SparkToro

Your Customers Are Leaving While You're Not Looking The most painful truth about business growth? Your customers change faster than you realize. Even million-dollar companies crash when they miss these shifts. You can build multiple successful businesses by watching customer behavior obsessively. But the moment you stop tracking changes, your growth dies. Your audience adopts new technologies. They find different information sources. They need features you never considered. Then your business goes sideways. The scariest part? You won't know why. Without regular customer analysis, you're flying blind while your market transforms around you. Your customers evolve constantly: - Their tech preferences shift monthly - New influence sources shape their decisions - Their data needs expand rapidly - Their buying habits transform completely - Their expectations grow exponentially Most businesses freeze their understanding of customers at a single point in time. They build products and marketing for who their audience was, not who they're becoming. By the time they notice problems, they're months behind market changes. Success requires constant audience analysis. Not yearly surveys or quarterly reviews. You need weekly contact with customers. Daily monitoring of behavior changes. Continuous updates to your market understanding. Your customers won't wait for you to catch up. They'll find businesses that already understand their evolving needs.

With the rise of AI tools, Google Search is dead. Right? Wrong. Google Search grew more than 20% in 2024. We've got the data to prove it. Link below.

Your ICP Strategy is Killing Your Ad Performance Stop focusing exclusively on ideal customers. Your narrow targeting drives up ad costs while missing audiences who influence buying decisions. Your ICP needs two distinct groups: 1. Direct buyers who purchase your product 2. Broader audience interested in your content When you target only direct buyers, your marketing suffers in three critical ways: A) Content performs poorly because it reaches too few people B) Channel presence weakens from limited engagement C) Brand awareness stays low, keeping ad costs high Every major ad platform rewards high engagement. Google, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube - they all prioritize content that people already know and trust. The math is simple: Higher engagement means lower ad costs. But engagement comes from your whole audience, not just buyers. The people who read your content, share your posts, and follow your brand create the trust signals that platforms need. They influence your ideal customers even if they never buy. Most companies get this backwards. They create buyer-focused content that ignores their wider audience. Their ads cost more because platforms see low engagement. Their content struggles because it serves too narrow a group. Build your ICP strategy around both groups. Create content for your entire audience. Let their engagement drive down your ad costs. Your ideal customers trust brands their network already knows.

Your Audience Strategy is Backwards (And It's Costing You) Stop focusing exclusively on ideal customers. Your marketing suffers when you ignore the broader audience that influences them. The painful reality about marketing costs reveals itself in a vicious cycle. Ads with high engagement cost less to distribute, but that engagement only comes from strong brand recognition. Building recognition requires broad audience reach, which demands content that serves more than just potential customers. Your content strategy must embrace the entire community around your product or service. Most companies get this backwards. They create narrow content targeting only ideal customers while ignoring the wider audience that shapes buying decisions. This myopic strategy kills performance across every metric. Ad costs soar because platforms see low engagement. Conversion rates tank because prospects lack social proof. Brand awareness stagnates without community amplification. Customer acquisition costs climb as each touch becomes more expensive. Bottom-funnel qualification should remain narrow and focused. But top and middle-funnel marketing must target your entire audience ecosystem. The people who influence your customers matter as much as the customers themselves. Their engagement signals trust to platforms and prospects alike. When your broader audience knows, likes and trusts your brand, everything changes. Ad platforms reward you with lower distribution costs because people actually engage. Content earns organic reach instead of requiring paid promotion. Customers convert faster because they arrive pre-sold by community sentiment. Sales cycles compress as trust transfers from influencers to buyers. Stop limiting your reach to perfect-fit customers. Build influence with everyone who shapes their decisions. Your marketing budget will thank you.

Why Your Ideal Customer Profile is Missing Critical Data Pain points alone won't reveal how customers actually buy. A New York skier isn't searching for New York mountains - they're looking across New England. Your location-based marketing assumptions are probably wrong. Understanding when and where purchases happen matters more than basic problem identification. Take winter sports enthusiasts: They don't follow typical consumer patterns because timing and location shift their entire decision process. Most ICPs focus on demographics and pain points while ignoring crucial context: - When do customers actually make purchase decisions? - Where are they physically located when buying? - What seasonal factors influence their timing? - How does usage location differ from living location? - What external conditions affect their choices? The ski industry exposes this perfectly. A customer's home location often has nothing to do with their purchase behavior. They buy based on where they'll use the product, not where they live. Their decision timing follows seasonal patterns that ignore traditional marketing calendars. Your messaging must capture these full purchase patterns. Stop assuming customers buy like typical consumers. Map their actual decision journey - including timing, location, and contingent conditions that influence choices. Most marketers build ICPs backwards. They start with customer problems and demographics while missing the context that actually drives purchases. This creates messaging that hits pain points but misses purchase triggers. Fix your ICP by mapping the complete buying context. Understand not just what problems customers have, but when, where and how they make decisions to solve them.

