How to Break Out of the Google/Facebook Duopoly – In Just 7 Minutes with Rand Fishkin

 Discover the importance of knowing and understanding your audience Learn more on why you should ditch the expensive survey and check out SparkToro Find out how to know more about your audience and not just the facade Resources/Links: Wanting to Know More About Your Audience? Find out how to Instantly Discover What Your Audience Reads, Watches, Listens to, and Follows: SparkToro.com Summary Have you been investing in surveys and researches but not getting enough insights about your audience? Are you always getting breakeven whenever you use Facebook or Google and getting very little value back? Do you want to know more about how you can instantly know and understand your audience more? Rand Fishkin is the Co-Founder of SparkToro, a platform that instantly discovers what your audience reads, watches, listens to, and follows. He was the previous Founder of Moz, a globally successful and smarter way to do SEO. He is also the author of Lost & Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, as well as the co-author of The Art of SEO. In this episode, Rand talks about his insights on why Facebook and Google isn’t really the best platform when it comes to understanding your audience’s demographics and coming up with a marketing strategy. He also shares his tips on how you can know more about your audience and maximize your reach by using the right platform and ditching the expensive surveys. Check out these episode highlights: 01:45 - Rand’s ideal client: “So SparkToro provides audience research. It is primarily used by marketers. Those are in-house marketers at brands of all sizes, but we really love small and medium businesses and agencies and consultants too.” 02:04 - Problem Rand helps solve: “SparkToro helps people to instantly understand lots of attributes, behaviors, and demographics about their target audience.” 03:00 - Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to Rand: “Has this ever happened to you? You throw billions of dollars at Google and Facebook, and they take all your money from you, and then give you very little value back. It happens to a lot of marketers!” 04:39 - Common mistakes that people make before they find Rand’s solution: “I think the two big ones are number one, relying on surveys and interviews to answer questions like, "What does my audience pay attention to?", "Who are they watching and following", "What publications they read?”, “What are their sources of influence?" 06:25 - Rand’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): “I think one of the best things that you can do to figure out your audience is take a publication or a source of influence that is already popular with your audience.” 07:06 - Rand’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Check out Rand’s Website: SparkToro.com 07:50 - Q: how do we long-term disintermediate the power that these duopolies have over the advertising and marketing universe? A: SparkToro can make a tiny, teeny-weeny dent. And the bigger issue is going to be, eventually, we have to decide that competition is a good thing for capitalism. Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode: “The way SparkToro works is it just passively crawls the web and social accounts, and then collects that data based on what people actually do.” -Rand FishkinClick To Tweet Transcript (Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)