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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.
We are entering an era where the things people are saying about you may become more important than the things you say about yourself. I think that's really scary, but my existential crisis aside, I believe there's something we can do about it. You can take a second right now to Google yourself and by yourself, I mean your brand.
So for me, I searched up what is SparkToro and who is Amanda Natividad? Now look at the snippet. Do you like what you see? What's good, bad, or fine? What do you want to see reinforced or what descriptions should be there? This is our starting point. Because Increasingly, people are forming opinions about your brand before they ever visit your site.
They do it through reviews, subreddits, best of lists, AI answers, snippets, and all the other public material floating around the web. Third party discussion is winning category visibility and AI systems can reinforce whatever public claims are easiest to retrieve and repeat. This episode is not about why that's happening, and actually, if you missed last week's episode called Attribution is Breaking, measurement needs to Grow Up.
That covers the why. So if you missed it, go ahead and check that out first. This episode is about what to do about your public record, because if the public record is shaping how people perceive your brand, then marketers need a playbook for strengthening that public record on purpose. I'm Amanda Natividad and welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
Before I get into the Seven Step Playbook, here are a few names I'll be referencing Will Reynolds, the founder of SEER Interactive, who's been doing a lot of smart work around GEO and AI search. Ross Simmons, the founder of Foundation, and he recently published a big piece of research on Reddit's role in B2B SaaS search.
I will also mention a recent search engine land article on why some content shows up in AI overviews and why some doesn't, and then I'm also going to bring up Alert Mouse, a Google Alerts competitor, and SparkToro, the makers of fine audience research software. All right, so step one, audit the story.
The internet is already telling about you. Before you create anything new, look at what already exists. Search your brand name, search your category plus your brand. Search your competitors plus your brand. Look at what comes up and look at the snippets and citations that show up first. By the way, if you need a better way to track your brand mentions, sign up for Alert Mouse.
It's a free Google Alerts competitor, but this actually works. You'll get a daily email digest of all your brand mentions and alert mouse even flags the biggies like major media mentions. Now in this audit, you are trying to answer a very simple question. What claims about us are already winning? Not what is true internally, rather what is actually visible.
This matters because repeated public claims can become disproportionately influential. Will Reynolds from SEER Interactive recently blogged about how one old negative review about SEER got serviced repeatedly in branded AI prompts because it was public and duplicated across enough places to be treated like Signal in Will's words, because it existed, and AI goes deeper than humans do.
AI found it. The key takeaway here, start by figuring out what the web currently believes. Now step two, treat third party surfaces like part of your brand footprint. Ross Simmons, research of Reddit in B2B SaaS basically says Reddit isn't just stealing clicks from best of keywords. It's showing up right in the middle of category discovery.
Which means a lot of buyers are meeting your category and maybe even your brand in a Reddit thread before they ever see your site. So those forums and review sites, keep an eye on them and get involved. Don't spam them and don't become a reply guy, but understand which third party services influenced buyer assumptions in your category and where possible contribute useful information there.
Oh, and by the way, do you know if Reddit specifically is where people would fathomable discover your brand? Because if you're not sure, you should search your audience in Spec Toro. Literally, you can type out a plain English query describing your audience like you would to a colleague, and you can see which subreddits, which social networks and search and AI tools your audience hangs out in or uses.
If buyers are meeting you or your category there first, those surfaces are part of your brand footprint, whether you like it or not.
Step three. Separate weak claims from strong facts. Once you audit the landscape, split what you find into two buckets. Bucket one, weak but visible claims, old reviews, thin comparisons, outdated summaries, past complaints, things like that. Bucket two, strong facts. You can actually support original data.
Customer counts your own case studies with your verified outcomes with real customers. You have those right? Note your. Own product explanations, expert points of view. The thing is AI and search systems are not good judges of truth. They're often working from what is available, repeated and easy to reuse.
That's a core lesson from Seer Interactives experiment, and it also aligns with search engine lands. Recent article that stated retrieval and citation depend on structure and extract ability, not just classic ranking strength. So your job in this step is not to complain about bad evidence. It's to take stock of all of it, good and bad.
Step four, publish facts. Only you can publish. Most brands publish generic top of funnel content that any competent intern or LLM could have drafted. But then they wonder why it's not getting cited or amplified. But hey, if you happen to be getting success with this, you do, you keep it up, but don't stop there.
What you really need to do is publish the stuff. Only you can credibly say your data, your category perspective, your customer patterns. Your explanation of how the product actually works, your receipts in Seer Interactives experiment, they found that when they published a page with specific retention data, those facts started getting cited.
That's the kind of content, I mean, actual facts that strengthened the public record. Step five, make your content easy to retrieve, sight, and summarize. So search engine land's recent piece argues that top rankings do not guarantee AI overview visibility and frames the problem as one of retrieval structure and citations.
They found that content is more likely to appear when it provides direct answer units, strong structure and visible expertise signals. So if you want your content to make it into the public record, make it easy to read and crawl. Put the answer high on the page. Use clear headings, write plainly. Include specific quotable lines.
State the claim and support it. Make the strongest parts legible to both humans and machines. Step six, refresh the public record proactively. One of the more brutal lessons from Seer Interactives experiment is that fixing the record once may not be enough. Seer found the effect of its public response was not necessarily durable, which is why the team moved toward a more centralized and maintainable source of truth.
The public record is not a one-time asset. It's a living system. So update your proof points, publish new data. Replace vague claims with specifics. Fill in the holes before weak third party material fills 'em for you. You're not trying to control the narrative. You can't, but you can Try to make sure the strongest available narrative is yours.
Step seven, our last step measure whether the public record is getting stronger. Look for things like are better sources showing up for branded searches? Are AI answers citing stronger facts? Are more prospects mentioning the right differentiators? Are weak claims getting displaced? Are branded queries increasing?
Are third party surfaces reflecting your real positioning more accurately? This is the work. Reputation management. You won't see outcomes right away, but you can track what's changing
right now. The goal is to improve what people find, read, infer, and repeat about you before they ever visit your site. So if I were to boil this down, the playbook is this audit, the current public record. Treat third party surfaces as part of your brand footprint. Identify the weak claims that are winning.
Publish better facts that only you can publish. Structure them so they are easy to retrieve and cite. Refresh the record continuously and measure whether the story the internet tells about you is getting better like it or not. Your brand is being shaped before anyone visits your website, and if you're not actively contributing to the public record, that informs that somebody else will fill the gaps.
Thank you for listening, friends. if you enjoy this episode and wanna see more playbook, booky framework type things like this, let me know, give me a shout or please leave a kind review that really helps indie podcasts like mine. So told then I'll see you next week friends. Bye.