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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.
[00:00:00] Amanda Natividad: I'm a little sick of talking about AI. Let's talk about something evergreen, or at least something that is now evergreen. I wanna talk about something that's been bouncing around in my head for the last few weeks. I think one of the biggest misconceptions about marketing is that success comes from doing more.
[00:00:19] More channels, more content, more dashboards, more optimization, just more. And I don't think that's true anymore. Actually, I think the opposite is closer to the truth. I think good marketing is choosing what not to do because what this is really about is opportunity cost.
[00:00:45] I'm Amanda Natividad. Welcome to Zero Click Marketing
[00:00:52] Every marketing decision has one. Every time you say yes to something, you're saying no to something else. And I think that's becoming one of the defining skills of modern marketing. Today, you can invest in PR, social media ads, AI visibility, YouTube, partnerships, events, community, creator marketing, or more.
[00:01:14] Always more. There's always another channel or tactic to execute, always another platform promising attention. We definitely don't have an idea shortage problem. The problem is that we have way too many perfectly reasonable ideas. And it's not that we can't identify good ideas anymore. It's getting harder to figure out which are the good ones to leave behind.
[00:01:39] We're all noodling on some version of the same question. Should I invest more in AI visibility? Should I focus on PR? Should I finally start that YouTube channel? Should I be posting every day? We keep asking ourselves which thing we should do and not asking which thing we should stop doing. After all, marketing isn't additive forever.
[00:02:04] Your calendar eventually fills up. Your creative energy drains. Your team gets overloaded. And then every new initiative starts competing with something else. That's something I don't think we appreciate enough. We don't choose marketing channels. We choose obligations. Starting a newsletter is not choosing email.
[00:02:29] It's choosing to sit down and write every week. It's setting a deadline and then sitting down to think, write, edit, and then hit publish. A podcast? That's not choosing audio. That's choosing guest outreach, scheduling, researching, recording, editing. Oh, and then there's also promotion, distribution, following up, repurposing.
[00:02:56] Every channel comes with maintenance, and maintenance is where strategies go to die when the afterglow of the launch is over, the real work becomes sustaining the efforts. I think this is one reason people become overwhelmed. They have too many promises they've made to themselves. Every should becomes another recurring meeting on your calendar.
[00:03:21] Eventually, you are spending all your time maintaining systems instead of creating anything interesting. One question I've started asking myself is really simple, "If I say yes to this, what am I saying no to? If I spend 10 hours learning a new platform, what didn't get those 10 hours? If I spend all week optimizing one landing page, which customer conversations did not happen?"
[00:03:51] Opportunity cost isn't always money. Sometimes it's focus, momentum, or just having enough energy left at the end of the day to think clearly. One thing that has helped me is using three very simple filters. The first is, is my audience actually here? Not theoretically, actually. Because if your buyers spend all day listening to podcasts and reading newsletters Why are you forcing yourself to make TikToks you hate?
[00:04:24] The second filter is can I sustain this? Not can I make one great YouTube video? Can I make 50? Can I publish every week for a year? Can I still enjoy this after the novelty wears off? Because consistency beats intensity almost every time. And the third filter is the one that I think is the most overlooked.
[00:04:49] Will this actually change my business? Notice that's different from can I measure it. In last week's conversation with Rachel Downey from Share Your Genius, one thing she said really stuck with me. She doesn't obsess over every newsletter metric because instead she's asking a better question. Would those metrics actually change what we do?
[00:05:13] Because sometimes we spend hours measuring something that we know we're gonna keep doing anyway. For instance, I have this podcast. If downloads fluctuate week to week, and they do, I'm not quitting the show. I record the next. Same thing with my newsletters, both my personal one and the one I run for SparkToro.
[00:05:35] If opens dip, it doesn't mean I'm ending the newsletter. Maybe I'm revisiting the format or the subject line, but I keep going. I'll cap this off with a personal example. People ask me all the time why I don't post everywhere, and the answer is, the real answer is because I don't want to. I like writing. I like speaking.
[00:05:58] I like podcasting, which to me is like recording mini audiobooks for your friends. Could I make short form videos on TikTok every day? Probably. Would I enjoy it? Absolutely not. I don't even use TikTok. And I think that matters more than marketers sometimes admit because audiences can tell the difference between someone creating because they want to and someone creating because they feel obligated.
[00:06:27] And I also think there's something freeing about deciding what you're not going to optimize. I'm not trying to squeeze another half percent out of every metric or attempt to win on every platform. I'm trying to build a body of work. Those are different goals. So maybe the question isn't what should I add to my marketing?
[00:06:47] Maybe it's what can I stop feeling guilty about? What channel can you stop pretending you'll eventually prioritize? What tactic isn't actually aligned with your business? Saying no isn't giving up. It's making room for saying yes to the things that matter. I think that's one of the lessons of Zero Click Marketing.
[00:07:11] The internet keeps giving us more places to show up, but that doesn't mean we have to show up everywhere. People don't remember brands because they posted on 12 platforms. They remember brands because they consistently showed up in the places that mattered with something worth remembering. So if there's one idea I leave you with today, it's this: Every marketing yes costs something else.
[00:07:37] Choose those yeses carefully. Thank you for listening to Zero Click Marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you took a few minutes to leave a positive review. It really helps indie podcasts like this one. See you next week.