New research! How Often Do Americans Search Google? Which Search Verticals Do They Use? Thanks to our friends at Datos, A Semrush Company, we now have a solid baseline for how people use Google. Some fast stats: - American desktop web users performed, on average, 126 unique Google searches each month in 2024. (The median was 53 Google searches/month.) - Google serves at least 492 billion searches per month (or ~1.3 billion per day). - Google had about 5.9 trillion searches in 2024 — a similar number they themselves recently said. - Back in 2018, Google Images had almost 1/3rd the volume of Google dot com. In 2024, it’s about 1/8th the size, which is still extraordinary. We plan on running this analysis again this fall to see how things will have changed. Many people think that AI tools will displace Google’s market share. If that’s true, we should see the number of Google searches fall each month. We’ll see. 👀 But in the meantime, we have more related research coming next week! https://lnkd.in/duNJytRD

The Quarterly ICP Refresh Nobody Does Your ideal customer profile expired last quarter. Did you notice? Most companies treat ICPs like stone tablets - carved once, referenced forever. That's marketing malpractice in 2024. Audiences evolve monthly now. New tools emerge. Work habits shift. Information sources change. Purchase patterns transform. Six months ago, no one in your field used AI tools… Today? Different story. Your perfectly crafted ICP from last year is making your marketing look like a fossil. We learned this running audience research for tech companies. Every month brought surprising shifts. Tools people swore by became obsolete. Trusted information sources lost influence. New communities emerged from nowhere. The solution isn't constant research. It's systematic observation. Set monthly checkpoints. Track behavior changes. Notice platform shifts. Watch for new information sources. Your ICP isn't a document. It's a living profile that needs regular updates.

Stop Surveying. Start Listening. An entrepreneur friend was just quoted $40,000 for a customer survey. Save your money. The best audience research comes by listening > asking. It's happening right now in public conversations across the internet. Traditional market research is backwards. It interrupts people to ask questions. It creates artificial environments. It forces structured responses. Then it pretends those answers reflect reality. Modern audience research means finding where natural conversations already happen. Forums. Review sections. Social media threads. Professional communities. These spaces contain raw, unfiltered truth about what people actually think. We built SparkToro because I got tired of expensive research telling me less than an hour of careful listening could reveal. Every major insight I've had about audiences came from observation, not surveys. The future belongs to listeners, not surveyors.

The Two-Conversation Rule That Changed My Marketing Want to spot the next big trend in your industry? Stop watching influencers. Last year, everyone chased viral signals. They tracked hashtags. They monitored engagement rates. They followed the loud voices. They missed the real shifts. Here's what actually predicts trends: The Two-Conversation Rule. When two people in your target audience discuss the same topic independently, pay attention. Not trending topics. Not viral posts. Just organic, unprompted conversations about the same thing. We discovered this pattern tracking platform shifts. Before each major migration, quiet conversations started happening. No hashtags. No viral moments. Just people independently expressing the same thoughts. These whispers predict behavior changes better than any viral metric. They show real pain points, not manufactured hype. They reveal genuine shifts, not marketing campaigns. The trick? You have to be deep in your community to notice them. You have to listen more than you talk. You have to spot patterns others miss. Real trends don't start with explosions. They start with whispers.

Your Audience Research Is Probably Backwards We watched two competitors launch products this week. Both failed. Both made the same mistake. They asked customers what they wanted. Sounds smart, right? Wrong. Customer feedback lies. Not because people are dishonest, but because they're terrible at predicting their own behavior. They tell you what they think they want. They describe imaginary versions of themselves. They invent rational explanations for emotional decisions. We've spent years studying audience behavior at SparkToro. Here's what actually works: watch what people do, not what they say they'll do. When skiers told us they choose mountains based on location, we checked their actual booking patterns. Truth? They routinely drove past closer resorts for better snow conditions. Their behavior contradicted their statements. This pattern repeats everywhere. B2B buyers claim they research all options carefully. Reality? Most choose vendors their peers recommend, then rationalize the choice afterward. Startup founders say they pick tools based on features. Actually? They follow what successful competitors use. Real audience research means studying behavior patterns, not collecting opinions. Track where people spend time. Notice what they actually click. Monitor their real purchase sequences. Stop asking what people want. Start watching what they do.