w/ Rand Fishkin of SparkToro
Do you feel like you're burning money at the altar of Facebook while Zuckerberg builds a VR empire? Are you earning break even ROAS, and hoping ad prices don't rise any further?
If you are, that's not uncommon.
In August, I was at Ecommerce Day in LA, and heard their keynote speaker say "Facebook and Google's entire business model is to take credit of sales that were already going to happen."
And then he convinced me that was true.
Joining us today with some unconventional wisdom on building a better marketing plan for your brand is Rand Fishkin.
Rand Fishkin is cofounder and CEO of SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software.
Rand's Bio: In 2018, Rand started SparkToro with Casey Henry and published, with Penguin/Random House, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World. Rand previously co-contributed to two books: Art of SEO, and Inbound Marketing & SEO. He’s been profiled in the Seattle Times, featured in Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, named to BusinessWeek’s 30 Under 30, written about in Newsweek, The Next Web, the Inc 500, and hundreds of other publications. He is, however, most proud of his prominent appearances in Geraldine’s first book, All Over the Place. Geraldine and Rand are also small investors in TinySeed Accelerator, LegUp, TeamSportz, Techstars Seattle and Backstage Capital.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
9/27/2022
Kurt Elster: Hello, my friends. Welcome back to The Unofficial Shopify Podcast. And I was wondering, do you ever feel like perhaps you’re burning money at the altar of Facebook while Zuckerberg builds his VR empire? Are you just breaking even? Is your ROAS just like one to one with your ad spend as you hope ad prices don’t rise any further, because if they do, now we’re gonna be at negative ROAS? Not something any of us want. If you’re feeling that way, it’s not uncommon. You’re certainly not the only one. And back in August, I was at E-Commerce Day in L.A., and I heard their keynote speaker. That’s just like an absolute lightbulb moment for me. He said, “Facebook and Google’s entire business model is to take credit of sales that were already going to happen.”
Sound Board Robot: Oh. My. God.
Kurt Elster: And then he proceeded to convince me that that was absolutely true. And so, joining us today with some unconventional wisdom on building a better marketing plan for your brand is none other than returning guest Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, makers of fine audience research software and general PR bigwig. He’s been profiled in the Seattle Times, featured in the Puget Sound Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, named to Business Week’s 30 Under 30, written about in Newsweek, The Next Web, the Inc 500, and hundreds of other publications. Not too shabby. I even heard he talked to Oprah.
Rand, welcome. Is this true? Do you know Oprah?
Rand Fishkin: No is probably the wrong word, but we were on her show once.
Kurt Elster: Wow. Did you meet Gail? Was Gail involved?
Rand Fishkin: I don’t think so. To be honest, I was not a regular viewer of the program, but they invited us on the show, and I was like, “Well, hey. We’ve been wanting to go see the Chicago Museum of Art, so if you could fly us in a day early we’ll come on your program.” And they kind of had this, “Wait a minute. No, no. We’re doing you a favor by having you on our program.” It’s like, “No, no. I’m doing you a favor by coming on the program. I’m not familiar with your show really.” So, yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, they called, and you were like, “Oprah who?”
Rand Fishkin: No. I mean, I had certainly heard of her. I knew that she was a popular daytime television host. But this was 2008. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: 2008. And what’s funny is like even-
Rand Fishkin: Which is I think, Kurt, where you got my bio from, I think you must have found an old SEOmoz bio from like 2010. When you were reading it off I was like, “Wow, I haven’t heard that stuff in 12 years.”
Kurt Elster: You know, I copied and pasted it from somewhere, but that was like 15 minutes ago. How could I possibly remember where it came from? I got too many tabs open.
Rand Fishkin: I do have an official bio if you want. I can send it to you later.
Kurt Elster: Oh, I will find and include your official bio in the show notes for people.
Rand Fishkin: No, no. You don’t need to do that. I’m just teasing you.
Kurt Elster: Oh. Okay, good.
Rand Fishkin: This is gonna be the vibe of this whole interview. I hope you’re ready.
Kurt Elster: I am absolutely prepared. Well, you know, how do I transition from Oprah back to ad spend? All right, so you did this talk at E-Com Day L.A. that really… that resonated with me because you agitated the pain here of like the current state of PPC ads. How do you see it? What was the breaking point for you where you’re like, look, someone has to speak the truth here?
Rand Fishkin: I mean, I think that plenty of folks have been speaking the truth for a long time, and my job is just to make that truth more accessible, more understandable, give it a memorable flow, so yeah, for a decade-plus, plenty of folks in the whatever, eCommerce spaces, in venture capital-backed software spaces, anyone who engages with the advertising ecosystem recognizes not that Google and Facebook exclusively take credit for sales that were already gonna happen, but that is their growth methodology, right?
