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Digital Marketing in a Clickless, Attribution-Free World
124 Plays2 years ago
For many years, marketers have leaned hard into data for information and insight about how people interact with different activities.
But the landscape has dramatically changed.
A lot of digital marketing can't be tracked or attributed. People see content but never click, or they learn about products on the Dark Web.
Spark Toro CEO Rand Fishkin says marketers need to return to the days of creativity and ingenuity to attract and engage customers.
He says they need to make leaps of faith when making marketing decisions as opposed to depending on data to lead the way strategically and tactically.
It's an insightful conversation with someone who's been in the digital trenches for a long time.
Recommended
Transcript
Balancing Data and Creativity in Marketing
00:00:06
Speaker
For years, the marketing world has been dominated by data. Strategic and tactical decisions were made based on KPIs and data that provided insight into how prospects and customers were interacting with marketing.
00:00:21
Speaker
Data is important, but truth be told, marketing is a combination of art and science. While data delivers facts and figures, marketing is also driven by creativity, talking to customers, and sometimes doing things that simply feel right.
Challenges of Non-Data-Driven Marketing Activities
00:00:37
Speaker
Spark Toro, CEO of Rand Frischkin, is someone who has been articulating the importance and challenges of non-data activity at a time when attribution is becoming increasingly more difficult.
00:00:50
Speaker
If you read his post on the Spark Torah blog or LinkedIn, he's talking about and exploring topics that resonate with people who believe in the qualitative side of marketing. Welcome to Marketing Spark, Rand. Thanks for having me, Mark. Good to be here. How's that intro? Does that encapsulate sort of your view of the world these days?
00:01:10
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you definitely that attribution is getting much more difficult and yet the behavior of whatever you want to call them, executive teams and leadership teams has not yet come around to this idea that attribution might not be possible or reasonable as an expectation for marketers. I also think there's still a lot of marketers who are still, who are just kind of addicted to it, right? They learn marketing one way,
00:01:38
Speaker
They're not really going to change. That's just how it was. I think the first 10, 15 years of my career doing SEO right back in the early 2000s into the 2010s, same thing. There were marketers who just, they had learned marketing in the 70s and 80s and 90s and they were not going to change.
Generational Differences in Marketing Approaches
00:01:57
Speaker
They were not going to evolve and become digital marketing
00:02:01
Speaker
gurus or believers, they had their ways and they were set. And I suspect that happens every generation. So look, I think we're fighting against a difficult tide, but for those marketers and those teams that are willing to invest in serendipitous, hard to measure channels,
00:02:20
Speaker
It's going to be, it's going to be good, good getting. Yeah. I've got a lot of ground to cover.
Reflections on Running a Small Business
00:02:25
Speaker
Uh, I did want to start with how things are going at Spark Toro, which launched in, I believe April, 2020 as the mobile pandemic. Yeah. Great timing from the outside looking in. It looks like you're enjoying the latest chapter of your entrepreneurial journey. How are things going with Spark Toro? And what are some of the things you've learned over the last couple of years? Let's see. I am definitely much happier as a human being running a
00:02:50
Speaker
very tiny team and a small business versus a big venture scale trying to be a billion dollar company type of business. I don't think hyper growth is something that interests me. And I also think that I like people too much to be a great leader of large teams.
Employee Care in Large Organizations
00:03:13
Speaker
That's an interesting statement. Yeah. You have to have some
00:03:21
Speaker
dissociative or psychopathic. I don't mean that in the bad sense. I realize psychopathy is a problematic thing. I just mean you can't care deeply about every human being that you work with or who works for you in a scaling, fast-growing organization.
00:03:37
Speaker
or you will be forced to make decisions that deeply hurt you because they hurt others, or you will make decisions that are not right for the business. You have to choose. It's the downside of capitalism. It comes down to where you feel comfortable, where your swim lane is, the kind of company you want to run. I think that's one of the
00:04:04
Speaker
realities of being an entrepreneur is everybody dreams of raising venture capital and being a unicorn, but the reality is far different than what your thoughts are of what it could be. Yeah. I mean, and it's a big gamble, right? So I think Moz was probably, I think statistically in the top 2% or 3% of all companies that raise venture capital. And yet, I think by any investor standard, it was a failure.
