park Howell (24:22.167)

But you want to really focus on each individual niche working with your tool.

Rand Fishkin (24:27.982)

Exactly, right? Because then you can go to SparkToro and you can describe that one specific audience. So for example, can I share my screen here? I think I can.

Park Howell (24:37.963)

Yeah, but we’re on audio. They’re not actually going to see the video. but we can we’ll bring it to life through our words. How about that?

Rand Fishkin (24:39.771)

we’re on audio. Okay, okay.

Rand Fishkin (24:45.398)

All right, sounds good. Yeah, so here’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna go to SparkToro and I’m gonna search for profile contains e-commerce founder in the United States.

Park Howell (24:55.871)

And hey, if you’re listening along and you got a laptop or something right there, go on the web and pull up Spark Toro and just do what Rand’s doing and let’s see what happens.

Rand Fishkin (24:59.32)

Yeah?

Rand Fishkin (25:03.456)

Exactly. It’s, easy, easy as pie. So, okay. So here we go. spark Toro has data on 10,000, approximately 10,000 accounts that contain the words e-commerce founder in their profile. That could be in their job title or role or their job description, on sites like LinkedIn, but potentially also Twitter or Instagram places like that. So then, spark Torah is showing me a breakdown of gender, a little nice pie chart here.

So it’s not surprising, a 72 % male, 26 % female, and 1 % non-binary or other. And then we’re looking at the social networks that they’re on. And in order from most to least popular, it’s YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, TikTok. That is not that far off of the average US.

web user. So e-commerce founders are not massively different in terms of their social network use. But now I’m going to scroll down to search and AI tools, which search and AI tools do they use in what order? And it goes Google, Bing, Wikipedia, Amazon, Reddit, ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the number six most popular platform, search and AI tool platform. And it is used 121 % more than average, more than the average American.

Park Howell (26:03.287)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (26:32.014)

by e-commerce founders. This particular group. it probably really does pay in the world where you’re targeting e-commerce founders to be visible and well-known in tools like ChatGPT. It also shows me that Claude and Perplexity are number 11 and 12. And those are both plus 63%, plus 57%. So those are popular as well.

Park Howell (26:33.771)

this particular group.

Park Howell (26:55.839)

Mm-hmm. Well, which not a surprise given their founders, their startup thinking people, and they’re in the e-commerce world. So they’re going to be more up to date. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (27:02.572)

Yep. Right. Technology world. Yeah. And then, and then you can see, you know, websites that they visit. So for example, WooCommerce.com has a very high affinity. Retaildive.com, DigitalCommerce360, eConsultancy. These are places that you could pitch, that you could advertise with, that you could, you could, your PR person could reach out and say, Hey, you should have Park on eConsultancy’s, you know, whatever podcast or YouTube channel or, Hey,

He could write a piece for you about storytelling for e-commerce founders. That could be a phenomenal win for reaching that specific audience. And this is what SparkToro is designed to do, right? Show you these opportunities in podcasts and YouTube channels and websites. And it also tells you topics that people are interested in. So one topic that’s quite interesting is effective branding. There’s a lot of interest in effective branding, affinity of 94.

Park Howell (27:56.993)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (28:01.346)

Digital marketing strategies is high using SEO for online growth is high. Sales trends in e-commerce is of deep interest. And so if you were able to sort of show the trends of what products are rising and falling, what people are buying and stopping buying online, maybe how things like tariffs are affecting e-commerce trends, that could be really interesting for this audience.

Park Howell (28:24.375)

Yeah, and then the Spark Toro provide insights on now what to do with this information. You’ve got this and what’s the next step? What do I do with this? I like, okay, great, Randy, you’ve given me all this great stuff. Now what do I do?

Rand Fishkin (28:37.814)

It’s funny, it’s funny you should ask. My co-founder and I were just on a call yesterday and we were chatting about this and the answer is mostly no. We give you the data and then leave you free to, you decide what this means and what you should do with it. Because the answer is really different for every different person. Like some people should go pitch podcasts and try to be a guest on those places. Some people should go.