I think they’ve reached the turning point in their businesses where it’s very difficult for them to create new incremental sales for nearly anyone. I don’t want to say everyone, but nearly anyone. And so, what they have to do now in order to grow their businesses at the rate that Wall Street wants to see is to start charging people and taking credit for sales that were already gonna happen.
And they can do this very effectively in two ways. One, on the attribution side, by essentially making it such that you cannot see or understand where and how people are flowing through the internet’s ecosystem. You can’t see that, “Oh, this customer actually visited my website three times previously in the past three months and they searched for my brand and then they saw some of my content on a guest article, and then they heard me on this podcast, and then they watched one of my YouTube videos. Oh, and then they searched for my product and clicked my PPC ad.” That sale was always gonna come to you. You were always gonna get that sale. But what happened is Google and Facebook said, “Hey, because of privacy concerns,” Apple too, right? Apple is getting huge into the advertising game. They’re probably gonna be the fourth largest ad platform in the U.S. within the next few years and might even overtake Amazon for the number three spot thanks to the privacy changes that they made. Privacy, I should put this in quotes, air quotes, right?
Because of these privacy changes, they’re able to hide referrer strings. Everything that comes to you looks like dark traffic. They won’t tell you when people have experienced your organic, your non-paid, non-advertised content on the web, and they do that under the guise of privacy, right? They say, “Hey, it’s not ethical, or legal, or it’s problematic if we show you that someone saw your content, your brand, your YouTube channel, whatever, before they came to your website. That’s not ethical.” The only thing that’s ethical is showing you whether they saw your ad.
Come on, man. We all know what’s happening, right? Essentially, Google and Facebook have said over the last 20 years CMOs, CEOs, boards of directors have become addicted to metrics that prove the value of marketing, that prove attribution, full channel attribution, so going on someone’s podcast, producing a YouTube clip, sending a tweet, posting on LinkedIn, getting highly engaged with Instagram post, that stuff cannot be tracked, and therefore we will not invest in it. But every Instagram ad you buy, every Facebook ad you buy, every ad you buy on Google, every ad you buy on the display network, those can be beautifully tracked. Those will show that everyone who bought your product engaged with something.
And what Google and Facebook have an incentive to do is to show the ad to the people who they were certain would already buy from you. Because that’s how they make themselves look good. And it’s really hard if you work at a company where your stock price, and your employees’ stock units are valued based on your growth, to not take an incentive like that and make the most of it.
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah. This seems… Hearing you explain it, it almost seems inevitable.
Rand Fishkin: Inevitable.
Kurt Elster: Years ago, it was the case that I could go, and I set up an online store, and I could buy ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, maybe even Amazon if I’m selling on Amazon, and I’d probably do pretty well. And on top of it, we got drunk on data-driven decision making because those things would come back and go, “Hey, here’s you put in a dollar, you got five dollars back.” I’ll do that again. I’ll do that all day.
Rand Fishkin: I’ll do that all day.
Kurt Elster: And then over time, everybody figures it out. And then we start noticing like, “Well, this attribution thing, wait a second. Klaviyo, Facebook and Google all say they took…” If I add up the attributed revenue they take it’s higher than my actual revenue. Well, wait a second. What’s going on there? So, which is right? And of course, the answer… Well, if any of them was touch point, which you had that example of what that, like the many touch points in a funnel, well, they all get a little bit of credit. Then they all take all credit.
But these are publicly traded companies that are doing this. And so, they are very much profit motivated to keep this going. And there’s only so many eyeballs on the internet, so what do they do?
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely. I think, so you’ve identified another part of the problem here, which is essentially that once the marketplace gets crowded enough with millions of advertisers for any given page that might load, for any given keyword that might get searched, for any given Facebook post that might get loaded, it’s really difficult for Facebook and Google to resist showing the ads that they feel confident are going to show up in someone’s attribution funnel. Whether it’s a view-through conversion, or a direct conversion, or a referral, doesn’t matter. That’s where the money is right now, and so of course that’s where they are going.
10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago for sure, the money was all in creating new incremental revenue. Today, that’s exploited. It’s filled. So, I’m not saying there’s no opportunity here. There’s brands, and we heard, you and I heard people at E-Commerce Day, like Vasa Martinez and others, talking about, “Hey, we did run some Instagram ads for a brand new brand. We did see a lift. We did see conversions and sales.” Okay, so that still exists. It’s just the minority, right? And it’s shrinking.
And so, what you have to do as a smart eCommerce business owner is recognize this reality and this truth and be ready to attribute a large portion of your sales not to what Google, Facebook, or any other reporting platform claim happens in the advertising funnel, but to your brand, your word of mouth, your organic content, your zero click content on social, right? Your native videos, your native tweets, and posts, and TikTok videos. Your appearances on podcasts. The discussion that people have around you. The PR and news items. All of that is contributing and it's invisible because no one has an incentive to show it to you.
