2 builders who never spoke to each other

Audit the channel you are entirely absent from

Spend half an hour putting the top sources your audience uses for search, social, forums, podcasts and prompts beside your own plan, and mark where you spend, where you publish and where you are simply missing, because one absent surface can break the whole journey. Study what they pay attention to away from social entirely, and check first whether the marketing problem is actually a product problem.

The method

1. 01

   Run a half-hour audit: put the top sources for search, social, forums, podcasts, keywords and prompts beside your current plan and mark where you spend, where you publish, where you chase mentions and where you are absent.

2. 02

   Audit for the channel you are entirely absent from, since one missing surface breaks the whole journey.

3. 03

   Study what your audience pays attention to away from social entirely: listen to the podcasts they listen to and ask customers outright who influences them.

4. 04

   Check whether the marketing problem is actually a product problem before you spend on promotion.

What it returned

• 70

  Rand Fishkin puts it at roughly 70 percent of the time, using a bank that thought it needed to publicise its high-yield savings account when the rate simply lost to the ten banks buyers were comparing it against on Google, ChatGPT, Bankrate and Reddit.

• SparkToro frames this as the exercise anyone can do today, then splits the follow-up by role: demand gen tests developer-native surfaces, brand checks how the product appears in Claude and Perplexity, partnerships courts AI-engineering shows before the obvious big names.

• Rand Fishkin's bank example fails because buyers were getting their information from Reddit, from newly popular personal finance podcasts and from newsletters where nobody had written about the brand at all.

Sources

• 3 Common Social Media Mistakes That We Don't Talk About EnoughSparkToro · sparktoro.com · Writing for your peers, not your audience · 2024-12-16
• How We'd Market to Software Developers at Startups - SparkToroSparkToro · sparktoro.com · What we’d actually do with this · 2026-06-04
• The 7 Marketing Problems Pinball-Shaped Buyer Journeys Create - SparkToroRand Fishkin · sparktoro.com · Transcript: · undated