Park Howell (28:46.358)

Mm-hmm.

Park Howell (28:54.625)

Gotcha.

Rand Fishkin (29:06.83)

pay Google to be advertisers on the right YouTube channels. Some people should look at the topics and keywords and make content. Some people should go to the bios that are, you know, the bio keywords that show up in LinkedIn and buy LinkedIn ads to appear for those. The answer is different for every different person, but we have started to see our customers do something quite interesting, which speaking of the AI topic, they basically are exporting

Spark Toro’s data. So just taking a giant export of all the data that the audience research report provides about a given audience. Then they upload it to ChatGPT or Claude. Claude tends to be quite popular with our customers in particular. And then they ask Claude or ChatGPT, hey, what recommendations do you have for me? And I am doing this. I’m trying to reach these people. My marketing channels are these ones.

based on this audience data, what can I do? Tell me about social media posts that I should put up. Tell me blog posts I should write. Tell me research that I should consider. Tell me what the topic of our next webinar should be. All those kinds of things. Tell me what our landing page testing headlines should be. And these AI tools give pretty crappy answers to that if you don’t give them any data.

Right? If you just say like, Hey, tell me what to do. You get very, very generic responses. But if you give the AI tool a lot of data, a lot of information about an audience, their answers get pretty good. I’ll be honest, I was quite skeptical about this. thought this was. I don’t know. A little pseudo sciency, right? Like I, I’ve always believed that AI is a little bit spicy auto complete. it’s just words that come after other words frequently on the internet, but.

Park Howell (30:59.072)

Mm-hmm

Rand Fishkin (31:03.086)

When I played with the results and I watched some of our customers do this, even my skeptical brain was impressed. so now I’m, Casey and I are thinking about whether we’re going to put this right into the product and give these recommendations inside the tool.

Park Howell (31:13.909)

Yeah.

Park Howell (31:21.367)

Well, I had that same trepidation about a year and a half ago when we started building our StoryCycle Genie thinking, could it really do that good of job working based on my P of the StoryCycle system that is very effective? It’s just, it takes a lot of work. Well, now you can boil that down in about 10 minutes and get all the same output. And I have been blown away by what it’s done. And I ran SparkTour through it, sent you and I’ll resend you that doc.

Rand Fishkin (31:36.076)

Yeah.

Park Howell (31:49.311)

And so as you were talking, I was just looking through the OO exercise we call it, and that stands for organization offering and outcomes. And it gives you nine one word brand descriptors, kind of personality traits. And it, for your organization, it came up with from just simply reviewing your website, basically, transparent, rebellious, and authentic. And the rebellious I want to read to you, which I love,

This descriptor captures Spark Toro’s stance against the Google-Facebook duopoly and its mission to help marketers find alternatives. The company positions itself as challenging the status quo of digital marketing and offering a different path. Is that accurate?

Rand Fishkin (32:33.862)

I think that’s unfortunately extremely accurate. It’s interesting. Here’s what I think is great about it. Rebellious is not a word that we’ve used to self-describe. However, the reasoning models, yeah, the reasoning models, right? This is using the new 03 from ChachiPT.

Park Howell (32:38.263)

Unfortunately, but yeah.

Park Howell (32:52.161)

how you act.

Park Howell (32:59.415)

We are using cloud and you’d have to ask Sean Schroeder on that because he’s got he’s doing all the prompt engineering for us. So I’m not sure who he’s pulling that from.

Rand Fishkin (33:02.064)

you’re using cloud.

Rand Fishkin (33:07.318)

Yeah. Yeah. So, so yeah. So Claude, think this is why a lot of our customers like Claude as well is because it has a reasoning model. And so essentially rather than just looking for words that frequently come up or other words, it also tries to build associative language. so it sees, you know, it sees spark Toro frequently being talked about as challenging status quo, as fighting back against the duopoly, as giving data.