In fact, the incentive is to hide it from you. Facebook and Google, and Amazon and Apple, don’t want you to find out that PR was a great investment. Because it doesn’t bring them any money.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. Organic SEO, all of these things that don’t require active investment to one of these ad companies, this ad tech, you’re right. It is deemphasized and disincentivized. And then we don’t have the attribution, and so we go, “Well, it didn’t work.”
Rand Fishkin: Right? And then you lobby the EU government, you lobby the U.S. government, you lobby the California government to convince them to write privacy laws that hide this data under the guise of, “Hey, this is whatever, a security risk, a privacy risk.” I’m not saying there aren’t some actual privacy issues, but most of the actual privacy, and fishing, and spam, and scam issues are very disconnected from, “Hey, can I see whether someone watched my YouTube video before they came to my website?” Sorry. That’s just not… That’s not where the privacy issue lies, especially not in an aggregated format.
Yeah, man. It’s tough going out there for a marketer. I think in order to compete you have to be willing to accept the truth that hard to measure or impossible to measure channels are probably providing the best ROI. And you just can’t prove it to yourself because these big tech monopolies aren’t gonna let you anymore.
Kurt Elster: All right. I’m with you. But it’s beginning to sound like a conspiracy theory.
Rand Fishkin: I feel like conspiracy… Conspiracy theories happen when there is belief without evidence. And that is not the case here, right? So, Kurt, let’s take a look at a bunch of examples. I have a bunch right here. So, here’s an example-
Kurt Elster: Hit me.
Rand Fishkin: A story about Procter & Gamble cutting $200 million in digital ad spend, reducing their reach from hundreds of thousands of websites and platforms to just a few thousand, and increasing the number of people who saw their ads and their sales by 10%. Wait, what?
Kurt Elster: How could that be?
Rand Fishkin: How can that be? Here’s another example. This is from the New York Times a few years ago. Chase had ads on 400,000 websites, then on just 5,000. Same results. Whoa. Wait a minute. Here’s one from Input. Uber wasted $100 million on useless digital ad campaigns. When they cut that spend, they saw the same number of conversions. What?
Kurt Elster: That’s damning.
Rand Fishkin: What’s happening? eBay. eBay cut off all, all their branded paid search advertising and saw a small lift. A small lift in sales. Here’s Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb. “What the pandemic showed is we can take marketing down to zero and still have 95% of the same traffic as the year before. We are not going to forget that lesson.”
Kurt Elster: Wow. So, zero dollar marketing and traffic essentially unchanged.
Rand Fishkin: So, this is what’s happening, right? There’s this… You know, you heard me tell this story, right? The parable of the pizzeria. And-
Kurt Elster: Let’s hear it, because I love it. I have tried to retell it and butcher it.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, so the short version, super short version here, right? So, a pizzeria owner, much like eCommerce owner, she’s like, “Hey, I want to get some more business,” so she hires three neighborhood scamps to pass out fliers. And you know, she’s a smart attribution focused marketer, so she gives one kid a green flier, one kid a red flier, one kid a white flier. They all have different codes on them. She sends them out in the neighborhood to distribute these fliers.
A month later, she looks and the kid who’s distributing the green flier is responsible for like 50% of all the new business. She’s like, “Oh my God, this is incredible.” All right, fire the other two. Kid, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it. Six months later, she talks to her accountant. The accountant is like, “Well, sales are up about 8%, but to be honest, profits are actually down a little bit because you’ve been giving all these discounts.” And the pizzeria owner is like, “Whoa, whoa, what the hell is going on here?”
So, she puts on a disguise, and she follows the kid out of the store in the morning with his fliers, and what does she see? The little scamp ducks into an alleyway right around the corner from the pizzeria and whenever he sees someone heading that way, he runs out of the alley and hands them a flier. And that’s exactly what Google and Facebook are doing. They have incredible knowledge of where people go on the web, what they’ve searched for, what they’ve visited, pages they’ve liked, this incredible database of zero-party data, first-party data, that they alone are allowed to have access to, right? The Facebook pixel is on every single website. The Google pixel is on every single website. Google and Facebook know. You don’t get to know.
And then they show your ads, right? They distribute that green flier to anyone who looks like they’re coming into your pizzeria.
Kurt Elster: And we see this with Google P Max ads, Performance Max, where it will always have a preference for spending your budget on branded search. Well, branded search was… You know where they were going. You. They were looking for you. But now I’m paying for it?
