Summary: <br> How to reach out to Rand Fishkin:<br> <a href="https://www.facebook.com/rand.fishkin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> </a> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/randfishkin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> </a> <a href="https://twitter.com/randfish" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"> </a> <a href="https://sparktoro.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"></a><br> Throughout his career, Rand Fishkin has always aimed to help businesses improve their marketing campaigns. Most widely recognized as the founder of Moz, Rand continues to expand his impact with the creation of a new software company, <a href="https://sparktoro.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">SparkToro</a>.<br> With a rich understanding of the challenges digital marketers face and a keen eye for opportunity, Rand honed in on the absence of a marketing tool that provides useful insights about specific target audiences, most notably data showing which sites are most commonly visited by those audiences.<br> To fill this void, Rand and partner, Casey Henry, founded SparkToro with a vision of aiding marketing efforts by “making the publications, people, and sources that influence any audience more transparent.”<br> SparkToro remains a work in progress, but early successes have shifted attention to Rand’s underrated business philosophy and non-traditional business structure. On this episode, Rand explains what Zebras are and why they are consistently more successful than Unicorns, how he and his partner designed the SparkToro business structure, and when marketers can expect to start benefiting from Sparktoro.<br> What Is SparkToro?<br> Over his career, Rand has noticed that digital marketing budgets are often wasted because marketers are unable to predict how to reach their target audiences directly. Budgets are often squandered as marketers purchase ad space on broad-audience platforms, such as Google and Facebook, where brand messages often go overlooked among the heavy competition.<br> Rand and his small team are still developing SparkToro, but once completed, the software will help brands improve outreach efforts, get better amplification from sources relevant to target audiences, and ultimately achieve better returns on marketing efforts by providing marketers with easy access to all the data they need about the audiences they want to reach.<br> Results will display data like what podcasts and blogs audience members subscribe to, which social media influencers they follow, and what websites they frequently visit.<br> How Does SparkToro Work?<br> Rand and his team have not settled on a final design for SparkToro, but the data aggregation necessary to build their software is well underway. Similar to political pollsters, the SparkToro team began their data conquest by conducting surveys. These survey results reveal how niche groups of people behave online.<br> Rand points out that, while these SparkToro surveys are unlikely to pick up data from every single target audience member online, SparkToro’s data will be accurate in showing statistically significant patterns representative of missing data from the same group.<br> The SparkToro team is also gathering data from other key sources, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, and any website where an email is registered with a user profile. With data aggregated from various internet sources, each profile held in the SparkToro database is more likely to be accurate and complete.<br> Profiles found through SparkToro are intended only for market research to learn about an individual's interactions with a particular industry. For this reason, Rand has designed all search results to hide any irrelevant or private information. Even the most complete profile displayed through SparkToro will omit personal details like address or phone number.<br> SparkToro: Unicorn or Zebra?<br> Even with an intricate and effective product,
