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Insights Unlocked
Winning with zero-click marketing starts with customer empathy
00:49:22
Rand Fishkin breaks down the death of attribution and how zero-click marketing and customer empathy is reshaping digital strategy
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- [00:02]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome back to the Insights Unlocked podcast. In this episode, we're joined by Rand Fishkin, co founder of SparkToro and longtime marketing truth teller. Rand dives into why attribution is broken, how zero click marketing is changing everything, and how customer empathy can help marketers break through in today's walled garden Internet. Enjoy the show.
- [00:25]
Mike McDowell
Welcome to Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing where we bring you candid conversations and stories with the thinkers, doers and builders behind some of the most successful digital products and experiences in the world, from concepts to execution.
- [00:43]
Nathan Isaacs
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, principal content marketing manager at User Testing, and joining us today as host is UserTesting's Mike McDowell, our principal solutions marketing manager. Welcome back to the show, Mike.
- [00:58]
Rand Fishkin
Thanks, man. It's awesome to be back. I love every time I get here.
- [01:02]
Nathan Isaacs
Today's guest is Rand Fishkin. Rand is co founder and CEO of SparkToro, the audience research platform, helping marketers understand where their audiences spend time and what influences them. Rand is also the founder of Moz, a prolific speaker and author of Lost and founder. He spent his career helping people do better marketing, not just with data, but with empathy, transparency, and a lot of personality. Welcome to the show. Ran.
- [01:31]
Rand Fishkin
Oh, thanks for having me, guys. Great to be here.
- [01:35]
Yeah, it's really awesome, Rand. As I was looking through, getting ready for the show, I was like starting to realize all these similarities and when I realized that you had done Moz, like SEOmoz was like the go to when I was running e commerce like 20 years ago. That was always what we looked at is like, what should we be doing? And going to that. So a long overdue. Thank you for creating that.
- [01:59]
Yeah, yeah.
- [02:01]
Stage, Right. So, yeah, setting the stage back there, you know, for basically the better part of two decades, you've been helping people become better marketers, whether it is that SEO content or true audience Insights. Looking at sort of the world today, what do you think the biggest shift is that people still aren't paying enough attention to when it comes to, you know, being a great marketer?
- [02:24]
Oh, gosh, it depends a little bit. But my sense is that if you are in classic digital marketing, so content marketing or SEO or paid and performance marketing, those sorts of arenas, I think the biggest change that still hasn't hit is the death of attribution. And that is essentially a lot of folks are probably familiar with this trend. If you've seen me speak about anything, you've probably seen me speak about this, which, which is that 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was reasonable to build attribution models that would estimate the degree to which press and PR podcast appearances, your YouTube channel, your organic social media efforts, your content efforts contributed to any given sale or conversion that you made on your website. And that was reasonable because almost every platform sent referral data about the visitor that they sent you. So you know, Facebook sent a visitor to your website, they would tell you, hey, it came from this Facebook post or page. If Google sent you a visitor, Google would tell you, hey, it came from this particular keyword that they searched for. If Twitter sent you a visit, if LinkedIn sent you a visit, if Reddit sent you a visit, if Slack sent you a visit, all these platforms sent along data with every visit that they sent. And a big part of that was that they grew their adoption by showing companies and websites and marketers how valuable their traffic could be. Now the platforms have learned to behave a totally different way, right? Basically the platforms followed the Instagram model of why would we ever let traffic leave our website? And that that started inside sort of Facebook and Instagram, but now it is spread to everyone, right? Reddit is keeping traffic on Reddit, YouTube keeps traffic on YouTube, Google keeps traffic on Google. And so as as referral traffic ends and as all of these platforms start to make their referral data dark, right? Google took away keyword data, Facebook hides a bunch of the referral Data. Places like WhatsApp, Slack, TikTok, LinkedIn, they don't pass refer strings anymore. So you don't even know that the visit came from these places. Infuriating. And we have a bunch of research about this on our website if you want to look it up. But all that means, Mike, you cannot build a successful, thoughtful, comprehensive attribution model. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, right? I haven't even talked about how privacy laws have impacted this, how the death of third party cookies has impacted this, how the adoption of ad blockers BY More than 30% of all Internet users has impacted this, how the changes to Google Analytics has impacted this. Long story short, maybe one, one time, a long time ago, you could build reasonable attribution models. Today you cannot. Anyone who tells you that they have sophisticated AI tools that will let you do it is lying to you. They are lying to you to tell you something. The only real use case for attribution modeling is paid in performance if you're exclusively using paid data, because that channel continues to provide excellent data about every visit it sends you, for obvious reasons. Fine, that's fine. But if you want to measure anything Organic attribution modeling is dead.