Park Howell (33:15.328)

Yeah.

Park Howell (33:24.407)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (33:34.19)

to people that Google and Facebook want to keep secret. And then it is building that word association to rebellious, which I actually kind of like that word, right? Yeah. No, who do you cheer for in Star Wars? It’s not the empire, it’s the rebellion.

Park Howell (33:44.629)

Well, you are rebellious. may, maybe you’re flinching from it a little bit. I don’t know, but I think it is what you do.

Yeah, yeah, exactly right. Well, then let me bounce off what it came up with your three character traits for your offering. What people experience while working with Spark Toro came up with illuminating, accessible and comprehensive. And for illuminating, for illuminating, for instance, it says the platform literally illuminates hidden audience behaviors and preferences that were previously in the dark.

It brings clarity to the murky world of audience research.

Rand Fishkin (34:28.167)

I like that description a lot, except I would say we do that figuratively, not literally. Yeah.

Park Howell (34:33.855)

Yeah, yeah. Well, that’s the beauty of it too with the the story cycle is as it comes out with the genie, then you can iterate on anything immediately in it. And it says, I hear you ran. OK, then how does this work for you? Yeah, good. And then once you’ve done all your iteration, have that flexibility, then it creates that foundational brand narrative that you can use, you know, of course, for all your marketing. And now the third category is outcomes. So the final.

Three descriptors are confidence, precision, and freedom.

Which one would you like me to read? Confidence, precision, or freedom?

Rand Fishkin (35:12.366)

I’m curious about the freedom one. Yeah, what is that? Tell me more there.

Park Howell (35:15.497)

It says the platform liberates marketers from over-reliance on Google and Facebook, giving them the freedom to explore alternative channels and approaches.

Rand Fishkin (35:26.648)

Huh, I love that. Yeah, think it’s a word I haven’t previously associated with our brand, but could be interesting to, I wonder, yeah, I wonder if it will resonate with our audience, but I think this is the beauty of, right, you get these suggestions and then they, what’s nice.

Park Howell (35:41.941)

Yeah. Well, what we found with the RAND, when people go through it, three major things happen to them. And this was kind of my learning too with the Genie. Number one, it validates what you’re already doing well. It’s like, yep, nailed it. Yep, so that means you are communicating it well on your website. It highlights the gaps and the missed opportunities. you’re like,

Well, it didn’t say anything about this and I go, well, because that’s not showing up in your marketing. So you might want to highlight that and do something about it. And then third, it gives you inspiration, different ways like freedom to think about your company and talk about it. So, and it even created a unique value proposition. Do you have a current, do you have a UVP right now?

Rand Fishkin (36:20.546)

Yeah, very interesting.

Rand Fishkin (36:29.102)

We have a strategic North Star, right? Essentially, who are we for and what do we do for them? And that is…

Park Howell (36:37.663)

We call that a purpose statement and it wrote one for you as well and maybe it pulled yours, but I’ll read both of them to you. The UVP it came up with after scanning everything, discover where your audience truly pays attention.

Rand Fishkin (36:52.809)

That’s very close to what we say on our homepage.

Park Howell (36:55.265)

So it may well have pulled that and then it goes, let’s jump down to the purpose statement here and just see how this lands with you. Spark Toro exists to help people do better marketing by illuminating the authentic sources of influence that shape any audiences, opinions and behaviors.

Rand Fishkin (37:15.935)

That is also almost literally taken from our mission, our core mission statement.

Park Howell (37:21.559)

Good, so that means you’re doing a good job of communicating that. If it’s coming through in this, sometimes, a lot of times, I’ll read the purpose statement, the UVP to a company and they’ll go, oh my God, that’s brilliant. And I’ll say, where did it pull that from? And he goes, we’ve never said that before, ever. But it’s the reasoning brought it together, right?