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. The only way Google can really justify branded search is blackmail. Oh, that’s a lot of nice traffic you’re getting there to your brand. Oh, it would be a shame if someone were to go ahead and outrank you for that for your own name. That’s essentially the Google model, right? It’s mafia but legal.
So, yeah, your second option is essentially to invest in channels that can show you long-term brand lift that you cannot prove. And this is very difficult for a lot of marketers and a lot of eCommerce owners because we have, to your point, over the last quarter century become addicted, addicted to the metrics proving somewhere in one of our ad platforms, or our reporting suites, our analytics software, that this conversion came from these places. And if you are willing to let go of that philosophy, you can have extraordinary results. And the way to measure it is the same way that advertising and marketing was measured in the 20th century, and that is to say, “Hey,” Coca-Cola, for example, it’s 1965 and Coca-Cola runs a big in-store promotion in all the major grocery stores in Cleveland but none in Akron or Cincinnati. And then they look, and they see, “Huh, all right. Same store sales in Cincinnati, in Cleveland, increased an additional 6% over Akron and Cleveland, which have very similar demographics and behaviors. Okay. We know that this is worth a 6% store-by-store lift. Let’s do some more of it.”
Or let’s not, right? It’s not worth it. Whatever the cost is. And hey, if you invest in six months of hard to measure content marketing, native social content, a video series, conference and events strategy, a PR strategy, a-
Kurt Elster: Podcast tour.
Rand Fishkin: A podcast tour. A co-marketing event. All these kinds of things. And you can see, “Okay, we would have predicted based on our historic growth, we were growing organically at about 2% month over month in terms of traffic and email subscribers,” and whatever your metrics are that kind of measure that top of funnel, middle funnel stuff. And then you look, and you go, “Hm. Gosh, since we started this strategy, over the last six months we’ve seen an 11% lift.” Okay, so this is worth a compound 6%. Wow. That can get us really far. If we’re able to keep this up the next 18 months, we’re gonna crush our targets without spending a dime on Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, whatever. Let’s do it.
Kurt Elster: So, I could still get data. I just don’t get the per-transaction attribution that I had in the past. I can still do things to try and segment and see these results, but I’m looking at it just bigger picture. We’re zooming out a little bit. It gets a little more general.
Rand Fishkin: That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. And some of the stuff, I’ll say that some of it is very frustrating to try and measure because if you try and measure it, you will almost certainly work yourself into apoplexy and paralysis because what’ll happen very often is that other things will interfere with your tracking, right? So, oh, hey, we’ve been doing whatever, our podcast series, and that’s been growing our organic and brand growth rate, our branded search traffic is up, our whatever direct and dark traffic are up. But we’re not sure if it’s all the podcast because we also got covered in this magazine. We also got covered, someone’s email list mentioned us, so we don’t know whether one of those was responsible for the other.
Oh, and even more frustrating, it turns out that mention that we got from that person’s popular email list was actually because they heard us on the podcast, so do we attribute that to the pod? I guess we do. It’s this kind of thing, right? This drives CMOs insane. And my only advice is you gotta let go. You gotta let go and I hate to say it, but since we were having a Star Wars conversation before the podcast started, use the force, Luke. Right? You have to trust your intuition. You know when something is resonating with people. You can see it in the emails that are coming in, people you have conversations with. They’re like, “Oh yeah, I heard you on this. Oh yeah, you got mentioned here. Oh yeah, this email list talked about you. Oh man, I saw you on this YouTube video the other day. Oh, I’ve been following you on Twitter for a few weeks.” It’s that kind of thing.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. You certainly hear, you get a feel and a sense for it.
Rand Fishkin: You get a feel.
Kurt Elster: And I’ll hear that from people who are on this show. They’ll go, “Oh, it was so great because we saw a lift and then a bunch of people reached out and said specifically hey, heard you on Kurt’s podcast.” Ah, okay. So, it’s like yeah, I only have attribution on a small sample, but I can infer what happened based on timing, right?
The attraction to ads is if I get the right… If I put in all the right inputs and I have the right audience, and placement, and messaging, and landing page, I get everything right, I can scale it by throwing more money at it. How do I do that here? How do I get that same ability to scale the successful things?
Rand Fishkin: There’s a bunch of ways, but the fundamental underlying concept is what I call the marketing flywheel. So, this is essentially like… And you can do this with advertising too. In fact, what you’re describing with ads is similar. So, the idea here is that you do a marketing thing, whatever that might be. The simplest, lightest thing is send a tweet, or post something to Facebook. Put something on Instagram. Take a photo of your product and upload it to Pinterest. Whatever. And then you try and amplify that thing’s reach so that it reaches more people than it would have just if you’d just posted it and left it alone. And then you try and build the audience around that, hopefully using your other channels, and reaching out to other people to help them see it and get in front of them. Maybe you’re doing email outreach. Maybe you’re mentioning people in your social post. Maybe you are inviting guests on your podcast and making little clips that they’re gonna go share on their own social channels, which will drive more people back.