- [06:10]
Yeah, it's funny again, you're taking me back. I used to run analytics for hertz for over 20 years. And I still remember when they made the change that, oh, you're not getting referral data on organic traffic anymore, only paid. And we were like, what? And I also remember having a bit of an argument with a digital marketer when they started implementing a 30, 60, 90 attribution model for, for traffic, for transactions. And there was a, no, there's a report that shows that it's all valid. And I was like, let me see that report. And I got the report. And who do you think, go back about 15 years. Who do you think published that report? It was double click.
- [06:49]
So yeah, I mean this is one of the most frustrating things about it, right? That Google and Facebook will still claim, hey, attribution is possible. Here's how you do attribution modeling. Here's the sophisticated math that we use behind it. Look, here's how Google Analytics can help you do it, all those kinds of things. And every single time I've ever seen one of these attribution reports, it always shows where is, where is the real value coming from in your digital marketing campaigns. Well, Google and Facebook of course, and specifically the traffic that you pay for.
- [07:23]
And it's just, yeah, well that, that actually makes it a lot harder for, especially with social networks and things where a lot of people invested years building personal brands and these platforms. I mean I still remember when search engines goal it was stated written was to get you off the search engine as fast as possible to the place you want to go. Social media was all about sharing third party content with your networks, like finding things and sharing it. And so for me personally this idea of has been very frustrating where, oh, if I want to share a YouTube video to my network or I want to share a link to something about user testing, whatever it is, you have to sort of do it all cleverly, put the link in the comments, do this. There's all these special ways we try to trick the systems because of this sort of zero click sort of ecosystems that they're all building now. Aol anybody? You know, walled garden, built in rain, right? Remember that?
- [08:15]
Yeah. And so I mean what, what obviously happened was that all of the, hey, we're going to send you traffic that was just a decade long Trojan horse. And once the trojan horse had rolled into the village of the Internet, you know, the soldiers came out. The soldiers came out and basically slaughtered the traffic and that is infuriating. It arguably it should have been regulated, right? Google absolutely was a monopoly in its space. Facebook absolutely was in a monopoly in its space. You can see the Department of Justice under both Biden and Trump for one and two, right? Both administrations saying, hey, this was illegal abuse of monopoly power and we should be doing something about it. And we should not have let Facebook buy Instagram and we should not have let them buy WhatsApp and we should not have let Google potentially own Google Analytics and own Chrome browser and you know, all these different, the Android. Well, because, because you know, sort of those administrations, the Bush and Obama administrations, DOJs fell down on the job and, and didn't keep up with the times. We are stuck in a space where this monopoly abuse has meant a, a sort of tragic death of the open Internet. And I think unfortunately most Internet users don't really care. They like getting instant answers from Google.
- [09:45]
Exactly.
- [09:45]
That Google essentially steals that content copyright free. They, they don't really care that OpenAI steals creators works and you know, the works from books and then trains its models on that. And they don't, they don't particularly care that when you browse through Reddit or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or Twitter or YouTube, you're not getting content, you're not being sent to anyone else's website. People, people now prefer to stay in their platforms. They don't like to click, they like to, they like to scroll and swipe.
- [10:22]
So in that model now where the end user largely doesn't care, what are some of the strategies that you've been recommending to brands so that they can actually still build some kind of equity in the, in themselves without having to rely on inbound strategies and linking out of these sort of closed ecosystems.
- [10:40]
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, for better or worse, probably for worse, but that's just the way it goes. The marketing of the 21st century is going to look a lot more like the marketing of the 20th century, which is create influence in the places that people pay attention and measure based on lift, not attribution. That's a really simple way of saying you will have to do zero click marketing. You will have to create content on YouTube, on Reddit, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Threads, on Blue sky, on TikTok. Wherever your audience is, you need to go and make content in those places natively that performs well and gets engagement, that attracts whatever, you know, followers and a community and comments and then rely on the fact that those people who are interested in your product, the problem that you solve and your solution to it will go and find your website. They will go and transact eventually when they're ready. But you're going to have to do most of the top and middle of funnel marketing natively in all of these places where your audience pays attention, rather than relying on these sources of influence to drive traffic at top of funnel and middle of funnel stages like they used to. And then you're going to have to stop measuring with attribution. You're going to have to start measuring the same way Coca Cola measured billboards in 1955, which is we put up a billboard on Michigan Avenue in Chicago and we put up another one in Detroit, and we see which one same store, sales quarter over quarter, lift is higher. And then we roll that one out to the next Midwest city. And then we see how that campaign compares to our west coast campaign of no billboards, but lots of gas station sponsorships and et cetera, et cetera. Right. You're testing and measuring investments rather than relying on an attribution model to tell you which thing contributed to each sale.
