A full SparkToro Review - can this tool really disrupt any marketer’s life?

By: Arik Marmorstein, Spectroomz founder

Spectroomz lets you and your team hire an online researcher so you can focus on where your skills are most impactful and get data-based decisions.

This is a full review of the new trending audience intelligence tool, SparkToro. I recently also reviewed the trending email marketing tool ConvertKit.

Contents:

1. What is SparkToro

2. What can you use it for

3. Features and product overview

4. Pricing

5. SparkToro alternatives 

6. Do I recommend SparkToro?

   
   
   
   
   

This post also includes links to relevant hyper-practical guides: 

• How to do influencer marketing. 

• How to do your own PR. 

• A guide to podcast marketing. 

  
  
  

Let’s start. 

SparkToro is an “audience intelligence” (or market research) tool that enables you to know your audience’s interests, behavior, and demographics better. You can learn who they follow on social media, what websites they visit, which podcasts they listen to, as well as additional valuable audience insights. I think it could be especially helpful to influencer marketers, but also for PR, SEO, content and performance marketers, as I will explain further below.

The company was founded by Rand Fishkin, who previously founded Moz, and his co founder Casey Henry. I recently discovered it through ExplodingTopics.

Content marketing and SEO professionals 

As a content marketer or an SEO professional, SparkToro will enable you to learn where to publish your content (either through backlinks or guest posts). You can use Google and different SEO tools as well, but it looks like SparkToro will help you prioritize your outreach faster, and tailor it to your audience. 

Digital marketing professionals and social media marketers 

As a social media marketer, SparkToro will enable you to learn where to invest your budget and how to target your audience. Here’s a short story to exemplify how. Several years ago I wanted to advertise a product to runners on Facebook, but I didn’t have any customer data (emails, phone numbers, pixel data) to build a lookalike audience with (a lookalike audience is a broader audience Facebook builds for you based on a ‘seed data’ you provide such as a current customer list). Now, anyone who advertised on Facebook knows that targeting your ads based on interest, page likes, etc. is usually expansive and inefficient. 

I hired a freelancer who got me 100 Twitter followers’ emails of 3 running-related companies. That’s a very small, general seed which usually doesn’t provide good results (a follower ≠ a buyer). Then I built a custom audience based on this seed (not a lookalike since it’s too small), and went to check that audience on Facebook’s audience insights tool, which gives you demographic and interest insights of different groups based on their likes and interest. I learned which pages my audience likes + its demographic, and advertised my service only based on that. The results were amazing, plain, and simple. 

So why not do that? Because Facebook doesn’t allow it anymore. You cannot see insights on your audiences. This is a void SparkToro can fill for social media marketers. 

PR professionals and entrepreneurs 

SparkToro can help you target the publications your audience is exposed to. Also, entrepreneurs who get their own media coverage can save a lot of time figuring which publications to pitch to. 

Influencer marketing professionals 

This is probably the strongest use case. Influencer’s marketing managers/agencies spend a lot of time scouting for the right influencers, understanding their audience, their engagement, and more. SparkToro can help with that as well. This is actaully a great influencer intelligence tool.

Audience intelligence: 

You start with your input -  which audience are you targeting. You can target people based on interest, words in their profile, social accounts they follow, websites they visit, or hashtags they use. 

For the sake of example, I was looking for people who frequently use the hashtag #ActuallyAutistic.

Social output:

You can see the top social accounts (with Twitter focus) the audience you are targeting is following. In this example below, you can see that 27% of my target audience is following Neurodivergent Rebel. If I want to use influencer’s marketing, reaching out to her would make sense. You can also see the SparkToro score, which is the level of the account’s reach relative to it’s following. It is basically the level of engagement of her followers with her content (RT, shares etc.). This is helpful for influencer marketing professionals. You can export it to CSV.

In addition, you can filter the results you get based on audience size, location, engagement, and whether to include “gems”, which are accounts with great engagement, but still relatively non-mainstream (again, influencer marketing opportunity here). 

Website output:

This output shows you a list of popular websites among my targeted audience. Interesting data and filters I have are the domain authority of that website and how many websites link it. This is valuable info for SEO and content marketers, as well as for PR professionals.