It's all this kind of stuff. And the idea is that you’re turning the audience that you attract from other platforms, other people’s podcasts or YouTube channels, other social platforms, other people’s email newsletters, conferences and events, whatever it is, back to you, to your website, and hopefully capturing them either with an email, because they sign up for something. This is a lot of eCommerce retailers will do discounts, and newsletters, and all that kind of stuff. Or because you actually make a sale. A little less common with this type of touch but it can work.
And now the next time you do that same marketing thing, the impact is bigger because when it comes to amplify you have a bigger audience. You have more followers on social. You have a new connection. You have more email subscribers. You have more people who are organically visiting your website. You have more authority with Google, so you rank a little better in SEO. All of these things build on each other and you keep repeating this pattern, this process, over and over, building up this kind of muscle the same way you would at a gym, right? And at the apex of this I can tell you from experience, right? Back in my Moz years, I could hit publish on a blog post and tens of thousands of people would see it without me doing a single other marketing activity. Just the publish button. Because we built up this incredible flywheel, right? The strength of, “Hey, when Rand publishes something it’s good, and it goes out to all these email subscribers, those email subscribers share it on their social channel, those social channels get picked up by more people, Moz shares it on its social channel, Rand shares it on his.” Every time the flywheel completes, more and more people follow Rand and Moz and the people who share it, and more people subscribe to the email, and more people come to the blog, and Google likes the blog better.
It’s a beautiful recurring process that scales wonderfully. It’s just really hard to get started.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. That’s the catch is like step one is I have access to so many potential things that I could do. There are just limitless tools, limitless digital creativity at my fingertips, and that’s a problem. Now I’m stuck. I have paralysis by analysis.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, man.
Kurt Elster: And so, I need to get unstuck, and just getting started is the hard part. I just gotta try some things and I generally encourage people to go like, “All right, find the overlap of what you’re good at, what you like to do.” For me, I don’t love writing, but I do enjoy doing the podcast. And so, okay, that’s my thing. And like find whatever your thing is and then you try it. Get it out there. And you’re gonna be talking to yourself for six months. The first six months, nobody cares.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. No, it’s gonna feel-
Kurt Elster: You just have to accept that.
Rand Fishkin: It’s gonna feel so frustrating. You’re gonna be like, “This isn’t working. I’m not getting any results.” And I guarantee you that all the people who’ve been successful had exactly those same first six, nine, 12 months. And guess what? All your competitors, all their CMOs and CEOs were like, “Okay, you gotta stop this. It’s not working.”
Kurt Elster: I always use six months because I don’t want to discourage people, but I think the reality is it’s more like 12.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. It is. It is. I mean, there’s people who knock it out of the park in the first 90 days. That’s rare but it does happen. And then there’s folks who take a year, two years. I tell this story; I think I told this story in Lost and Founder. The first two-and-a-half years of the Moz blog I never broke 200, 300 visits to a post.
Kurt Elster: Oh, really?
Rand Fishkin: It was just a slog. I sucked. I was terrible at it. If I could get one link to one blog post, I was like, “Woo!” Cheering on my walk home to my crappy apartment that Geraldine was paying for because I couldn’t pay myself anything, so she was like paying our rent and all our bills. I mean, that was just the way of it. I think today what’s great is no one’s gonna fail that hard for that long because there’s just so much more information about how this stuff works, right? So, you can’t… If you’re creative and you have a good idea, and you’re good at execution, and you can find a community that cares about it, and it’s something that you really enjoy doing, you can almost certainly have success in 6 to 12 months. And success on a small scale, right? But you will see that progress. You’ll see that progress within your first like 20 episodes, or blog posts, or whatever, videos that you make for social, or YouTube posts. You will see it if you’re doing this stuff right.
I think the key is you have to have deep empathy for what your audience wants.
Kurt Elster: Aha. All right, so there’s the critical thing is knowing the audience.
Rand Fishkin: Absolutely.
Kurt Elster: That’s what I don’t like about PPC ads, is it really separates us from the audience. They’re no longer people. They’re a cohort and we don’t talk to them other than when you get a crappy drive-by comment on a post or ad. Your approach, much more conversational in nature when you’re doing this content marketing flywheel, so we need… Clearly, like the magic is we need to know our audience. Talk to me about that.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, man. I mean-
Kurt Elster: I’m sure you… 100% you know. You’ve got insights here.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Yeah. This is what I do all day every day, right? Audience research is what this new company, SparkToro, is all about. And so, a ton of what I spend my time doing is helping people understand their audiences through software, but also through… As much as I’d love to say, “Oh yeah, just SparkToro and you can do it.” No, no, no, no, no. The three methodologies that I recommend for everyone are interviews, surveys, and then data at scale through software, right? So, one-on-one conversations with just a few people in your field. I realize that can be scary for some folks. I know it’s tough. But you know, whatever. If you’re selling… If you’re Vasa and you’re selling Perfy, talk to the people who are going to whatever, Whole Foods, and buying the weird new beverages in a can, and be like, “Hey, yeah. What do you like? Why do you do this? What’s interesting?”