- [12:56]
It's kind of wild how print and television are becoming more interactive than the actual digital platforms because you're starting to see QR codes embedded in commercials and on billboards and on wherever distribution, magazines, whatever to truly get you engaging right away. But you can't get that in these straight digital channels anymore. And if you try to embed a Q, I'm actually envisioning it as you were talking a QR code on an image that was uploaded to a social network. They probably have an AI that would detect that you had a QR code on it and then they would downgrade the distribution of that. So, yeah, that's actually really wild that, who knows, maybe Mad Men will become new again. You know, we'll go back to Mad.
- [13:36]
Men style, I think. You know, it's one of those things where for 20 years I argued against the lunacy of throwing your marketing dollars at all these unmeasurable channels. And now here I am over the last few years, you know, waking up to this reality and saying, well, I was wrong. If you go and do what the rand fishkin of 2017 told you to do, you're going to have a bad time.
- [14:07]
Yeah, it's interesting looking back, taking this to where we are now. Essentially, this is what we're saying. SparkToro is designed to go and find. Go to the places that your audience already spends time and figure out what influences them there. At the same Time. User testing is all about listening directly to customers, sort of where they are and about the things that they care about. How do you see the insights that user testing generates and the insights that SparkToro can generate? How do you see that all behavior data and direct feedback coming together to help with some of these strategies?
- [14:43]
Yeah, I would say, you know, SparkToro is very focused on the top, that sort of top and middle of funnel stages. Right. So where is my audience? Where do. Should I be contributing to Pinterest? Do I need to pay attention to Quora? Is my audience adopting ChatGPT and perplexity and Gemini? Are they still using Google and what sort of search terms are they using? But SparkToro is good at answering those types of questions. Which subreddits are they following? Which YouTube channels are they paying attention to? And then I think data that comes from user testing of all kinds that is very useful. Once someone hits a property that you own and control. Right. Once you can control the experience, the data that user testing gives you back is priceless. Right. It helps you solve problems like the friction that is created in the user experience process. It helps you solve problems like objections that people that your content and marketing needs to overcome, which could also contribute, by the way, to the top and middle of funnel. So, yeah, I think these two things are valuable on their own and invaluable together.
- [16:00]
Yeah, I love the way you put all that. A lot of people think that user testing is meant to be a replacement for everything else. And really it works in conjunction in tandem with a lot of other tools. And so it's like, no, no, no, it's analytics plus this. It's top of funnel plus this. Sometimes user testing is at the top of the funnel, understanding perceptions and things as well. But you know, if you need to get to very specific people, you know, you're using things like the SparkToro database. And we recently just implemented LinkedIn verifications. We're trying to connect with APIs over to LinkedIn as well. It's really interesting how it all sort of works together. The theme sort of, that we've sort of been touching on almost with every one of these questions so far is like, everything's changing. The world is changing. We got to learn to adapt. You actually recently went through a lot of changes yourself with SparkToro. You did a whole redesign, you know, adding a whole bunch of new features, data elements, natural language processing. You just talked about ChatGPT upgrades. Why did you feel the need to relaunch? And you know, how Is that relaunch going to change the way that teams are using insights and coming to insights better through SparkToro now?