Rand Fishkin (37:42.732)

Yeah, yeah. So, think two things are probably true. One is some of it is the reasoning model, but a lot of it is essentially it looks across the web or across its corpus of data, which comes from the web. comes from, you know, digitally indexed books, all those kinds of things, and looks for mentions of the brand. And then looks at the words and phrases that appear around it in paragraphs and sentences and documents across the web. And then it tries to assemble all those.

Park Howell (38:06.88)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (38:11.342)

words and phrases and look for the ones that appear most frequently statistically, and then find the words and phrases through synonyms and knowledge graph matching to build a singular association. very frequently, you know what it’s great at? It’s great at summing up. So if there’s 50,000 documents on the web,

Park Howell (38:31.19)

Yes.

Rand Fishkin (38:35.276)

with mentions of your brand and what they do. And everyone’s used their own words to describe you. know, every podcast host describes you a little differently. Every time you’ve ever been mentioned in a social media post, someone says something a little different. What any of these AI tools are great at is summarizing the average of what people say about you. And that generally comes up. I will say this though, Park, one thing you have to be careful with all the AI tools is it is overly positive about you.

Park Howell (38:55.159)

Mm-hmm.

Park Howell (39:04.289)

Mm-hmm.

Rand Fishkin (39:04.736)

it tends to, know, it does not, if for example, let’s say you’re Tesla or something and people are saying terrible things about you all day, every day, and sort of, you know, lot of your media coverage is very negative. The AI models are trained not to show that unless specifically asked about it. So through the, the training, you know, fine tuning process, which a lot of human labor AI models have been

trained to show more positive stuff because people who use AI tools like that.

Park Howell (39:37.143)

That’s interesting, yeah. And I guess I’ve seen that too, because everything coming through on our reports are very positive. And I would imagine we can just use the Genie and say, okay, now tell me what are the hardcore. We actually have a tool, a story grading tool in it that is for free that you can put your website in and then put three of your competitors’ websites in it. And it’ll come back and it will grade you on a 14 point scale.

Rand Fishkin (39:44.45)

Very positive.

Park Howell (40:03.037)

on how well you are communicating and where your major problems are compared to your competition. So it does look at that negative side, but I think you’re right. I’ve seen it. It’s very positive. It’s very enabling. My emotional promise for it is enthralling because I’ve seen people use it and go, my God, this is like magic. And they do hear the good things about their brand and the process.

Rand Fishkin (40:28.14)

Yep, yep, absolutely. I think it just really pays and I want so much for people to understand how AI tools work. Just like when I was in the SEO world, I wanted people to understand how Google worked. I think that that understanding unfortunately is still really lacking. yeah, it’s frustrating.

Park Howell (40:48.789)

Yeah, well, so new. I mean, we’re pioneers in it.

Rand Fishkin (40:54.958)

I think we all get so much better at using these tools intelligently when we understand what they’re doing and what they’re not doing.

Park Howell (41:01.951)

Yeah, yeah, I think that’s a good point. it sounds like Spark Turo will be a beautiful product for us to be able to run the genie, you know, through your stuff so we could really understand our market, take those findings and then put it into our genie and say, OK, now you know everything about us. And the genie, by the way, will call out three primary audiences. Yours, came up with number one digital marketing agencies as being your number one. I don’t know if that is or not, but that’s what it came up with.

Set number two content marketers and SEO specialists and number three founders and product marketers

Rand Fishkin (41:38.254)

Yeah, I would say those are our three audiences. The SEO people, probably not so much, but content marketers for sure. Social media marketers, PRs is one of our big ones. agencies, yeah, totally, totally. Agencies and consultants, that’s probably 40 % of our audience.

Park Howell (41:43.99)

Yeah.

Park Howell (41:50.997)

Yeah. So then you would go in and tweak that, take SEO out and put something else in. So it worked for you. Yeah. Yeah.

And then it identified the four emotional drivers that you should consider as a brand to use to connect with these audiences in four categories, really. Challenges, frustrations, fears, and aspirations. So again, I’m assuming you could take this insight that Spark Toro would give us, and we say, okay, here’s where they are. Now create us a content campaign, and let’s say digital marketing agencies.