00:04:28
Speaker
It sold, but it sold for technically a lot of money, a very large amount of money, but certainly nothing that would interest investors from a venture standpoint. It did not return the minimum return on capital that was expected after Foundry had been in for seven or eight years, and I think Ignition had been in for 12. So that's pretty frustrating, and I think it's
00:04:55
Speaker
you know, it's kind of a privileged position to be like, well, you know, I made some money from it and it technically, you know, it built a great career for me, but for a lot of people who work there, I think that was a very painful journey. And I think for a lot of other venture backed companies, they, they don't get anywhere close to that. So, and then there's all the companies that try and raise venture and fail, right? And so everyone who gets it, there's a thousand, a thousand who are chasing it.
Marketing's Data Obsession vs. Non-Attribution Methods
00:05:24
Speaker
We talked off the top about the marketing world driven by data and the idea that everything that can be measured should be measured and the fascination or obsession that marketers have with data. But it's clear that the marketing landscape has changed. Attribution is obviously a challenge these days. A lot of consumer behavior can't be tracked or measured. And you're hearing a lot of marketers talk about dark web and dark social.
00:05:51
Speaker
Let's talk about the shift to the non-attribution marketing world and the impact that it's having on marketers. You've got a lot to say on that. It's almost like the world has shifted under marketers' feet recently.
Impact of Tech and Privacy Changes on Marketing
00:06:07
Speaker
So I think the three biggest drivers of this, and every marketer, every digital marketer is going to be familiar with these, right? So number one, all of the platforms, all the big tech platforms after the Cambridge Analytica
00:06:22
Speaker
scandal, pseudo-scandal, whatever you want to call it, pulled back on a ton of the data that they used to provide. So you used to get a tremendous amount of information about your audience in Facebook or Instagram. If you had presences on those platforms, even Twitter, your Twitter analytics would show you all sorts of data about your
00:06:39
Speaker
your audience on Twitter. There was tons of data available in Google Ads. Even if you go back a few years prior, prior to 2012, Google would tell you which keywords sent traffic to your website, even in organic. Now they only do it for paid. So lots and lots of these data sources sort of went away in that 2012 to 2016 period under the guise of privacy protections.
00:07:05
Speaker
Then there were some actual legal things and government regulation things that happened, the CCP in Canada, California Privacy Act, and of course GDPR in the EU. These things all had knock-on effects on
00:07:23
Speaker
sort of what could be tracked and measured and how long and oh mark i see that you came to my website and then ninety days later you took this activity in another ninety days after that you did this other activity and then you converted and okay i could measure not anymore right now the.
00:07:38
Speaker
The window of tracking with cookies is shrinking and of course cookies themselves are rumored to be going away sometime in the next few years. And then the third change of course is Apple. So Apple essentially realized that their hardware business margins were not as good as potential software and ads business.
00:07:59
Speaker
And so Apple is basically vying to become another Google Facebook player. And I think they're going to cost Facebook some tens of billions of dollars in advertising just by forcing users to opt in rather than opt out of getting tracking on Apple devices when they use Facebook and Facebook owned properties.
00:08:22
Speaker
So those big things, those macro trends all take away a ton of data on both the organic and the paid side of analytics. And that means that we live in a world that's more like the world of 25 or 30 years ago.
00:08:38
Speaker
where what you can measure is brand lift and total traffic and total conversions and conversion rate and not each individual person and each individual person's journey to and through the web to get to your email signup form or your e-commerce checkout page. That's what's changed and unfortunately, not very many companies or marketers are behaving like that's changed.
