[Best of Season] AMP 081: How To Do Remarkable Customer Research With Rand Fishkin From SparkToro

Actionable Marketing Podcast

CoSchedule started the Actionable Marketing Podcast (AMP) in 2015 and has recorded and published more than 300 episodes. CoSchedule has worked with some of the smartest minds out there that share their stories with you through this podcast. This season, CoSchedule brings back some of the best of the best evergreen content.

Where do your customers hang out? What kinds of things do they like? What publications do they read? Customer research involves a lot of leg work, so does this information even matter? How can you leverage such insight for SEO?

Today, we’re talking to Rand Fishkin, founder of SparkToro and author of Lost and Founder. He is a powerhouse in the content marketing and SEO world.

Some of the highlights of the show include:

• Background, origination, and purpose of SparkToro
• Reaching/Researching Audiences: Slow, frustrating, and inaccurate process
• Companies spend money contracting agencies for a list of top customers, blogs, podcasts, and events
• Bones of Audience Intelligence: 1) Identify audiences across channels; 2) Know audience density; 3) Use trustworthy and valuable metrics
• How to obtain, benchmark, filter, and analyze data
• Data Points: Which to focus on and where to get them
• Social Network Profiles: Report follower count and engagement
• Biases generate unrepresentative data influenced by SEO
• Significant sample sizes and diverse groups are needed for true coverage
• Examples of missing specific audiences
• SparkToro lets you find people who practice specific fields
• Does current audience intelligence data represent the market as a whole?
• Improve SEO by helping audience accomplish tasks, and identifying and broadening link sources

Links:

• Rand Fishkin on Twitter
• SparkToro
• Lost and Founder
• Project Event Safe
• Moz
• SurveyMonkey Audience
• Nate Silver
• SimilarWeb Pro
• CoSchedule

Quotes by Rand Fishkin:

“If you’re looking at a social network profile, don’t just report on follower count, go look at the last 20 or 50 posts...report on how much engagement did each of those get.”

“Go out there, build a company, make mistakes, just don’t make exactly the same ones I did.”

“You get biased by your existing understanding of the field.”