- [17:02]
Yeah, I think, you know, when I, when I think about what y' all do at user testing, I think that actually very much informed why we changed SparkToro. And, and it should. You know, if I were to show you our numbers, you. You would see. Casey doesn't like my. My co founder doesn't like sharing numbers publicly even. I sort of do. But I, I also have a lot of empathy and understanding for why he doesn't. But what I would say is, or what those number would, would show you was that SparkToro had sort of stagnated in terms of growth over the previous 16, 18 months prior to this redesign. And what we did, we, we worked with a consultant, someone you're probably very familiar with, Asia Orangio from Demand Maven. And, you know, Asia, I think, shares a ton of the philosophy that y' all have behind user testing and the idea of getting feedback. And she basically conducted a ton of customer interviews for us because Mike won. I'm sure this doesn't surprise you to learn if the founder does outreach to customers and asks people what they think, they're going to be like, oh, my God, everything's amazing. You're so great. Love it. No, you, you can't get honest answers. There's just like this human, I don't know thing. And, and it's probably. It's worse for me because I'm a known personality in sort of digital marketing world. And so a lot of people, you know, whatever, have even more of a. A desire to, like, make you happy. Yeah, make me happy or like, make me think that everything's great or what, Whatever. And I think that's part of my personality too. Like, I'm kind of a get along with everyone type of person. Well, except Republicans, but, you know, everybody else. And, and in, in this case, Asia talked to our audience, talked to our customers and found that people were using SparkToro to do things that we didn't think they were doing with the product. Like what we thought was the. We thought people went into SparkToro and for example, they would say, which YouTube channels, which podcasts, which pieces of content, which subreddits should I be contributing to pitching, paying attention to, where should I do my pr? There's some of that. Absolutely. It's not. There's not none. But a ton of our customers used us essentially for strategy and for pitches, and that's pitches to internally, to their Team externally to a client, pitch to their boss, like, trying to make the case for why they should be able to invest in a subreddit strategy or a Pinterest strategy or a YouTube strategy or whatever it was. And so Asia came back and said, you should make a product that is infinitely more screenshot able, way more visual, more chart and graph heavy and designed to be essentially like, show me that one graph that I can just click export or click screenshot, put it in my slide deck, show my. Show my. My audience, right, which is essentially boss, team or client. And that we. We are about to close our most successful month in like two years.
- [20:31]
So congrats. That's awesome.
- [20:32]
Yeah, she was. She was right. User testing is really important. I don't know if people know this. Maybe if you're a first time listener to the podcast, let me tell you, I can speak from experience. It really made a big delta. I looked at our. We use ProfitWell to sort of track our SaaS metrics, and it's one of those. For the last 16 months, there have been some, okay, months where we grew a little bit and some months where we shrank a little bit, some months where it was almost exactly flat. And it's just been disappointing. And then this month is, wow, that's great. Like, whoa, something happened, right? And the something that happened was we built the product our customers wanted, we solved the problem that they actually wanted to solve with our product, and it makes a huge difference. And there's like a ton more different things. You know, you mentioned the LLM stuff. One of the other findings that Asia had, which was. Which was immensely valuable to us, was that people struggled to conform to the three types of searches that we offered. So. So, like, when you go to SparkToro, I don't know if you played around with it, Mike, but basically you can, you can search for audiences. You could search for audiences in three ways. You could say, my audience visits this website, Plug, put in a website. You can say, my audience has these words in their bio or profile, right? So like, like mechanical engineers or interior designers or people who play Dungeons and Dragons, you know, whatever it is, right? And they put D and D in their bio, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like they love it or whatever. Cyclist, you know, like, like they're super into cycling. Or you could search by keyword. Essentially, my audience looks for florists in Ohio or, you know, whatever. Whatever keywords they search for in Google. And then SparkToro would go through our data set and essentially build an audience based on those three Options. But a lot of people want to describe their audience. My audience is 35 to 60 year old women who are amateur potters or, or what do they call it, People who are into, you know, pottery in Canada and they often sell their products on, on Etsy or at local pottery goods stores. Tell me how to reach them. And we were like, I don't know how to search for that audience inside SparkToro. And so over the last few months, Casey through some very smart sort of AI work on one side, but then the AI gives a response that Kasey has to match up to the database and he was able to do that in a way that, that really works. And so now you can go to SparkToro and just describe your audience the same way you would describe it to a friend or a boss or an LLM. And that produces, yeah, some really cool results. So that has gotten hugely popular with, with especially like our higher tier customers. It's only available at the higher tier because it's an expensive query right now, but we're working on making it available to any, everyone. Anyway, look, I'm telling you these specifics not to sell you on SparkToro, but to sell you on user testing and understanding your customers. Because if you understand your customers, you will sell more of your product. You will make a product that they use, that they like and that they recommend. And that is what's been happening. We didn't ramp up any marketing spend. We didn't do more marketing of SparkToro in the last month. It was people finding the product they actually wanted and needed and used, buying more of it and then recommending it to their friends and colleagues.