00:09:07
Speaker
Maybe it's the time for the veteran marketer to come back into the forefront. You think about 20, 30 years ago, like I was a NewsFebruary reporter years ago, so I worked in the age of print. We couldn't measure the effectiveness of a newspaper ad for the same reason you couldn't measure billboard ads or direct mail or radio.
00:09:27
Speaker
Well, but you did, right, you did measure and report on certain metrics. It just wasn't one to one. It wasn't well, you know, Alicia in Indianapolis saw this newspaper ad and then clicked to your website. No, it was. Oh, you know, we reach this many subscribers in Indianapolis and here's your same, you know, you, whatever corporation can measure same source, same store sales in Indianapolis versus Cleveland.
00:09:56
Speaker
And since those are similar cities, you can determine whether the ad that you ran in the paper had an effect or not.
00:10:03
Speaker
On a related note, you've also talked a lot about hard to measure channels, things like organic SEO, content marketing, earned media, organic social media.
Return to Creativity and Intuition in Marketing
00:10:14
Speaker
If I was a marketer and I'm a data-driven marketer, the levers I could pull were very granular, and now it's almost a guessing game. It's probably a little dramatic to say that, but there's a combination of, you know, marketing is art and science. The science, we leaned hard into the science, and now do you think we have to
00:10:32
Speaker
Maybe swing back to the the art the creativity that maybe intuition is is one way to think about it
00:10:41
Speaker
I think the weird thing for me, Mark, is I almost wonder whether many marketers and entrepreneurs and businesses that leaned hard into that creativity, intuition, harder and possible to measure channels, even before the last four or five years of changes, were more successful than those of us who tried to attribute every visitor and only invest in channels that produced a certain amount of ROI based on our spend in them.
00:11:11
Speaker
I kind of think they might have. I suspect that if you look at the most effective marketing over the last two decades, it was not the people who perfectly put a dollar into Google AdWords and figured out that they could get a dollar and seven cents out of it and scaled that up.
00:11:31
Speaker
I think those were the big winners. I think the big winners were people who had these massively creative visions with their product and figured out how to position that product to a market that was deeply interested in it and then told that story over and over effectively through all the places where that market was paying attention. And then maybe, yeah, ran some Google and Facebook ads to go along with it.
00:11:53
Speaker
I was watching a video recently, one of the founders of Wheaton Kennedy, the big advertising agency up on your neck of the woods was talking about the Nike campaigns and some of the amazing creative work they've done. And that is marketing that resonates, that has an impact that lasts forever. A lot of marketers talk about the wisdom of David Ogilvy.
00:12:16
Speaker
And I do find it interesting that even data driven types really are enamored and fascinated by the power of creativity and campaigns that just connect with people. I think it's I think creativity is is so important, but we seem to have forgotten its value in many respects. Yeah, so I have this I have this suspicion that there was a
00:12:39
Speaker
sort of cultural shift as the web became very popular in the early 2000s, at least in the wealthy parts of the world. And then over the last 10 years, obviously, in every part of the world, I think there was this cultural belief
00:12:55
Speaker
that marketers should behave more like engineers and mathematicians, right? That storytelling, creativity, resonance, branding, positioning, that these things were no longer relevant because you could now measure the impact of every buyer's journey. And that addiction actually blinded
00:13:19
Speaker
an entire generation of marketers, myself included, absolutely myself included. I'm as guilty as anyone to the power of those things and the influence that those have. And it's just really hard to prove to yourself or anyone else.
00:13:34
Speaker
And I think the difficulty of that proof is what makes them so valuable because if something is very hard to prove, it's hard to prove that a channel like PR or influencer marketing or content or going on people's podcasts, right? It's very difficult to say to prove that any one visitor, any one conversion came from someone's podcast.
