Sparktoro – The Game-changing Data Collection Tool for eCommerce Brands
Being a marketing agency for eCommerce retailers, we often find ourselves creating marketing personas for our eCommerce clients. Creating personas helps us create targeted marketing campaigns that are relevant to the brand’s targeted audience. Now, if you’ve any experience in creating marketing personas, you’d know that it requires a lot of research and data analysis. Without this laborious research work, the personas created can be pure guesswork and don’t help in setting-up high-performing marketing campaigns.
While there are plenty of tools out there to create a persona document, there are very few research tools. We always wished there was a tool that could index the entire social media and give us a centralized place to research this data, and also give this data to us in a format that we can use.
Little did we know that Rand Fishkin – the SEO wizard and one of the founders at SEOMOZ (now known as Moz) was working on creating this exact same tool for the last few years – SparkToro. It has just been made public, and we were invited by Rand Fishkin to give it a try to see if it solves our data gathering problems.
So, with this quick post – we share our experience using Sparktoro. We hope this article helps our readers know about the applications of this tool and also share some of our candid thoughts on whether it’s worth the investment of $112 per month.
Enter Sparktoro
Sparktoro is a helpful tool for competitive research, persona building, or creating outreach lists. It gives brands more information about how their customers like to spend their time online or the kind of content that they engage with. It gives the user a lot of insight into their customer’s interests and interactions online.
If you’re selling a niche service or product, Sparktoro helps you to analyze your customer’s behavior within minutes and create an eff marketing strategy backed by data. The tool can save a lot of time for marketers when it comes to doing consumer research.
How to use it for your eCommerce brand’s audience
If you have an eCommerce brand, you might know that finding the right customers for your product while trying to understand where they engage, what they read, or listen to can be an incredibly time-consuming process. Also, you can’t always be sure about the accuracy of the search. Sparktoro’s audience intelligence technology helps pull aggregated data from tens and hundreds of social profiles which in turn helps to build connections with authentic and resourceful people.
For example, if you’re looking for people interested in “fitness”, Sparktoro will process profiles that match the criteria and extract the most commonly shared attributes of that group. You can also compare audiences based on what group you’ve selected to have better results. Sparktoro helps brands reach smaller niches which divulge more opportunities to market smarter than the competitor and avoid bad investments altogether.
What we liked about the tool
From our initial searches and experience, we were impressed with SparkToro. Its ability to define an audience by keyword, interests, and locations is great to get more in-depth information about the audience. Sparktoro’s fast aggregation of data saves a lot of time which is a great plus. Its feature where you can compare the behavior and results of two keywords is also something that can be of great help.
What we wish this tool had
Even though Sparktoro is a great tool, there were a few things that we wished the tool had to make the data gathering process more swift.
When we searched for house cleaning, the top results were of real estate companies. We understand the tool may not have enough data to make it that intelligent at this stage, but maybe a caveat on the search results can be helpful so that users have a realistic expectation.
We also wished there were different views in the below section that we could use depending on our objective: influencer marketing, cold emailing, link building, and networking. That would show us different data that would only be relevant to us and our search.
To wrap it up, Sparktoro exceeded our expectations. The data that the tool provides is almost impossible to get from any other SaaS tool that we’ve come across. It saves the user a remarkable amount of time and resources to gather the data. The feature where one can compare the audiences’ is particularly interesting and will come in very handy for CMO’s and other marketing professionals to make the right marketing decisions. All in all, we would recommend eCommerce brands to use Sparktoro.