Podcast output:

Marketers can reach out to podcasts either to talk as guests (podcasters need interesting content) or to advertise (this is a guide to podcast advertising). In addition to the regular data, SparkToro shows you how many episodes this podcast has already published (it’s an indication to its audience size) as well as when was the last episode, which serves as an indication to how active it is and enables you to estimate when is the next advertising opportunity, which usually won’t be in the next episode (it takes time to prepare the ad + schedule it in the queue).

Youtube output:

You can see here leading Youtube channels that are followed and/or engaged by your audience.  This is great for influencer marketing professionals. You can see the number of subscribers of each channel, the average views per video (I would check the average of the last 10 videos and remove any anomalies since sometimes influencers or their clients promote a specific video), and when was the last video posted (so you can understand how active are they). I would also add the frequency of which they post (the more they post the less long-tail traffic you should get) and how many sponsored videos have they had so far (Makrwatch is a great tool that shows you some of this data).

Other audience insights:

This section shows you commonly used words by your audience on social media content and shares, common hashtags, and words in their bio. This can help marketers with their ads or content copywriting. In addition, you can see their location (city-level and state geographic distribution) and on which social networks they are most active compared to Twitter which is the benchmark of SparkToro. This of course can help with ad targeting, event planning, and more.

Compare audiences

This feature lets you compare two audiences. Let’s assume, for the sake of example, I decided to create shoes that are branded and adjusted to autistic adults (I don’t know if it even makes sense). This section can help you see:

The size of the relevant audiences and to what extent are they overlapping:

We can see there is a relatively very small overlap between the two (#ActuallyAutistic and #Runners). Using that feature, I can brainstorm and test which products make sense to promote to my audience. I can also see to what extent each audience’s behaviour is homogeneous (the more homogeneous an audience is, the easier it is to advertise to).

Top shared social account they follow and shared phrases in bio

This can help marketers target their ads, influencer marketing, and more based on common top shared social accounts the two audiences follow. SparkToro even lets you toggle between the overlap data to the distinctive data in case you want to broaden the audiences you target (on the account of relevance) or to exclude audiences.  The shared phrases can help you a lot with messaging your content/ads. 

Top shared websites and podcast

Top locations and hashtags used

Profile search

This section lets you dig deeper into the followers of specific social accounts or website. This can help content marketers, PR, and influencer marketing professionals prioritize their outreach. 

You can see the relative reach of the account (SparkScore), the level of engagement of its followers, and how active it is on a weekly and monthly basis. 

Additionally, you can see common words used in the bios of the account followers, as well as social media reach by platform. You can also see top websites visited by the followers of such account and commonly used words in shares of its following.  

Other social media accounts followed by the account’s following and location information are also available. 

The free plan lets you get to know SparkToro a little bit, as it provides you 10 searches/months. If you want to go premium, you have the monthly or yearly plan.

Monthly Plan

Yearly Plan

It’s definitely not cheap but what bothers me more here is that the basic plan doesn’t make sense at all. As a solo-preneur and marketer I can assure you that 100 searches/month is not nearly enough, it feels like it’s built to get you in the funnel towards another upgrade. In the basic plan a solo-preneur will pay $1.5/search while on the premium you’ll pay $0.6. That’s X2.5. This is a research tool and as such, it should enable you, well, research. For example, my SEO tool enables me to have 25 keywords queries/day (750/month). This is a limit that makes sense. Also, with Covid-19 financial implications, it would make sense to find a friendlier pricing model or adjust the return.



I’m not familiar with a single platform that provides all these features, Rand Fishkin and Casey Henry have done a great job in my opinion. However, there are different tools that when combined can get you a lot of what’s provided by SparkToro. 

A combination of Facebook’s audience insights,  Klear, Makrwatch, and Ahrefs/Moz can get you a lot of what you get with SparkToro. If you are a full-stack marketer or your team does it’s own influencer marketing, PR, SEO, and more, you may be already paying for the functionality you get with SparkToro by using other tools.  Obviously, it’s more time-consuming and less convenient.

If you are an influencer marketer, or in a situation where you are doing performance marketing without a lot of prior data that can help with targeting, I would highly recommend SparkToro as it will save you time and money you would otherwise spend targeting the wrong audience. Pricing is less appealing for small startups, solo-preneurs, and marketing freelancers, so it’s more relevant to more established agencies or companies.