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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.
There's a tension I see all the time in marketing, a lot of marketers overvalue polish. They want the post to look right, sound right, and they obsess over the image carousel before it goes out into the world. And a lot of marketers overvalue volume, they'll tell you to just ship it, polish more and stop overthinking it.
Of course. The easy answer is why not both? Why not be both polished and prolific? And yes, in theory that would be ideal, but that's not really where most people get stuck. Most marketers are not struggling with effort. They're struggling with judgment. They don't know what's good enough to publish and what actually needs more work.
So that's what I want to talk about today. For the next 11 minutes or so, we are going to live in the tension between fine and good.
I'm Amanda Natividad. Welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
Polish is not the same thing as value and volume is not the same thing as value Either. Polish can make something look valuable, a beautifully designed carousel, a tightly edited video, a polished presentation.
It's signals effort, and it signals care, which absolutely can help, but it does not guarantee that what you made is actually useful. And volume can feel valuable too. If you're showing up constantly, publishing regularly and keeping the machine moving, it can create a sense of momentum. It can make you feel productive, but you can publish a lot and still say very little.
So if Polish is not the answer and volume is not the answer either, then what is, I think the bar is usefulness. In a zero click environment, your content often does not get a second chance because the content is the destination. So the question is not, is this polished enough or have I published enough this week?
The questions are, is this useful and is this useful on its own? Would this be worth someone's time? And when I say someone, I think that part really matters because that someone is your audience, but it's not your audience at their laziest or most distracted, you should assume the best version of them.
Maybe that means someone like you, but younger, someone smart, sharp, who pays attention to the world around them. After all, you're listening to this podcast, of course, you're paying attention. Because part of making good work is respecting your audience and their time. If you assume your audience is gullible or easily impressed, you will make worse content.
You'll under explain or you'll overexplain obvious ideas. You'll confuse performance for substance. You'll polish a turd. But if you assume your audience is thoughtful and capable, You start asking better questions to yourself. You ask whether this is actually saying something, whether it offers a useful example, a sharper framing or a perspective they can use.
So how do you know what is good enough? Here's a simple test. Strip everything away. No design, no formatting, just the idea. Maybe it's just you and the text editor. So, I hate to use Amazon's workforce as an example here, but I do think they got something right. Amazon has long used written memos instead of PowerPoint.
In many internal meetings, Andy Jassy wrote in Amazon's 2024 shareholder letter that the company stopped using PowerPoint in internally in 2004 because slides were easy for the presenter to prepare, but harder for the audience to use to understand the real issues. So they moved to narratives of up to six pages.
Jeff Bezos also described the practice of silently reading the memo at the start of meetings as a kind of study hall. That's basically the test. If you took away the visuals, the formatting, the transitions with the underlying idea still hold up.
Would this still be worth consuming? Would this still teach a smart person something useful? Would this still help them see something more clearly? If the answer to any of these is no, you don't have a Polish problem and you don't have a volume problem, you have an idea problem and more Polish will not fix it.
More volume will not fix it either. To me, something is ready to publish when it has at least one real thing to offer. So it might be at least one of these three things. One. It helps them see something more. Clearly, it's a non-obvious insight. Maybe it's something that typically takes someone months or years to realize.
Two, it helps them better understand something. Maybe you're offering a clear concrete example like in a case study, or you're defining a helpful distinction between multiple ideas, three. It helps them do something better or faster. So maybe it's a step-by-step or it's a framework for how to do something.
It does not need to be perfect. It needs to be clear. It doesn't need to be long, but it needs to be long enough to offer context and insight. It does not need to be beautifully produced. And hey, if this is a text-based social platform, all you need is the type text. It does need to give the audience something that they didn't have before.
That to me, is a difference between content that fills the space and content that earns attention. Here's where I'll use myself as an example, and it's not because I want to be self-referential, but you know, I have receipts. So if you look at my LinkedIn you'll see how my content does this.
Scrolling through my most recent posts at the time of this recording. I posted some original research from Spark Toro about what actually influences people and how it's not Google search that does it. So that helped my audience see the problem with attribution more clearly.
Another one of my posts dove into a Spark Toro feature that helps you see how an audience's chat, GPT versus Google Search Usage reveals their intent and AI tools versus search tools. So that insight helped people better understand our Spark Toro tool. It also just helps 'em do a better marketing. Now I'll be the first to say my content isn't perfect.
Most of my posts are also text only, and yeah, I have a Canva account, but I rarely make social media graphics with it, and not all of my posts go viral. In fact, few of them do. But what these posts do is create a body of work founded on how to do marketing. That isn't over-reliant on just performance marketing or just SEO Driven marketing or just brand marketing.
I mean, that's my whole thing. Zero click marketing friends. Anyway, I think where a lot of marketers go wrong is that. They don't spend enough time thinking about how their campaign is actually useful or how their content is actually useful. Maybe they start with Polish because they want the prettiest landing page, or they start with volume because they're eager to fill a content calendar.
They optimize for consistency, output, and shipping fast, but neither of these approaches holds up for very long. If I had to simplify the hierarchy of useful marketing content, I'd put it this way. First usefulness, then clarity, then volume, and then Polish. Usefulness is non-negotiable. Clarity makes sure people can actually understand the thing.
Volume matters because you do need enough reps to build a body of work, and you do need to get your messaging out there frequently, and Polish can absolutely help, but Polish is a multiplier. It's not a substitute. It can improve a strong idea, but it cannot rescue a weak one. Not even the juiciest hook can save a weak idea, or if it did, I would wager that you'd be appealing to the wrong audience anyway.
This is especially true now in our previous click driven world, you could sometimes get away with making the packaging do a lot of the work. You could create something that looked compelling enough to earn the click and you'd actually get the click because you weren't getting algorithmically suppressed, and the platforms back then weren't traffic.
And back then you'd have been able to track it and repeat the campaign again. But in a zero click world, the value has to be there sooner. If it isn't, you lose the moment. No attention, no amplification. so, if you are trying to decide whether something needs more refinement or whether it's ready to go, I wouldn't start by asking whether it's polished enough.
And I wouldn't start by asking whether you've posted enough lately. I would ask. Is this actually worth a few minutes from a smart person? I respect if yes, publish it. If no, keep working. That is not perfectionism, that is discernment. I know. I know. You're probably thinking, okay, but how do I know whether something is working?
Next week I want to talk about a related problem. The way marketing trains us to overvalue what is easiest to count, because sometimes the thing that looks best in the report is not the thing doing the most work. That will be next week on zero click marketing.