00:14:00
Speaker
even if somebody says, Hey, I heard you on Mark's podcast, right? And you were great. And I went to Spark Toro and I signed up for free count. And I loved it. Even then we're kind of like, well, but can we try like, can we believe them? Is that for sure the thing that captured them? Because if I like look at the visitor path, I could see all these other journeys. My sense is that that
00:14:21
Speaker
cultural belief is just going to be really hard to overcome. And the other framing of this is the incentives. Marketing departments, the managers, the CMO, the VP of Marketing, the CEO, the board, the investors,
00:14:39
Speaker
They want to see, show me how much money you spent on which channel and how many conversions that produced and what was the lifetime value of those conversions. And then I'll tell you how much we can invest to scale up doing more of that thing. And if you can't prove it, you're not getting the money and you're not getting the job. And so organizations that became data-driven became addicted to those kinds of metrics. And as a result, we're in the world that we're in.
00:15:10
Speaker
I suffer from, if we do that, this should happen, reality. A lot of my marketing is focused on positioning and messaging. And it's important. I fundamentally believe that it underpins your sales, marketing, product, customer success.
00:15:27
Speaker
But how do I prove to clients the ROI of positioning and messaging? It's so hard. It's sort of like trying to prove to an executive at Netflix that high quality storytelling and script writing is more important than special effects or getting a big name actor or something like that. It's more of a belief thing than a metrics thing.
00:15:53
Speaker
there's never gonna be the kind of scientific quality mathematical proof that would overcome all arguments. And because of that, yeah, we live in this world where
00:16:09
Speaker
you have to hold your own beliefs and you have to cling to them even when the evidence is weak or missing. And it's just a very difficult thing to do. I think the other problem is, in a lot of these areas, Mark, you're probably the exception. I bet all of your positioning and branding and things absolutely work the first time, but mine don't. I wish. I'll invest in
00:16:39
Speaker
something that I think is really important. Hey, I think we should reposition Spark Toro sort of the pitch of what we do from when we first launched it was audience intelligence. Now it's audience research. And I think that's a good thing, but it's pretty tough to prove that one or the other is better. You kind of have to go with your gut and
00:17:00
Speaker
If you get it wrong, if it feels to you, you have to use a lot of anecdotal evidence. You have conversations with people. They tell you that audience research is something different than what you thought it was. And when they are talking about it on stages and they're talking about it in conference rooms, it's just fundamentally not what you're doing. And you're like, okay, okay, I think I made a mistake. I should go back to the drawing board on that.
00:17:24
Speaker
then, gosh, that feels pretty bad. It feels a lot worse than, hey, our Google Ads effectiveness is sinking. We can see that our click-through rate dropped 6% last quarter. Let's try and refresh those ads and see if we can bump that up. It's not the same level of granularity and fine control. Qualitative versus quantitative.
00:17:47
Speaker
thing that we battle with every day, and unfortunately I'm on the quantitative side of the house.
Challenges in Tracking Digital Activities
00:17:52
Speaker
The other area that I wanted to talk to you about, which I find fascinating, is the idea of the zero-click marketing. It's the idea that a lot of digital activity doesn't result in a click, so there's no tracking or attribution.
00:18:06
Speaker
And you look at platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat that are linkless. I'm just curious about sort of the genesis of Zero Click and the impact on marketers and marketing. Another one of these leap of faith marketing activities that we're doing these days. Yeah, yeah, it's super frustrating. So like, if you go back 10 years,
00:18:32
Speaker
impressions, followers, views, these were considered vanity metrics. Things that smart marketers were supposed to ignore, not pay attention to, not put in their KPIs. Otherwise, they would be misled into thinking that these pure engagement things, which built up visibility on a social platform or a tech platform,
00:18:56
Speaker
but didn't necessarily lead to a conversion that you would get misled by them. Now they're kind of all we have.
00:19:02
Speaker
Right? Because, yeah, to your point, there's a bunch of linkless platforms. I would even put YouTube in there, although technically YouTube can, you know, you can add a link, technically Instagram, you could add a link in your bio, technically Reddit, some subreddits, you can add a link, right? But all of these big platforms are moving to the same thing, which is essentially either completely linkless, sometimes a link in a bio is allowed, and always any link in content
00:19:30
Speaker
gets a penalty against its visibility, right? And that is because the platforms don't want you to leave. If you're on Reddit, Reddit wants you to stay on Reddit. If you're on Twitter, Twitter needs you to stay on Twitter. Well, who knows what Twitter is doing now that it's over. You can throw out everything we know about Twitter. But LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, all the rest.