Go to those trade shows and talk to people who are buyers for stores, and stockers, and have that conversation. What’s going on in the field right now? What’s hot? What’s interesting? What’s changing? What has the pandemic done to store sales versus eCom? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? All those kinds of things. And get that. You want to get that sixth sense for like, “I know what’s happening. I know what the buzz is among this group of people and why they talk about Mountain Dew Sweet Lightning all the time.” Whatever it is.
You know, I want to know whether the Coca-Cola Dreamworld and pixel flavors, is it pixel flavors? I can’t remember. Whatever crazy crap they come out with-
Kurt Elster: That’s like galaxy… Yeah, they had really goofball flavors that were like, “This is our Gen Z play.”
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Like, “Ah, yes. My children want to drink space.”
Rand Fishkin: And it tastes like nothing, you know? But it doesn’t matter because the product’s marketing is so interesting. And when you have these conversations, you can turn the questions that you have at scale kind of like, “Okay, is it just this one weirdo that I talked to who felt that way? Or is it a lot of people?” And that’s what you can run a survey with, right? So, you can run surveys at scale, like across consumer groups, with like a Qualtrics or Survey Monkey, or hell, if you have an email list of a few hundred or a few thousand people, you can just survey them, right? And get these answers to these questions.
And then you try and validate this through software so you can be like, “Okay, my audience, whatever, follows this subreddit, or they pay attention to this social account, or they use these words in their bio. They describe themselves as whatever, interior designers, or outdoor enthusiasts, or fishermen,” whatever you’re selling to. And then you go get tons of data about like ah, okay, they follow these 500 people on social, and like 17% of them follow this particular account. You should probably subscribe to that account too, right? Listen to the sources of influence in your field. See what the buzz is. See what they’re talking about.
And then you can take that understanding, that deep understanding of your field, back to your content, your native social, your podcast, your video series, your event marketing, your co-marketing, your research, whatever you’re doing. You can take it back to your packaging. You can take it back to your positioning, how you describe your product, right? And when you speak their language and when you talk about the things that they have interest in but can’t find other places, that’s the money.
Kurt Elster: It’s interesting how a recurring theme in interviews with really successful marketers and brand operators is that the cornerstone of that success is we talk to people. Like, “Oh, you want the killer app? It’s phone.app. Try it.” You gotta call these people and actually have a conversation with someone. And then, miraculously, by asking your target market questions, you will begin to gain a greater understanding. You know, it doesn’t seem so crazy when you phrase it like that. But people are really resistant to it. I kind of like your idea of striking up a conversation with… This is like early step one, just strike up conversations with people shopping in public.
I have certainly asked people. I’ll go like, “This is weird, but I work in X industry. Could I just ask you about that?” And people love… They’re obviously interested. They’re there. I’ve never had someone have a bad reaction to it. I’ll just ask them a couple questions for five minutes. And then it’s interesting. You get a clear idea of motivations and what they see benefits as.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, I do this all the time. My first 18 months of SparkToro we didn’t have a product, so Casey and I, my co-founder and I, he was building the thing and all I was doing was just having conversation after conversation with people in our field who we thought were gonna be good customers for the product and learning about their frustrations. That, Kurt, that is actually where I kept hearing this whole return on ad spend problem. That’s what made me formulate this idea around the Google, and Facebook, and Apple, and Amazon sort of taking credit for all these sales. That’s where I first heard the parable of the pizzeria. All this stuff is not… These are not my ideas, right? They’re just, “Oh, man. That resonated with a lot of people. I heard that from this person. When we sent out a survey, yes, a ton of people said oh, attribution is a big reason why we don’t invest in sort of more organic types of flywheels. And we can’t prove to our boss or our team that a high percentage of our audience is paying attention to some particular source on the web.”
I was like, “Oh, damn. SparkToro needs to have a percent. Percent of audience. That’s the metric that matters most.” We need to show them 31% of interior designers in Canada listen to this podcast. That’s the thing they care about. That’s what they have to show in order to get investment. Okay, right? Now, that’s what we’re gonna go build. And your audience is the same, right? They have something they care about. The problem isn’t being solved by existing solutions, so you, if you can solve it, if you can talk about it, if you can make them feel good about it, if you can share the emotion that they’re having, my friend, you will build an audience. You will have sales.