- [24:15]
Yeah, no, that's, that's phenomenal actually. Yeah, getting to the, the right audiences, especially when they're super niche, figuring out where they are is like super important. You talked about the lms. We talked about it a little bit earlier with closed gardens and stuff like that and them staying on a search engine. If we're, if you're a marketer, like who's doing mostly content marketing, let's just say you're building blog posts, you're building content, all of a sudden your traffic is going down to nothing. Let's give a little help to like that person's trying to talk to their boss and explain why their traffic is down and all that. How, how do you recommend that those marketers go back to stakeholders and talk to them about the changes and what they should really expect to see in their data and insights that they've been collecting traditionally versus what's going to change, you know, for them in the future.
- [25:01]
Oh gosh, okay. I think there's a few kind of powerful tricks to having those conversations successfully. I'm sure you know, many of these Mike, Right. Like you folks have to do a lot of this. One of the ones that I found to be quite effective is using a competitive angle which is essentially saying like, hey, this thing that I think we should do, whether it's, we should be collecting user feedback in this way, we should be having these conversations with our customers. We should, you know, undergo a customer an intensive customer research and you know, interview process. We should hire a third party consultant to do it. Is saying, hey, our competitor did this. And for some reason lots of executives and bosses and clients who would otherwise be like, no, we don't need that, we don't need that. As soon as they see, you know, a little chart with their, with the three companies that they're competing against, you know, and then the little chart says, well they did this check, they did this check and we didn't do this. X why aren't we doing that? That is extremely compelling to a lot of people. I think it's that fear of missing out. As an example, I don't know if you've watched a lot of the AI marketing lately. Right. But a ton of how, a ton of how like Anthropic which, which operates Claude or, OR Perplexity or OpenAI which operates chat G or Google, which operates Gemini. A ton of how they do their marketing is fear based and you're going to miss out. Your competitors are already using us. You are going to be left in the dust. Wall street isn't going to like your results unless you're adopting AI. That, that is how they're selling. The adoption of AI is through this sort of fear of missing out competitive angle. And it's effective. It works.
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Simon's Behavioral Economics 101. The fear of loss is far stronger than the desire for gain. Yeah, yeah.
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I mean I think this, this feeds into like a fundamental human psychology which is that the scarcity mindset is just part of our evolutionary history. Right. And so it's very hard for us to understand that that is not scarcity mindset is obviously disproven in a million ways and doesn't really exist. But it's very hard to understand how someone else gaining doesn't mean you lose. And as a result it's quite effective on, you know, on our emotional sort of monkey brains.
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Yeah. Oh my gosh, 100% I keep down on the floor behind me over here, Dr. Robert Cialdini's influence and he's got all the different methods of persuasion, models of persuasion. Scarcity is obviously one of them. Fear based, it's all in there. I highly recommend any more marketer grab that just to understand what you're up against. A lot of what you were just talking about is really the norms kind of being turned on their heads a little bit. Like this is what the norm was. We got to change things. You talked a little bit about this, obviously with your example of the pivot that you just made. Your customers are doing things you didn't actually know they were doing. That wasn't the most popular. You kind of reframed everything. When it comes to your thoughts on, on early feedback on ideas and concepts and innovations. Have your, I mean you're, you're obviously supporting and a huge advocate of this. You've made it very clear. Were you always doing things upfront and early or now do you have like even more of a, of an enhanced vision of like, yeah, we got to do stuff upfront to make sure that all that investment that we did is in the right way to use our product the way that our customers are going to use it.
- [28:50]
I mean, I'll tell you an embarrassing thing, which is that despite I don't think I've talked about this, I should, I should write a blog post about this or do a video about it. Despite being a marketer and someone who believes like I fully believe, and I have tens of thousands of case studies of evidence from the last quarter century showing that like marketing does make a big difference, right? How you position, how you place your message, how you get people's attention and engage them, that does make a difference. I'm not, I'm not questioning that, but I am, I am coming around to the belief that marketing is somewhere between 30 and 40% of the equation for most businesses in, in our category. In other categories, marketing can be 70 or 80% of, of sales and product is 10 or 20%. Anytime someone says, look, marketing doesn't matter at all product, you make the Pro a better product and people will adopt it. And to that I say, Adobe PDF, it's one of the worst products in its category. It might be the worst product that has ever been in its category, but it doesn't matter. There's too much adoption and momentum and marketing and power behind it. And so too bad you're going to have to deal with Adobe PDF for forever. And there's plenty of Other products like that. I think the United States healthcare system is a great example. But I do believe that in software as a service, where making product is. Casey and I were two guys who raised a tiny bit of money from private investors. We didn't even raise venture. And we built SparkToro on less than a million dollars of investment in about 18 months. Lots of people can build software, right. And I think that AI is making lots of those processes. It's not easy, but it is easier.