00:19:54
Speaker
everyone is the same Pinterest. Pinterest is a link-filled platform, but even Pinterest, you got to click a few times to get off of it, and even then it'll open a new tab. The core idea here is that you can either fight against the platform's desires, you can fight against the algorithms that these big tech companies have built, and try and eke out the last few clicks that are available to you,
00:20:20
Speaker
Knowing that engagement rates on links on Facebook are 0.01% or lower, even worse, I think it's 0.0023% or something on Twitter. Folks from rival IQ do this data study every year where they show the relative engagement and clicks rates. That fight is, I think, a long-term losing battle. You're probably already losing. It sucks to even try and fight it.
00:20:48
Speaker
Or you can decide, hey, wait a minute, these platforms capture a tremendous amount of energy and attention from nearly every audience. One or more of these platforms captures almost certainly your audience, no matter who they are. So you can choose to get in front of them with your messaging, with your positioning, with your branding, with your content, with your product. And you can choose to make the KPI
00:21:16
Speaker
Did we get high engagement when we shared our content on that platform, even if it didn't lead to a trackable link that we could prove led to a conversion?
00:21:26
Speaker
And that answer is yes. You can do that. You can put out short video snippets. You can put out a little tweet. You can put out a Reddit post. And you can put out a visual on Instagram. You can put out a video on TikTok. And you can see how many people saw it, how much of the video did they watch, how many opens did it get, how many profile views did you get, those kinds of metrics. And from that,
00:21:55
Speaker
you can build your brand awareness on these platforms. Can you track it through to conversion? No. Some CMOs, some marketers will refuse to invest in that because they can't track it through to conversion. And some will say,
00:22:13
Speaker
I'm willing to build my brand in these places. I'm willing to do what marketers 30 years ago did and say, how many people subscribed to the newspaper and saw this ad? How many people watched this TV program and probably saw my ad? How many people were listening to the radio on the drive this morning and probably heard my ad? And that's what we're doing. We're going back to the old school. When you think about it on a related note,
00:22:41
Speaker
You know, a lot of marketers spend a lot of time developing buyer personas and ideal customer profiles, you know, having a clear understanding of who matters to you as a no brainer.
Broader Audience Engagement Strategies
00:22:52
Speaker
But a lot of buyer personas and ICPs tend to collect dust and not deliver much value at all. And you've talked about a different approach called audience personas. Can you explain how they work and why they're better?
00:23:06
Speaker
Yeah, so similar to zero-click content, which was developed, coined at least as a phrase by my colleague Amanda Natividad, similar pitch from her on audience personas, right? So we were going through a bunch of how people use SparkToro and many folks do use it to kind of develop a persona for their target customer, the person who's gonna buy from them. But what Amanda realized is that
00:23:36
Speaker
the person who's gonna buy from you is part of a larger group of people who might engage with your content, follow you, subscribe to you, be interested in what you're doing, even if they never actually buy. And in fact, those people are often more important to reach.
00:23:51
Speaker
than the individual down here because they're a bigger group and they're the ones that influence the people who eventually buy. They're the ones who can amplify your message. And so reaching that bigger group, building up that audience over time, that is a core, important metric and an important tactic by itself. And so this idea developed of rather than targeting only the customer, you should target the audience that you're trying to reach with your message.
00:24:19
Speaker
and everyone who that might be so rather than saying hey you know we sell i don't know a certain type of soil to particular agribusinesses you could say hey we probably want to reach everyone who talks about soil health
00:24:34
Speaker
worldwide, like the global community of researchers and marketers and content creators and journalists and bloggers and tick tockers and people who post on Twitter and people who go to conferences and events and are competitors who sell soil and people who are one level down and purchase these agricultural products and people who are one level up and are the suppliers to the agribusinesses, all of them.