Kurt Elster: That’s such a… Oh, I love that. I think that’s a great point to start to wrap things up on. Because it’s inspiring. It’s encouraging. You were talking about SparkToro and how the approach you’ve been pitching us this whole time is the one you used yourself. That’s some good dogfooding. Tell me about SparkToro.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah, so… All right, Kurt, so I’ve had a lot of practice trying to explain it over the last few years, and the one that I’ve found that really resonates with people is this version, which is essentially the absolute best way, the best way that you could possibly get information about your audience, your customers, is the following: You get all their home addresses, where they live physically, you learn lockpicking. You break into their house. You steal their phone. You get the phone’s unlock code. Then you go through, and you record every YouTube channel they subscribe to, every email newsletter they subscribe to, websites that they visit, things they search for in Google. You grab all the people that they follow on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, all the subreddits they’re subscribed to, all the TikToks they follow, all that information. And then you aggregate it together with the other 700 homes you’ve broken into.
Now, this is super illegal and deeply unethical, and you should not do it. I recommend this to no one. However, however, you know what’s crazy cool about the modern world and modern marketing? Is that tens of millions of people put this information publicly online. If you go visit my YouTube profile, you will see every channel I’m subscribed to and every comment I’ve ever left, right? Because it’s public. If you go to my Twitter account, you’ll see everyone I follow, everyone who follows me, every post I’ve ever sent, everyone who’s ever liked those posts. If you go to my Instagram, you’ll see everyone I follow. All this information is just publicly available. It’s a pain in the ass to go get. But you can. You can go crawl this information. You can do it manually yourself, right? Just by being like, “Okay, I’m gonna go find a bunch of whatever it is, electricians in Milwaukee, and I’m gonna see their profiles,” and there’s like, “Okay, I think I found 85 electricians in Milwaukee who have some sort of social presence. I’m gonna aggregate all their stuff together.” Oh, hey, look. This YouTube channel is really popular for electricians in Milwaukee. Cool. I’m gonna advertise against that. I’m gonna try and be a guest on there. I’m gonna learn from their posts. Whatever.
That takes months of work. Oh my God. So annoying. So, SparkToro is just that for the entire internet. Basically, you just go to SparkToro, and you say, “My audience,” and you choose one of those dropdowns. One of the dropdowns would be like follows this social account, or they frequently talk about this, frequently post about this subject, or they have these words in their bio, and then SparkToro will tell you, “Okay, we have 750 electricians in,” maybe Wisconsin, “and so, we can tell you that these are the aggregation of their demographics and their behaviors.
Kurt Elster: It’s essentially, it’s a database for describing and defining social media audiences.
Rand Fishkin: Very much so, right, so it’s like it’s social plus web, so it’s kind of… It’s a little bit overlappy, but yes, that’s exactly right. Essentially, we take these tens of millions, I think we have like 83 million public profiles in English. We’re only English language right now. And then you can search across them for anything that matches the criteria you’re interested in, and you can see whatever demographics, you can see behaviors, you can see what they follow, what they read, what they watch, which subreddits they’re subscribed to, which YouTube channels they subscribe to, who they follow on Twitter, and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and Instagram. All that info is in there.
Kurt Elster: And does this have a free trial?
Rand Fishkin: No. But it has a forever free account, so-
Kurt Elster: Oh. Even better.
Rand Fishkin: No credit card required. You don’t have to sign up for a trial. We’re not gonna charge you after 30 days if you forget. It’s just free, free, free. So, you can go play around with it, try it. There’s some complete free queries where you can see everything that’s in the product. You can run your own queries and sort of see samples of the data. If you’re like, “Oh, yeah, that’s super useful to me,” it is relatively inexpensive. It starts at 50 bucks a month, goes up from there, but what we did not want to do… There are folks in this space… In fact, Brandwatch has an awesome audience research tool that’s kind of like this, does not quite exactly the same thing, but similar things. But it's like you gotta get on the phone with a sales rep and pay like tens of thousands of dollars a year.
And we were like, “Oh, man. That sucks. We want to give this to small businesses, small agencies, consultants, folks who own an eCommerce shop.” That was kind of the goal. I’ve always been a small scale capitalism capitalist, like I love small businesses. I think big businesses and big monopolies… I’m not sure they’re totally good for the world. So, yeah.
Kurt Elster: I signed up just while you were talking about it. I signed up for SparkToro because you brilliantly have a register with Google button, which is my favorite thing ever. If I show up on a site for a free trial and it’s like I gotta type my first name in, that’s four characters. I don’t have that kind of time. But if I could just register with Google and get right into it, fabulous.