- [31:06]
Right.
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It's greasing a lot of the wheels for more software creation and faster software development. And yeah, product is the thing that really moves the needle. And we can see it, like when we make marketing changes, when we have incredibly successful marketing campaigns, we see a small delta. And when we make product changes, we see a big delta. Yeah, well, thinking about that product changes. Let me be clear.
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Go ahead, go ahead.
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Like the right product changes. Casey actually has been infuriated in the past, like, many times, because I've been like, hey, let's change this. And then he spends six months working on it and we release it, and it's. It doesn't do anything. You can make tons of product changes that have no impact, but the right product changes, the one that really serves the core of what your customers and audience and market needs and does it better than anyone else. There you go. That. Yeah, that's the insight.
- [32:10]
It's kind of funny that you say that prioritization is obviously a key and big organizations. I found it to be the most difficult thing to do because everyone's got their own incentives for the way they're compensated or what have you. Inbound traffic versus actual conversions versus average order value versus this, that everyone's measured differently. And traditionally no one ever asked the customer what they actually wanted. And so I loved when I started here at User Testing about four and a half years ago and discovered that we actually had a prioritization test type that could actually let the customers put their sticky notes on the magic quadrant. And, yeah, if you don't do what the customer's asking for, at least you can own it, you know, instead of just not doing it.
- [32:51]
I think there's a danger there too, which is we have. I think this is one of the brilliant things that Asia uncovered for us in her process, which was our customers told us they wanted things, and then we built those things and it did nothing for sort of the business. But then Asia sort of did these, like, interviews and watched them use the product and, like, got to the core of why they were doing the things they were doing. And so, yeah, that really changed.
- [33:31]
How.
- [33:31]
We thought about product prioritization and even how we conceived of ourselves as a company. Like, what are we, who are we for? And what are we doing for them?
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Yeah, you just nailed it. I was actually gonna ask something, and then you, like, led me right into it, which I love. When people do that, people traditionally in marketing think of, like, the touch point. Oh, I'm the first touch point. I just. I'm the newspaper ad, or I'm the banner ad, or I'm the Google AdWords ad or whatever it is. And then they go. They click it and they go into the site and it's someone else's problem after that. In the modern world, it's far more about a customer journey, and everybody involved in the customer journey has to be responsible kind of for all of it and understand what's upstream of you and what's downstream of you. And, you know, because the weak link, right, you're only strong as the weakest link in the chain. How do you sort of see marketers, you know, change? Do you see people changing their views to the entire journey, or are people still hung up on traditional. You know, I own the first touch point, and, you know, I'm covered.
- [34:28]
I mean, Mike, part of me, part of me says that is not the marketer's responsibility or fault. They. They are hired to do a job. And from all my years in especially SEO like that, like the first 17 years of my career, what I saw was pigeonholing and stay in your laning, like executives and clients. Right. When we're talking about agency business relationships. So both in house and agency side, it was always, you are an SEO. Don't tell me what to do with my branding. Don't tell me what to do with my positioning. Don't tell me what to do with my email marketing. Don't tell me what to do with my content. You know, well, content, they. They would let you in. Yeah, yeah, but, like, you have lanes that you had to stay in. And. And I think culturally, professionals in the marketing field are trained to stay in their lane. Even though almost all of them. I've met many marketers, they're smart enough to understand that every touch point, you know, the positioning, the brand statement, the product itself, how the product, you know, takes a user through the fl. The. What the product delivers in value, how that's talked about, all of those things have a massive impact, sometimes a bigger impact than the. Whatever ranking positions they get in Google or the content they Create on the blog or the, you know, promotional emails that they send, but they're not allowed to influence it. Right. They're. They're told to stay in their lane. They're trained on those specific things. And it just, I think that is the responsibility of the executive team, the founder and CEO, first and foremost. Right? Like, your job is to make smart decisions, and one of those big smart decisions is letting people stay outside their lane. Despite the chaos and messiness that creates. You should be surfacing customer insights and friction from all parts of your organization. That includes customer service. It includes your financial team. It includes your engineering team. If you leave product only up to product and marketing only up to marketing and customer service only up to customer service. And you have a team that gets customer feedback and they stay in their silo and, hey, quit messing with my engineering team. They're getting very frustrated with you. You failed. Right. That's your fault. That is not the team's fault. That is your fault and responsibility. And I say this as someone who. I ran a big team for a long time, a couple hundred people, and I don't think I was ever great at it.