00:25:03
Speaker
That's our community. That's our audience. What are their personas? Where can we find them online? What do they pay attention to? What do they care about? Who are they inviting to headline at their conferences? Who are they inviting to be on the popular YouTube channels? What are the big podcasters in that sector? What are the big email newsletters where we could be present?
00:25:25
Speaker
Those are the questions you want to ask about an audience persona rather than just the target buyer. And when you do, you often have way more success. I think this fundamental concept, the idea of audience personas, if you can embrace it in your organization and reach a bigger group of people with your messaging and realize that your messaging is not designed to sell right from the start.
00:25:48
Speaker
That is crucial to your success. So Mark, if you and I are trying to reach customers, it's weird. Sometimes people compare it to dating. You don't want to pitch your marketing on the conversion event only.
00:26:08
Speaker
You're trying to build a well-rounded brand that people are fundamentally interested in. And that is a different game than sell, sell, sell. Hey, here's our product. Here's why you should buy our product. Here's where to buy the product. This is the URL to buy the product. The product's on sale. The product is this much. That kind of marketing does not work very well in the modern attention economy.
00:26:33
Speaker
So let's make the persona reflect the kind of marketing that we need to do. I hate to be overly dramatic, but it sounds like the days of individual-based marketing are over. You can't track individuals, and you certainly shouldn't target these sort of granular buyer personas of individuals, you know, Bob, who
00:26:53
Speaker
BP marketing who has two kids and makes X amount of money. It's almost like we've taken a step back or a step up in terms of our marketing focus and our activities, but it is very interesting. I mean, there's the concept in B2B marketing of ABM, account-based marketing, where you basically say, oh, I'm not trying to reach a broad audience. I just want to reach
00:27:15
Speaker
I don't know, Dow Chemical. That's the one company that I want to be interested in my soil product. And you go after them individually and try to reach them on their particular channels with very, very customized messaging. I'm not saying that doesn't work. For some people it does. It's a fine way to go. But if you are
00:27:37
Speaker
If you are investing in building attention, building a brand, building an ecosystem in a community, investing in channels like content marketing and PR, ABM is not the way to go and individual focus is not the way to go. So yes, I would agree, right? Take your focus off Bob with two and a half kids and a cat who makes exactly this amount of money and put it into, oh, our audience is comprised of
00:28:06
Speaker
these diverse peoples who have these diverse behaviors, but the behaviors look like a lot of them subscribe to these podcasts, these YouTube channels. You can find them on these social networks, following these people, going to these events, subscribing to these email newsletters. That data is incredibly useful. You can actually do something with it versus like, well, marketing Mary gets her coffee at 9 a.m. and then she like, why? Why do I have this detail in my persona? It doesn't matter.
SEO Competition and Google's Search Control
00:28:36
Speaker
It would be remiss of me to not ask you about SEO. You spent a lot of time in that world. And I'm curious about your take on the SEO landscape these days. We've seen Google declare that essentially content should be written for humans, not robots. And a lot of marketers are still leaning hard into SEO to power organic search. Any thoughts about the changing role or, or importance or reliance on SEO for marketers these days?
00:29:05
Speaker
Gosh, let's see. This could be just my perspective. I have not been active in SEO for five years. Take what I say with a grain of salt. I would no longer consider myself an SEO expert and certainly I'm not a practitioner either.
00:29:23
Speaker
Google has been saying those things since 2002. So if that's what's new to you, I'm worried that you're 20 years behind. I'm deeply nervous. You know, I've seen a lot of the, I don't know, hemming and hawing and sort of nervousness about AI generated content and
00:29:42
Speaker
Oh, well, it scales so nicely. Is it going to do well in Google or is it not going to do well? What about scraped content that's been repurposed? And sometimes that does seem to do well, and sometimes it doesn't. And broadly, my sense is that if SEO is a great channel for you, keep investing in it, stay up to date with people who are not me. I'm not your guy. But if SEO is feeling like a
00:30:10
Speaker
I think three things are going on with it. Even when I left the field, it was getting incredibly competitive. In 2005, very few people were doing SEO, even fewer were doing it well. By 2015, a lot of people were doing SEO, some of them were doing it well.