It listed four challenges for you, proving value to clients with concrete data, differentiating services in a crowded market, staying ahead of rapidly changing digital landscape, and balancing multiple client needs with limited resources. Is that what you’re solving for them?

Rand Fishkin (42:49.102)

Those are definitely some of the sub-challenges. I think at the very top for us sits, make me look good to my boss, team, or client.

Park Howell (42:58.485)

Yeah, then you would put that in there and say, okay, this is great, at the very, know, number one is make me look good. Then in frustrations, it said reliance on incomplete or outdated audience data, time wasted on ineffective outreach and campaigns, difficulty finding genuine influencers and publications, and limited visibility into audience behaviors across platforms.

Rand Fishkin (43:05.452)

Yeah, make me awkward.

Rand Fishkin (43:10.806)

Right?

Rand Fishkin (43:24.332)

Yeah, yeah. A couple of those are kind of saying the same thing, but I think that I think that’s absolutely correct. Right? Like, yeah, this is this is the core thing. So this is I mean, what’s great is, you know, you can, I think, take this sort of AI powered genie. And then if you give it audience data, my assumption would be it can it can get even better, right? And in potentially more detailed.

Park Howell (43:25.707)

Missing anything?

Park Howell (43:30.058)

Okay.

Park Howell (43:49.215)

Yeah, because while you guys know about the audience, we know about your brand. You put those two together, say, OK, now brand story speak to this particular audience. And here’s where they are here. Create a marketing plan based on what’s Mark Toro’s telling you. That sounds beautiful. I can’t wait to do that. Can’t wait to try it.

Rand Fishkin (44:06.508)

Yeah, yeah, I think. Yeah, I want to test it out. Sounds fun.

Park Howell (44:12.085)

Well, I really appreciate it Rand. Any last thoughts for our audience of even when you get this data in and you got to humanize it, this is I guess was my main question to wrap this thing up is how do you bring your own humanity to it to really understand how to connect with these people?

Rand Fishkin (44:30.616)

Yeah, I mean, think in my opinion, it is very important not to take the output from any AI tool or even Spark Toro and put it directly into your brand messaging, make it directly and exactly the content that you push and promote. It’s, look, we still live in a human world and you can see time and time again, if you look at the posts that you forward to your friends.

If you look at the things that you chat to each other on WhatsApp or text messaging, if you take a look at what is getting shared on any platform, LinkedIn or Reddit or YouTube or Facebook, it’s not created by AI. It’s still real people writing or blogging or talking or videoing themselves. It’s still real people.

Despite all the advancements that AI has made and how close it seems to real human beings. I think it’s a trap. It is a dangerous trap to think that the output an AI gives you is good enough to use untouched in your marketing materials, your brand, your headlines, your blog posts. That’s a danger. I would be yourself be weird and different.

Park Howell (45:49.259)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (45:54.968)

Be your strange, know, inimitable, inimitable self. Yeah, make mistakes, right? Be willing to say things that no one has said before. That’s, that novelty is something AI will never be able to do. It can only, it can only reason and build off of things that have been done and said before. So find some novelty, be an artist, be creative.

Park Howell (46:00.171)

That’s a great word,

Park Howell (46:08.108)

Yeah.

Park Howell (46:12.15)

you

Rand Fishkin (46:25.132)

That’s how you stand out from a bunch of unfortunately marketers and founders who are just gonna copy and paste.

Park Howell (46:32.161)

Well, Mark Schaeffer came out with this book Audacious a couple of months ago. And I don’t know if you’ve read that, but what a brilliant answer to AI. There it is. Yeah, yeah. I’ve had him. I’ve had him for. Yeah, Mark came on the show a couple of years ago. he’s fantastic. And he was on the show a couple of months ago, and I read through his book and I said, yeah, yep, that’s right, you know, and it’s.

