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Zero Click Marketing is a marketing strategy podcast about content marketing, audience research, and how brands grow when clicks matter less. Hosted by Amanda Natividad, Chief Evangelist at SparkToro, the show explores how marketers reach audiences, build influence, and earn attention in a zero-click internet. New to the show? Start with Episode 2: What Zero Click Marketing Actually Is.
[00:00:06] Amanda Natividad: We marketers say we want good strategy. Then we turn around and optimize for whatever's easiest to measure. And those aren't always the same thing.
[00:00:16] Amanda Natividad: I'm Amanda Natividad. Welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
[00:00:24] Amanda Natividad: A lot of marketing decisions get made not because they're the smartest decisions, but because they're the easiest to defend in a meeting. The dashboard says traffic is up, organic search looks like it converted well.
[00:00:39] Amanda Natividad: That LinkedIn post got a lot of likes. Great. I'm not against any of those signals, but none of them automatically mean the work was strategically important.
[00:00:50] Amanda Natividad: Easy to see metrics can create false confidence, and I think that's one of the reasons so much marketing gets shaped by reporting instead of reality, and it shows up on every channel.
[00:01:04] Amanda Natividad: Social media marketers chase likes because likes are immediate and public. Email marketers get weirdly precious about open rates because they're fast and easy to report on. B2B teams overvalue attributed pipeline because it looks clean in a board deck. The broader pattern is that we keep mistaking visible proxies for strategic outcomes.
[00:01:30] Amanda Natividad: We keep falling in love with the metrics that are the least awkward to explain.
[00:01:36] Amanda Natividad: Let me start with the clearest example though. SEO. When a lot of leaders say they wanna invest in content marketing, what they actually mean is, let's make content for SEO, and I get why that happens. Google looks huge in analytics.
[00:01:52] Amanda Natividad: It looks high intent, it looks attributable. It looks like the obvious winner. The logic becomes, if Google looks like the best performing channel, well we should make more content for Google. Here's the trap, though.
[00:02:06] Amanda Natividad: Sometimes a channel gets credit for capturing demand when it didn't actually create the demand, because someone might hear about you on LinkedIn, on a podcast, at a conference, or from a friend at happy hour.
[00:02:20] Amanda Natividad: Then later when they're ready, they Google your brand name or a phrase they associate with you or even the category you've been teaching them about. And then they click, and now Google gets the credit. The dashboard says organic search performed. The spreadsheet says search converted. But maybe Google was just the cashier.
[00:02:43] Amanda Natividad: Maybe the other channels did the persuading. I see this at my company, SparkToro. Pretty often we'll have a big burst of signups to the tool, and then if I cross reference our Google Analytics with our calendars, I can often see the correlation between my colleague Rand Fishkin or I keynoting at a conference or presenting on a highly attended webinar, and then that activity showing up in the numbers a few days later.
[00:03:12] Amanda Natividad: In that moment, it would be very easy to look at the analytics and say, ah, yes, Google did it. But no, that would be way too neat. What likely happened is that someone saw my colleague Rand or I speak, got curious, maybe told a coworker, and then searched for us when they were finally ready. Search captured the demand, the keynote or webinar helped create it.
[00:03:41] Amanda Natividad: That's a very different story. Now, quick caveat, I'm not saying these metrics don't matter. Page views, rankings, search traffic, these are real signals, but they're a means to an end. The problem is when those proxy metrics stop being directional inputs and become the whole strategy. That's when you end up making content for the dashboard instead of for the audience.
[00:04:10] Amanda Natividad: It's also, I think, why so much marketing starts to feel repetitive or weirdly over-optimized because it is. It was literally built to perform in reporting.
[00:04:23] Amanda Natividad: I've had a different relationship to content for a long time, and I didn't have the clean language for it back then, but I knew what I was trying to do.
[00:04:34] Amanda Natividad: Years ago at Fitbit B2B, my team was all about what I now call content as a service. Content had a job to do. It had clients to serve. Written case studies directly helped our sales team close deals. I spent weeks focused exclusively on case studies—engagement content, which is to say content focused on helping our customers get the most out of their software.
[00:05:02] Amanda Natividad: It helped with retention, sure. But it also made customer success’s jobs a little easier. That work mattered even if it wasn't the kind of thing that lit up a flashy dashboard. And I think that's part of the problem.
[00:05:18] Amanda Natividad: A lot of the most valuable content in a business is not the sexiest content in a report.
[00:05:25] Amanda Natividad: Think about it. A case study probably isn't your highest traffic page. A customer education doc isn't going to rank for a major keyword, and your webinar isn't going viral. I mean, my webinar isn't either. And yet, these pieces can make the sales conversation easier, reduce friction, and build trust.
[00:05:50] Amanda Natividad: They can improve retention. They can give your audience the language they need to explain why your product matters. They can help customer success stop answering the same three questions every single week. That counts. Actually—let me say it with more conviction—that should count more.
[00:06:09] Amanda Natividad: I wrote in a blog post a while back that if you want to judge content quality, you have to look beyond the typical stuff—page views, rankings, the easy metrics everyone reaches for first. Instead, ask better questions. Did the content get shared off platform in ways you can't fully track? Did it spark thoughtful discussion?
[00:06:36] Amanda Natividad: Did people start repeating your phrasing? Did the content inspire another whole new marketing program?
