feat: add SparkToro as audience research tool

Add SparkToro integration guide, registry entry, and references in
customer-research skill. SparkToro reveals where your ICP spends time
using clickstream, search, and social data — essential for finding
podcasts, YouTube channels, subreddits, and websites your audience
engages with.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Corey Haines
2026-04-01 13:50:02 -07:00
parent 7c8c087486
commit b902ed2d79
4 changed files with 199 additions and 4 deletions
@@ -282,6 +282,61 @@ Comments on review videos are especially valuable — these are people actively
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## SparkToro (Audience Intelligence)
SparkToro is a behavioral audience research tool. Instead of mining individual posts and comments, it aggregates clickstream, search, and social data to show what your audience does at scale — what they read, watch, listen to, follow, and search for.
### When to Use SparkToro vs. Manual Research
- **SparkToro first** when you need to understand where your ICP spends time, what content they consume, and which influencers they follow — it answers these questions in seconds with aggregated data
- **Manual research first** (Reddit, G2, communities) when you need raw language, exact quotes, emotional context, and the "why" behind behavior
- **Best together**: Use SparkToro to identify which podcasts, subreddits, and websites matter, then go mine those sources manually for voice-of-customer language
### Key Queries to Run
**By competitor:**
- "People who follow @competitor" — reveals shared audience affinities
- "People who visit competitor.com" — shows what else they consume
**By audience description:**
- "People who frequently talk about [topic]" — finds audience behaviors
- "People whose bio contains [job title]" — profiles a role-based segment
**By your own audience:**
- "People who visit yourdomain.com" — understand your actual audience
- Compare against competitor audience profiles to find gaps
### What to Extract
| Data Type | What It Tells You | Use It For |
|-----------|------------------|------------|
| Top websites visited | Where your audience reads | Content partnerships, guest posting targets |
| Top podcasts | What they listen to | Podcast guesting, sponsorship decisions |
| Top YouTube channels | What they watch | Video content strategy, ad placements |
| Top subreddits | Where they discuss | Community participation, Reddit ad targeting |
| Search keywords | What they Google | SEO and content topic planning |
| AI prompt topics | What they ask AI tools | Emerging content opportunities |
| Social accounts followed | Who influences them | Influencer partnerships, co-marketing |
| Demographics | Who they are | Persona building, ad targeting |
### Source Weighting
SparkToro data is aggregated and anonymized — it shows patterns, not individual opinions. Treat it as:
- **High confidence** for behavioral data (what they visit, follow, search for)
- **Medium confidence** for demographic data (self-reported, may be incomplete)
- **Not a substitute** for qualitative research (doesn't capture language, emotions, or the "why")
### Limitations
- Free tier: 5 reports/month, shallow results (top 510)
- No public API — all research done through web interface
- Skews English-language, US-centric
- Shows what audiences do, not why — pair with qualitative sources
See [tools/integrations/sparktoro.md](../../../tools/integrations/sparktoro.md) for full tool details and pricing.
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## Organizing Your Research
Use a simple tagging system across all sources:
@@ -319,6 +374,7 @@ Not all sources carry equal weight. Use this guide when assigning confidence lab
| Survey (multiple choice) | Low-medium | Artifacts of the options you provided |
| NPS verbatims | Medium | Correlates with score; prompted by the survey moment |
| YouTube/TikTok comments | Medium | Skews toward engaged viewers; social performance |
| SparkToro audience data | Medium-high | Aggregated behavioral data; strong for "what" but not "why" |
| Job postings | Low-medium | Aspirational, not necessarily reflective of current pain |
### Confidence Labels in Practice