Stories you won't hear anywhere else – because we won't record them, and we ask participants to keep speaker-requested details private (i.e. off social media).
You'll emerge a savvier, more well-rounded practitioner.
I attended the @sparktoro Office Hours hosted by @amandanat. The guest was @TheCoolestCool, CEO - Foundation Marketing.
To put it simply my mind was blown.
If you've never been on a @sparktoro office hours with @randfish & @amandanat
What have you been doing!
Seriously golden resource for all marketers. Get on the next one people!
We ask our speakers to present their stories unfiltered, including real numbers, financial figures, and ugly truths. That's because SparkTogether isn't recorded, and we ask all of our attendees to agree not to publicly share any pieces a speaker marks as confidential.
You won't find these presentations on Twitter, LinkedIn, blog posts, or TikToks. That's what makes SparkTogether so special – it's a once a year chance to hear these powerful stories, warts and all.
Welcome to SparkTogether! Your hosts will set the stage for the day, discuss the rules of engagement, and maybe — maybe — we can convince Rand to tell us a story he’s never told before.
Sometimes you have to lay off your own kool-aid so you can actually make good, objective decisions. When my team and I started working with one client, we started with a grounded, realistic approach… which resulted in growing their business 4x in monthly recurring revenue during the pandemic. Now we’re on track for 10x growth over 2 years. I’m not just proud of these results — I’m proud that our strategy reflects my core values as a growth marketer.
Of course, the road to this kind of growth wasn’t easy. I’ll tell the whole story, including the behind-the-scenes of what shaped my thinking today.
When one of Seer Interactive's clients asked for help getting health information out to the public during the pandemic, we pulled out all the stops. This wasn't just a client, it was a passion project: this was important work. We presented 60 pages of impeccable, time-consuming, arduous research. The client was… overwhelmed by information and underwhelmed by the lack of consulting. This is the story of how they almost walked away, how a last-minute re-framing of their business decisions saved the day, and the gory details (including the actual Excel sheet).
Over the years, we've been hired by multiple companies who struggle with the same problem.
Low social media engagement with their audiences.
We’ve often helped these organizations get their groove back after their competitors have started to steal social media market share. We've often been tasked with creating social media content that would help them stand out and drive results.
We helped one brand drive 10x growth (20k+ visits in less than 2 weeks) in their referral traffic from social and we helped the other brand reach all-time highs of Twitter followers and growth. We did this by studying their audiences, learning what content / threads they wanted the most and then creating / distributing that content. In this session, I'll share it all!
For years, I've worked firmly behind the scenes as a social media strategist and loved it. Keeping your head down and doing the work makes for a great employee but a 'meh' business owner. To grow my business, I needed to use the same winning strategies I use for my clients to gain visibility and position myself as an expert in my field.
When I heard about TikTok emerging as a search platform for Gen Z, I knew this was my opportunity to put my plan in motion. I hosted my own mini-focus group. I then shared the insights on social media. I knew the content would perform well, but I had no idea just how well.
My social media posts blew up. My LinkedIn post got over 2,000 likes. My Twitter thread got over 8,000 retweets. And my follower count...nearly 10,000 followers overnight. I was quoted in ABC News, PRWeek, and even the New York Times reached out to interview me.
And for the first time, I'm sharing my story, including insights from the Gen-Z focus group.
It's March 2020. We were completely screwed: sales were plummeting, and our manufacturing line was in danger of being shut down. Our customers were clamoring for a way to help with the pandemic and we didn't know what to tell them. Until one day, an MIT professor and his daughter, two folks in the Glowforge community, came up with a way to make doctors' medical masks more comfortable and more wearable.
Enter: Ear Savers. A pair of plastic pieces for these medical masks.
We figured, if Glowforge is screwed, we may as well go down helping people. Two weeks later, we launched Ear Savers to 2 million people, and we ended up saving our company. In this session, I'll give you the confidential data behind the launch and the campaign, and how these little plastic pieces saved our business.