[00:06:43] Amanda Natividad: Was it economical? As in, did one piece do multiple jobs? Those are much better questions.
[00:06:51] Amanda Natividad: Off-platform sharing is a big one. Some of the most meaningful distribution happens where your analytics can't see—Slack threads, group chats, DMs, a coworker forwarding your newsletter, somebody dropping your article into a team channel with “this is exactly what I've been trying to explain.” That's influence, even if Google Analytics is acting like it never happened.
[00:07:16] Amanda Natividad: Quality of discussion is another one. If your content generates thoughtful replies, nuanced questions, strong webinar chat, good event conversations, or follow-up emails from smart people—that's a signal. Content that makes people think harder matters a lot more than low-context traffic.
[00:07:37] Amanda Natividad: Adoption is another signal I love. If people in your industry start using your language or copying your framework or repeating your way of seeing the problem, that's not fluff—that's influence in action.
[00:07:54] Amanda Natividad: And then there's my favorite category. Does the content serve multiple stakeholder goals? Because the strongest content usually does more than one job.
[00:08:05] Amanda Natividad: It can help SEO, sure. But it can also help lifecycle, sales, customer support, product marketing, or even PR.
[00:08:16] Amanda Natividad: That's how I've tended to think about content for a long time—not as a blog post floating in the void hoping for page views, but as an asset with responsibilities. Content should pull its weight. And if the only thing a piece of content can do is maybe rank eventually, I'm sorry, but that's just not a very ambitious vision for content marketing.
[00:08:42] Amanda Natividad: That's another reason I like the idea of being economical with content. If you create a meaty asset—a report, a white paper, a webinar, a customer story—you should milk that thing for all it's worth. It should feed multiple channels, support multiple teams, and create multiple opportunities. One strong idea should be able to travel.
[00:09:07] Amanda Natividad: This is how content gets way more interesting. It's one that's not shackled to SEO, because content can do so much more than rank. It can build affinity and earn subscribers. It can lead to press coverage and partnerships. It can make your audience remember you, trust you, and—let's be honest—look smarter in front of their boss. And when someone looks smart in front of their boss because they quoted you, they're a lot more likely to choose you later when they're actually ready to buy.
[00:09:38] Amanda Natividad: That's a much bigger job than “please rank for this keyword.”
[00:09:42] Amanda Natividad: Now I get why we overvalue what's easy to count. A lot of us work in environments where we have to explain ourselves to people who are not close to the audience and not close to the work. So of course we reach for the neatest possible proof. Of course we want the clean chart. Of course we want the attributed conversion path.
[00:10:03] Amanda Natividad: We want to look like rational, disciplined professionals. I do too.
[00:10:08] Amanda Natividad: The risk is that once you start rewarding only what's easiest to count, you slowly train your marketing team to make safer, narrower work. You train them to chase legibility. And what they're chasing isn't usefulness or memorability or real influence—it’s just legibility.
[00:10:45] Amanda Natividad: Those aren't the same thing. But marketing is awkward. Buyer journeys are awkward. People hear about you in one place, ignore you in another, remember you three weeks later, search for you when they're half distracted, ask a coworker, and then finally show up as if your last-click report just revealed a grand truth.
[00:11:02] Amanda Natividad: It didn't. It just revealed the last visible step. That's useful information. It's not the whole story.
[00:11:12] Amanda Natividad: So what do you do with this? I don't think the answer is to throw out easy metrics. I think the answer is to demote them.
[00:11:40] Amanda Natividad: Keep them, watch them, sure—but stop treating them like the main character. Then add richer signals to your reporting. Talk about where content got traction off platform, even if it's anecdotal. Talk about the quality of the responses you're getting. Talk about whether the content actually helps sales, customer success, product marketing, or lifecycle.
[00:12:04] Amanda Natividad: Call out when a piece inspired another program, format, or campaign. Note whether it gave your audience language, changed how they thought about a problem, or made your product easier to explain.
[00:12:16] Amanda Natividad: And yes, you may have to train leadership a little bit. Here's what that can sound like: this content did more than drive traffic—it gave the sales team a stronger proof point to use on their calls. Or this webinar didn't just generate registrations—it drove a measurable burst of branded search and signups in the two weeks after.
[00:12:40] Amanda Natividad: Or this piece isn't our highest traffic asset, but it's doing work for retention, customer education, and support efficiency all at once. Or your email marketer could talk about which campaign drove replies, not just opens.
[00:12:59] Amanda Natividad: That's still measurement—but it's better. It's measurement in context, and that actually helps you make decisions instead of rewarding whatever was easiest to count.
[00:13:02] Amanda Natividad: Especially now in a zero-click environment where so much influence happens before the visible action and outside the neat little path your software can track.
[00:13:20] Amanda Natividad: So here's a takeaway: easy-to-measure metrics are not useless—they're seductive. And when you let seductive metrics drive strategy, you start creating content for the dashboard instead of for your audience. The work gets narrower, safer, maybe a little more reportable—but less useful.
[00:13:28] Amanda Natividad: And I don't think the goal of content marketing is to be easy to report on. The goal is to make something that works.
[00:13:28] Amanda Natividad: Thank you for listening to Zero Click Marketing. I will catch you next week, friends. And if you liked this episode, I would super appreciate if you took the time to leave a review—that helps indie podcasts like mine, and it also makes my day a little bit better.