00:30:24
Speaker
In 2022, almost everyone's doing SEO and a good percent are doing it really well. So you better be literally some of the best in the world if you're going to try and compete because nobody clicks outside of those first four or five positions, right? The second thing that's happening is Google is taking more and more of the share of clicks for themselves.
00:30:44
Speaker
So more going to Google's own properties than ever before, more going to instant answers than ever before, more searches that are resulting in no clicks, and certainly no clicks to the open web, and even more clicks than ever going to a few leaders in every field. So if you take out the top 100 websites on the internet, the share of clicks that's left for everyone else's
00:31:13
Speaker
shrinking, dramatically shrinking. I'm nervous about SEO as a long-term channel. I think it's just incredibly competitive, more and more difficult, and also a shrinking opportunity because Google just can't find ... There's not another 7 billion searchers worldwide who are going to search 30 times every day. I think that's also a fundamental issue for their growth and for anybody who's investing in SEO.
00:31:39
Speaker
If you're looking for other channels, that's where I think a lot of these opportunities that we try and surface that I care about these days are present, right? Marketing through other sources of influence, going and finding that email newsletter that reaches exactly the target audience you want to reach, going and finding those YouTube channels, finding those podcasts, finding those social accounts, finding those niche websites, finding the conferences and events. I think there's a lot of opportunity in that.
00:32:07
Speaker
those places. And very few marketers invest in them. It doesn't even really have a name. Marketing through sources of influence. There's no job title for that. It's not like SEO or PPC or email marketing or content marketing. It's kind of absent. And because of that, there's a lot of opportunity
00:32:27
Speaker
Spark 2.0 seems to be having a growing reputation for naming new marketing initiatives, so maybe Amanda can focus some of her marketing savviness on that and come up with... That's what I need to be like. Amanda, come up with the zero-click content for marketing through sources of influence. Exactly, exactly. Job one for her. One final question. Over the past two years, many companies have embraced virtual events and conferences.
00:32:49
Speaker
To be honest most of them have been okay at best could be the lack of connection opportunities for in person events or the content doesn't play well online. Yeah later this month november tenth to be exact spark toro is hosting a virtual conference spark together you've. Marketed it as as a different type of conference so a how is it different and be how is
Innovative Virtual Conference at Spark Together
00:33:12
Speaker
it going.
00:33:12
Speaker
So fundamentally, I agree with you. I think that virtual events are just kind of broken in a lot of ways. And I think oddly enough, in-person events, while they still have their place, they can be very appealing. I was just at a conference in the UK speaking at an event and at another one. Yeah, in-person events are great, but they're also big vectors for
00:33:35
Speaker
getting sick. I got COVID at an event in April this year. And then I just got a cold at this event in the UK. And I was like, oh, man, I haven't been sick in a few years. Right, right. Being around lots of people. That's going to do it. And also, all of the in-person events are still smaller than they used to be. In-person events are just kind of, we haven't quite gotten back to, hey, let's go out and do professional development the way we did in 2019 and the 20 years before that.
00:34:04
Speaker
which is okay, I'm not sure how long it'll take to return, it'll probably be a while. Virtual events though, I kind of feel like during the pandemic, they were the only thing we had, right? And a lot of them were trying to put a square peg in a round hole, right? They were trying to shoehorn in this content, you know, speaker's format that just weren't quite right. The advantage to me of a virtual event
00:34:29
Speaker
is you can have someone present visually and audio in a in short format bursts, as long as you keep them pretty darn tight and very focused. And as long as the event itself is not too long. So those two and three day virtual events. I don't think that works. I'm not even I don't even think seven or eight hours works. Right. I think if you want to do
00:34:52
Speaker
a one-day event, the longest it can be is five and a half, six hours. And then I think speakers too. We had a lot of these hour-long sessions, keynotes, whatever. I don't think that fundamentally works either. I think, again, attention spans wane after 20 minutes, maybe 25. The cool thing about doing a virtual event is that the quality of the content, the educational focus can be what's really rich and powerful there.