- [37:32]
Well, and now you're taking a step further, even with SparkToro, and not even just creating an ad, but like figuring out where everybody is and, and where are those people and what are they doing on those places. So the marketer actually has to learn even a bit more about that. And you guys are providing that to them.
- [37:49]
Yeah, I mean, in, in a real way, there is a, There is a deep analogy between what, what your product and. And company does. Right. And what, what we're doing, which is essentially, hey, let's understand our audience and customer so that we can deliver a better product marketing for them and do this correctly, rather than sort of the siloed approach of, okay, you build what you want to build for the people that you think you're supposed to serve. We're saying, hey, let's talk to. Well, in your case, talk to. And in our case, passively observe the behavior of people. And, and this, you know, this speaks a little bit to what we were talking about with Asia's process, right? Where she watched people go use the product and, and saw what they actually did, which, which I know you guys are big on too. And I think, I think that is the power of SparkToro as well. Because if, for example, this is no offense to surveys and interviews, which are fine tools for other things, but if you survey someone and you say, hey, Mike, how did you decide to get Those glasses, right, the glasses that you're wearing.
- [39:08]
Yeah. Do you want the answer?
- [39:10]
Yeah, I'm curious.
- [39:11]
I was looking for, I actually had been looking at Warby Parker glasses because I see all those ads for like three glasses for $99. And then I went into the store and it really didn't. That wasn't the price point at all. And so I happened to be in Wegmans and I was looking at just the spinny thing, you know, with all the glasses on it. And they had these non traditional looking. Looked kind of just like Warby Parker glasses for like 35 bucks. And they were better than the little metal ones. I thought, well, yeah, I want to give my, give myself a new face, a more upgraded thing. And I just. And that's what I got them. I knew that I want something better. But yeah, I kind of was a little underserved by the marketing from another brand. And then I just sort of came upon them and I was like, yeah, I want this. And these are sav glasses.
- [39:52]
I, I think, I think this, this customer journey, you might, you might be accurate in like how, in describing your customer journey and how and how you get there. My guess is, and I don't mean this in an offensive way, but my guess is there are five to 12 other touch points that you had around things that influenced your decision to get a new pair of glasses at all, to be in Wegmans versus some other grocery store, to like, you know, whatever. Like all these different things that are very difficult to surface. And that customer journey is almost impossible to reverse engineer from a post purchase interviewer survey. But in a digital journey, you know, the, the devices that we have like, like the, the, you know, the way that SparkToro is basically powered is on clickstream data. So when, when my device or millions of devices visit URLs, that data is sent back to a source that Dados essentially buys from and collects and aggregates. They're anonymized. Right? So it doesn't say Rand Fishkin visited these websites and these URLs in a row, but it's kind of like the Nielsen TV families of the 20th century, right? It's just collecting all these URLs and journeys. And so someone will say, oh, you know, I was going to go to Warby Parker, but the price point was misleading. And so I went to Wegmans and got, you know, these glasses. But in fact, when we look at the URL Journey, we're like, oh my gosh, look, they actually visited three other providers they saw these ads. You know what they were following, these Pinterest boards they saw. They looked at subreddits for alternatives to Warby Parker. Like they did all these different things, but they didn't even remember that they did those things. And they comment, you know, they didn't comment about them. And so what Sparktoro is doing is essentially kind of the, you know, Asia's approach of like passively observing, like watching, just staying quiet and learning what people really do, even if they can't remember that's what they're doing, or even if they're not conscious of what they're doing. And I think that's really powerful.
- [42:10]
Yeah, don't just listen to what I say. Watch what I do. As we're rounding third right now, sort of heading halfway into home, I'll hit with one more. I think you just exemplified this the way you just sort of interrogated me a little bit there about my glasses and what have you. And I don't mean that in a negative way. You've said, you've talked about curiosity and how underrated of a skill that is, or perhaps even a deliberately constrained skill to the detriment of perhaps orgs. Let's do one final pitch to marketers to let them know how listening to real users and seeing what surprises you and shocks you really can shift the course of a campaign or product before you've invested too much money in it.