I've previously worked in-house at Google, ESPN, and HubSpot, before working independently with clients like GoDaddy, Wistia, Drift, Podia, Flipboard, and Salesforce to develop, improve, or host their original shows. And in this session, I’ll detail my biggest-budget project ever: Help Scout's game-changing docuseries, Against the Grain. Go behind the scenes for a rollercoaster tell-all. You'll see never-before-shared details, documentation, and data — and hear the good and bad of bringing on external talent, developing and marketing a glossy new show, and the decision to kill the project, before ultimately shaping a brand new, multimillion-dollar media strategy around its bones. Whether you run a show or plan to launch one (or more), don’t proceed without attending this talk.
It started with the best of intentions: 97th Floor was helping Tuft & Needle to improve their search traffic and content marketing ROI by following a rock-solid checklist that had helped dozens of clients before. Then it all went wrong when the industry evaporated almost overnight. Here's the full story of how we messed things up — before turning it back around.
This is the story, well... two stories, of repositioning two different products, and how those experiences and the incredible outcomes changed how I do my work. First, the tale of an advanced "spreadsheet product" that was on the brink of failure. Yet, after a major re-imagining of its market positioning, it became the world leader in mobile device databases. The second is about a struggling CRM that turned its fortunes around with a seemingly small act of repositioning, ultimately leading to a billion-dollar acquisition. Each of these yield powerful and parallel lessons for anyone struggling to earn market traction with their product.
My agency was seeking illustrations for our web design clients and identified a huge problem. Diversity in stock illustrations was non-existent. I couldn't be the only one with this problem, so I decided we'd solve it ourselves. Within just a few weeks, I spun up BlackIllustrations.com. And not only did people search for these illustrations, they bought them. A lot of them.
Less than two years later, we have over 80,000 paying customers: Google, Adobe, Airbnb, HubSpot, and more. In this tell-all presentation, I’ll show you how we did it, walk you through the buyer journey, and even show screenshots of our financials in the Gumroad dashboard. If you've ever wondered how to take a side hustle to six figures, this one's for you.
I’m the illustrator and co-author of the bestselling books Big Feelings and No Hard Feelings. So I know all too well how hard it is to effectively market your book. I’ll tell you all about the marketing strategy that made Big Feelings debut as one of the top 100 books on Amazon (when 97% of books never even hit the top 200!). I'll also explain how I built a relatable brand that now has over 750,000 followers on social media.
On November 10, 2022, spend a full day with an inspiring collection of marketers, creators, and operators from eight-figure agencies, fast-growing startups, and small, indie businesses, too. It’s a 6-hour webinar-style summit with the Netflix experience. You don’t need to leave your office, couch, or bed (no judgment). There’s no expensive plane flight, no overpriced hotels with beds that just don’t feel quite right, no soggy fries for $20 in the lobby.
But, if you've joined our Office Hours events, you know there's an incredibly, passionate, active, lively community of marketers in the chat, sharing their own experiences and building on what the speakers present.
You'll hear from agency owners who fell into pits of unprofitability and nearly shuttered their practice. You'll learn about in-house marketers who took dying companies to industry-leading growth rates with a single campaign.
You'll experience the emotional rollercoasters of campaigns that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, and the occasional few who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
With SparkTogether, we're using our experience to deliver an exceptional day of outstanding programming, but we don't think that's enough.
To be worthy of your time, SparkTogether needs to provide value you can't get anywhere else. That's what we've built – an event whose format is wholly unique, focused on memorable narratives, told with passion by the people who lived them, with real metrics and outcomes revealed (even when those numbers tell an unflattering story). We think stories are the most memorable way to learn.
6 hours of exceptional value. One track — so you don't have to miss sessions.
And we're definitely not making any sessions longer than 30 minutes — because no matter how great a speaker is, after 30 minutes on a virtual stage, we all have flagging attention spans. This is one full day of single-track sessions. 10 presenters. Well-moderated Q&A. And our always-awesome (and also well-moderated) live chat.
Customers
SparkTogether is completely virtual, so you can watch from anywhere.