00:35:20
Speaker
as opposed to the in-person thing where people are kind of, you know, if you're in the conference hall, you're half listening, but you're also kind of half online, and you're also kind of networking, right? So it's about the whole experience. And the virtual event, the idea is like, hey, this is kind of like watching an educational YouTube video, maybe with some interactivity and some benefits of being there live. But beyond that, not really. And so I think
00:35:45
Speaker
know, what we wanted to do was lean into the strengths of virtual events and lean away from the weaknesses. So yeah, aspired together as nobody goes longer than 20 minutes, a whole day is I think five and a half hours. The interesting thing and the weird thing is we're not leaning into one of the strengths, which is we are not recording the event. This is because, yeah, Mark, we had this
00:36:10
Speaker
this weird thing. So let's say right now that you were like, hey, Rand, I really want to talk to you about the Moz exit, like the sale of Moz. My response would be, Mark, I'm very sorry. I signed an NDA. I can't really talk about that. And that's because this podcast is being recorded. And it's going to exist out there. There's issues around that. There's people who might get upset. And there's also legal stuff.
00:36:34
Speaker
So for Spark together, we were like, hey, could we make our pitch to our speakers of would you be willing to share non-public information one time knowing that it's not recorded and that we're asking folks not to tweet and share and all that kind of stuff? Would you be willing to
00:36:49
Speaker
sort of share real metrics, numbers, data that can show how these stories that you're telling around marketing success or failure have gone. And all of our speakers said yes to that. In fact, that was one of the big criteria that we had in finding speakers was like, person with interesting story, willing to tell it once, wouldn't be willing to have it recorded. That's the person we want, right? We want those like, after this recording ends, Mark, if you're like, hey, how'd that mouse sale go? I'm like, oh, okay, well, now I can tell you because the recording's done.
00:37:19
Speaker
right? And then that conversation is what we wanted to get for Spark together. It's one time only, it's not recorded. We think this is going to be very powerful because when you hear those stories, they stick with you. Stories are so memorable compared to
00:37:37
Speaker
I don't know, here's 10 tactics to improve your PPC efficiency. That's good content, right? It's educational. It just doesn't stick with you. Like six days after you've heard it, you're like, eh, I remember two of those maybe.
00:37:52
Speaker
You've done a good job on LinkedIn of teasing the content, some of the stories that you're talking about. So it's going to be very interesting to see how the conference is going to be different and how people can act with it and engage with it. One final, final question.
Engagement with Rand and Spark Toro
00:38:07
Speaker
If people are interested to learn more about you and Spark Toro, where do they go?
00:38:11
Speaker
So sparktoro.com, we have forever free accounts. There's no free trial that you can sign up for a forever free account and try it out. If you are interested in all of my weird and wacky opinions on everything from economics to politics, to Halloween costumes, to marketing thoughts, I am most active on Twitter where I'm at Randfish, at least for a little while. We'll see who knows what the next six months of Twitter will bring. It could be a tire fire pretty quick over there.
00:38:39
Speaker
We'll see if other people are going to walk the walk and talk the talk and jump off the platform. I was going to say my suspicion is my LinkedIn activity is going to be quite a bit more over the next year because of new ownership. Good to know. Well, thanks for being on the podcast and thanks to everyone for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review. Subscribe via Apple podcast, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app.
00:39:03
Speaker
and share via social media. To learn more about how I work with B2B SaaS companies as a fractional CMO and strategic advisor and a physician and messaging consultant, email mark at mark2k.ca or connect with me on LinkedIn, not Twitter.