So, I did it. I stuck in Disney World. My wife has a Disney blog. And not only did this thing immediately give back a bunch of useful info, I knew it was right… This is really clever. It said like, “Here’s social accounts they follow most and here’s high engagement hidden gems.” And it said, “2.2% engage with Joe Rohde. Joe Rohde is retired. He was like their big creative director who built Animal Kingdom and did all these great things at the park, so I’m like I knew immediately that this was legit.
Rand Fishkin: Fascinating.
Kurt Elster: Because you made this Disney Parks deep cut reference.
Rand Fishkin: I mean, this is-
Kurt Elster: Within the audience.
Rand Fishkin: It’s one of those weird things where some of the data feels super obvious, right? If you know whatever, interior design world super well, or you know about electricians, or you know lots of stuff about the marketing world, or Disney World, you’ll be like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. This makes sense. This makes sense. This makes sense. This makes sense.” And then as you go down the list, you’ll be like, “Ooh, what is that? I don’t recognize that. I haven’t heard of that. I’m surprised about that.” And that information is often incredibly useful to folks.
But you know, sometimes people are even just like, “Hey, I know this is true, but I can’t prove it to my boss. I can’t prove to my boss that our audience pays attention to whatever YouTube channels, that they subscribe to podcasts, that they are not all whatever, men in their 50s,” and so you take that data and you’re like, “Hey, boss, team, client, let’s go.”
Kurt Elster: I love it. Final thing. Will you tell me about your book? Because I got a copy of it and I was flipping through it last weekend, and I was like, “This would be really helpful for some people.”
Rand Fishkin: I mean, it’s a little intense, but yes, so yeah, a lot of times when folks read it they’ll send me messages, which is really sweet and kind, but Lost and Founder is primarily about my first company, Moz, which I dropped out of college at 21 years old to start. The first five years were incredibly rough and rocky. You know, the book will take you through. I think the first chapter will take you through debt collectors knocking on my door, and near bankruptcy, and all that kind of shady stuff, and then it kind of talks about the rise of Moz. Moz became, for folks who might not have been around for it, became the leading SEO software provider for probably a period of four or five years, from about 2010 to 2015 or so. And then it was overtaken by several competitors.
And this book doesn’t pull any punches, so it kind of talks about the… Okay, here’s what it’s like being the CEO, and trying to raise venture capital, and trying to build a marketing engine, trying to build a software development team. Yeah, and then the pain of things like layoffs, depression, which I had a bad case of depression in 2014 and stepped down as the CEO of the company. I talk about staying on for a few more years and then kind of end the book with my departure from Moz.
So, it is definitely not an endorsement of the venture capital startup ecosystem, but if you are looking to learn more about what that’s really like and prepare yourself for that process, or if you’re trying to convince someone, a co-founder or whatever like, “Hey, maybe this isn’t for us,” it can help. I think a lot of folks have said the thing that they really took away from the book is the sense of not being alone in their struggles.
Kurt Elster: Yeah.
Rand Fishkin: Right? That-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, because everyone’s only posting their highlight reel on social media.
Rand Fishkin: Yes. This is not a highlight reel.
Kurt Elster: This full book that’s just like, “Here’s my honest experience.” Authenticity is the big buzzword these days. It was authentic. It was great.
Rand Fishkin: I think the weird thing for a lot of folks is from the outside, here’s this company that’s growing rapidly, got to like 50-plus million dollars in revenue, and tens of thousands of customers, and all these sort of from the outside good looking metrics, raised a ton of money, and yet inside it is not… And it never is. It is never the roses and champagne and accolades and, “Oh, we were crushing it every day.” No one has that experience, but everyone will tell you that’s their experience because the incentives of the venture capital world are you have to always look great. Because you’re always looking to attract the attention of who might fund your next round. Even if you’re just going to IPO, you have to get the investment banks and the bankers thinking, “This company looks incredible. There is no weakness whatsoever there. No vulnerabilities.”
Human beings aren’t that way, but companies and founders-
Kurt Elster: Yeah, that’s the dark truth.
Rand Fishkin: … like you have to present yourself that way, right?
Kurt Elster: It’s rough. Yeah. And so, it ends up… You end up with a lot of strange scenarios. Not you personally, but in-
Rand Fishkin: No, it’s true.
Kurt Elster: In general.
Rand Fishkin: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Rand Fishkin, I need to double down on my content marketing. I need to play with this SparkToro tool because I’m already fascinated by it. Unlimited free plan was how we phrased it?
Rand Fishkin: Yeah. Unlimited free plan. You can-
Kurt Elster: Unlimited free plan. SparkToro.com. Rand Fishkin, thank you so much.
Rand Fishkin: Kurt, thanks so much for having me, man. That was great.