- [42:50]
Yeah. Gosh. I mean, at the heart of building something that people want and selling it to them in the way that they are going to engage with and pay attention to, at the heart of those two things, which are essentially the, the two core problems behind, you know, building a business is empathy. Right. This is caring deeply about someone else's experience and journey, understanding who they are and what they do and why they do it, their motivations, their preferences, their behaviors, and then being able to put yourself in their shoes when you are designing the experience that they're going to go through and designing the improvements in that experience, and that that experience includes all the marketing things they'll experience before they come to you and all the product things they'll experience after. After purchasing. I think that the, you know, one of the, one of the tragic things we're experiencing sort of culturally is this like denigration of empathy at a societal, political, cultural level. But as a marketer or creator or product person, CEO, you have to care deeply about empathy. If you think about why products have success in markets, empathy is almost always at the core of it, especially in innovations. So Google's big innovation in the late 90s was realizing that a simple interface without advertising that delivered solid search results, better search results than the other engines, and their visual design approach to it, right? Removing all the other junk from it, that in fact was a market maker for them. And I would credit their visual approach and their understanding of who their users were, which were early adopters of the Internet. It was the early adopters of the Internet that Google understood they had to serve. And because they serve those people, those people, literally people, you know, if you're young, you might not remember this, but people like Mike and I would literally go to our parents house, our grandparents house, our aunts and uncles, every computer in the office that we worked at, and we would change the homepage to Google. And we did that for a bunch of reasons, including that Google didn't like F up people's machines. They didn't take them to like spam and malware and all this kind of stuff. And thinking about that empathy for the user, the right person, and then how Google kind of marketed that, that was key to their success. If you think about why Apple's products were so incredibly successful, you know, when Steve Jobs sort of returned and they made the first iPhone and rolled that out, that is because it was all empathy. There was the innovation, but the innovation was not that big. There were plenty of device. I had a device that was very similar to this, but it had a physical keyboard and it did a few things. But the innovation of, hey, let's make this beautifully accessible to everyone, even people who don't understand technology at all, that really captured it. And the open sourcing of the App Store really captured this. So we could go through a thousand examples of this, but what I want you to come away with is that empathy for the people who are buying and using your product, who are experiencing your marketing, is the most powerful thing that you can do. And no matter how much Elon Musk rails against empathy, even the Tesla is an exercise in empathy. It really, really is. SpaceX is an exercise in empathy for, for sort of NASA and people who launch satellites and people who, who need that service. So don't, don't listen to what, you know, sort of these, these folks are saying, watch what they're doing. And what they are doing is having deep empathy and understanding of their audiences and customers and then serving them in the ways that are going to make a difference. And there's no better advice I can give.
- [47:20]
That's awesome. At user testing, we do talk about the empathy gap and what percentage of companies believe that they are truly empathetic to their customers? And then the huge gap, when you ask the same customers, they think the companies are empathetic to them, there's a massive, massive gap. And that's what we're trying to close. But that really brings us to the end for today. I just want to say, Rand, I've loved this chat. It's been awesome, you know, hopefully you enjoyed it too. Thanks for being here. If someone wants to learn more about, you know, you, you know, Rand Fishkin or Sparktoro or even, you know, snack bar game, snack bar, you know, studios, they'll learn about that and what's coming soon. Where, where would they go?
- [47:58]
Yeah, yeah. So SparkToro, you can go sign up for a free account@sparktoro.com. there's no free trial. You don't have to put in a credit card. You can just use the product for free. And if you want to follow sort of me personally in this, all the stuff I talk about, I am most active on Blue sky, where I'm Rand fish or on LinkedIn Rand fishkin. And if you're interested in playing a chef in 1960s magical Italy and foraging and fighting boars, getting some pancetta for your carbonara that you're going to make at your snack bar, you can check out the snack bar at the end of the world. That is snackbarstudio.com that is awesome.
- [48:37]
My wife and I used to play this game, Pizza Tycoon. It was one of those Tycoon series games. We loved it. Anyways, thank you again so much, Rand, and just have an awesome rest of your day and have an awesome weekend. Thanks for being here.
- [48:47]
My pleasure, Mike. Thanks for having me.
- [48:49]
Take care, sir.
- [48:50]
Mike McDowell
Want to keep the conversation going? You can find the show notes@usertesting.com podcast if you haven't already, don't forget to follow us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Overcast or Google Play, so you never miss an episode. And if you enjoyed today's show, please share it with a friend or leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And until next time, this is Insights Unlocked, an original podcast from User Testing.