Rand Fishkin (46:35.095)

Yeah!

Rand Fishkin (46:40.43)

I’m gonna look at this. got a copy right here. I’m holding it up for those of you who are listening. I did a review of it on LinkedIn actually. I found Mark to be such a lovely soul. My goodness. Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (47:00.654)

Yeah.

Park Howell (47:00.905)

It’s pulling crazy stunts. It’s being silly. It’s being uniquely human. A couple of weeks after that, into my horror, I posted a show graphic with a major, major typo in it. And one of my buddies, you know, hit me, punched me in the nose basically and said, dude, you completely misspelled this word. And I looked at it, I’d got inverted some letters. you know, Rand, I was embarrassed at first and I thought, nah, I’m just human.

It’s just it’s I screwed it up. well, they’ll know they know it came from Park and not some AI.

Rand Fishkin (47:35.066)

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there’s beauty in that. think, I think it’s absolutely okay. I’d much rather, I’d much rather find people and brands that occasionally make mistakes, but are real humans versus a brand that, you know, uses AI to write all their content and copy. doesn’t, you know, nobody’s, nobody’s reading those books either. There’s a lot of, you go to Amazon, you search, you’re going to find a lot of created by AI.

Park Howell (47:38.421)

Yeah. Yeah.

Park Howell (47:54.283)

Yeah.

Rand Fishkin (48:04.302)

Who cares?

Park Howell (48:04.905)

Yeah, who cares? But it can do a lot of important work for us like understanding our audience, but then it’s up to us to bring our own unique voice to that message.

Rand Fishkin (48:10.904)

Sure, absolutely.

Rand Fishkin (48:14.988)

Yeah, yeah, if what you’re looking for is an aggregation of collected intelligence, collected language, AI is perfect. That’s exactly what you’re looking for. Like, assemble everything everyone’s ever said about me and my brand, and then tell me things about that data. That’s what AI is doing. And it’s so useful for exactly that purpose. So I think that’s a great use case.

Park Howell (48:41.335)

Yeah, it’s really the ultimate word processor, isn’t it? You know, when it comes down to it.

Rand Fishkin (48:45.358)

Yeah, yeah. mean, if you think about what 10 years ago, 15 years ago, Google probably 15 years ago, Google came out with auto suggest. Do remember you started typing in Google and it would predict what thing you were searching for. And I remember being, you know, in a hotel on the Amalfi coast and I started typing into my laptop and because of the IP address, it knew where I was coming from. I started typing in it.

predicted the name of a local restaurant that I never would have been able to spell myself. And I thought, gosh, how did it know to predict? How did it know I was searching for that restaurant? because people like me, Americans who are traveling on the Amalfi Coast and staying at this hotel in this town often search for that restaurant after visiting these websites. There you go. What else is ChatGPT doing? It’s predictive intelligence based on previous behaviors.

And if that’s what you’re looking to aggregate, fantastic. And if you need to be novel and you need to stand out and you need to be creative and human, your brain is better than a thousand AI prompts.

Park Howell (49:51.389)

I love it. Well, thanks. Where can people find out more about you and Spark Taurus is SPA arcade T O R O dot com, right?

Rand Fishkin (50:00.664)

Yeah, yeah, that’s right, Spark Toro and my other company, we didn’t talk about it, but Snack Bar Studio. If folks are interested in video game. Yeah, yeah, we’re making an indie video game. That’s snackbarstudio.com. And I am most active on LinkedIn, where I’m Rand Fishkin and on Blue Sky, where I’m Rand Fish.

Park Howell (50:07.357)

That’s a gaming company, right? Building games?

Park Howell (50:21.215)

Rand, thank you so much. It’s always great to speak to a fellow Seattleite, even though I’ve been in Arizona longer than I lived in Seattle, but still love it up there. Thanks for being with us. Take care. Okay, hold tight till the death.

Rand Fishkin (50:32.066)

My pleasure, Park. Take care.

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