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Zero Click Marketing is not about giving up on sales or clicks. It’s about accepting that influence often happens before the click — and measuring that influence more honestly.
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] Rand: All the things that happen in Zero Click Environment will eventually lead to the same thing that clicks led to, which is someone, someone who wants to buy some shoes, will buy some shoes, will they buy yours? That's determined by the environment of influence.
[00:00:22] Amanda: Rand I'm nervous to interview you for my podcast.
[00:00:25] Rand: I think you're required to say that.
[00:00:27] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:00:27] Rand: I have a feeling that every podcast host who's ever talked to me says that, and I don't know why. Because, 'cause I've, have I ever been on intimidating on a podcast? I don't know, because you are the, you're the digital marketing goat, so we are all nervous talking to you. I mean, I'm still nervous.
[00:00:41] Rand: I see. If someone is accomplished in a field, then they must be intimidating in some way. I don't know. It sounds
[00:00:52] Amanda: Mm-hmm.
[00:00:53] Rand: to me. Get outta here.
[00:00:54] Amanda: Oh, get outta here. Uh,
[00:00:59] Rand: is your show. I, I don't know what, I don't know what's
[00:01:02] Amanda: this actually is a show about upholding the patriarchy, so I'm a little.
[00:01:05] Rand: Oh yeah. That's why it says upholding the patriarchy with Amanda Natividad. You're gonna get so much tariff money.
[00:01:13] Amanda: Yeah, it's gonna be great. Everyone's gonna love it, but actually, if they're gonna hate it, it'd be great. No, but I do wanna talk about, um, obviously zero click marketing, but I thought this would be a fun episode because I, I really wanna cover the executive buy-in angle with you because you are an executive and you know, you speak, executive speak, but one thing I wa I wanna unpack first is, you know, so in the, so, so far in this podcast, we've talked about the problems that have come up in the recent, what recent, like six to eight years that have caused the need for zero click marketing, you know, so we've talked about disappearing cliques, um, dark social, the rise of ai, blah, blah, blah.
And then we've also talked about. Some ways to do zero click marketing. So sort of like, here's the problem, here's the solution. So I'm curious to hear from you, when you talk to somebody who, who is bought in on zero click marketing, like the executive, the the CMO, or even the CEO, who generally agrees but doesn't know what to do next, what do you tell them?
Like what are some of the sort of mental models that you start with to help someone get more aligned with a zero click marketing strategy?
Yeah, I actually think, uh, 80 to 90% majority agree that it's real, that the problem is real, that it's actually happening, that the. Big challenges are, okay, so what do I do and how do I prove that it's working? uh, that's the hardest thing to overcome. And I think that requires two things. The answer to every marketing question, Amanda, as you know very well, is depends. It depends. So it depends on your industry. It depends on what type of, uh, audience you're targeting. It depends on how you sell and who you're selling to. If you're a company that needs to sell, you know, hundreds of thousands of a product every week to sort of make, make your global minimums, gonna behave differently to someone who needs to sell product a week, B2C in a very bespoke context or enterprise SaaS where they need to close 10 deals a year to be a $50 million a year business like it. It's totally different. The things that you should invest in are different. The ways you should measure it are different. The how you experiment is different. So it's a hard, that's a hard question to give like one answer to. Well, let's start talking about different ways to measure. I mean, because there are different ways to go about it and it doesn't. There isn't one size fits all right. The whole, it depends thing. Um, 'cause it'll depend very much on, I think depends right on your sort of sales cycle, um, how much your product is, whether it's a product or a service or software first versus physical good versus service, right?
I think those are all different. So maybe it's how do you start thinking about measurement?
[00:04:20] Rand: I think the biggest thing is to. After you've identified, is my ideal customer, here's what's gonna sort of influence them to be aware of us and to want to buy from us. Now you're doing things to have that influence. Maybe, maybe that's something on social media. Maybe it's conferences and events.
Maybe it's podcasts webinars. Um, maybe it's in-person meetings that you set up through relationships. Maybe it's pr, like the list is so long. It's, um, yeah, it would take us the whole episode to get through, but what, once you've decided on that like set of tactics that you want to try that, that group, next, the next problem is saying, how do I prove to myself that it worked?
And that's where you have to let go a little bit. You have to let go of the idea of proof. will not be proof, especially if you're doing multiple things at the same time, which you probably should be. example, let's say. Um, what was the, what was the shoe brand that you emailed me today?
[00:05:25] Amanda: it was Rothy's.
[00:05:26] Rand: yeah, refuse.
Right? So like, let's say for example that their CMO says, Hey, we did this. I don't know how you heard about them, but let's say it's an influencer campaign, right? And they reached out to you and they were like, Hey Amanda, would you cover us in, I don't know, your newsletter or your social or whatever? you said, yes.
How do they prove if I go and buy a pair of their shoes. it came from you and that it was part of that influencer program. They can't prove it. correlate it. They can time series it. They could do a geographical program where they're like, Hey, we're gonna do West Coast influencers. They're mostly connected to other West Coast people.
They might be connected to some Canadians and some Mexicans and some people in Panama. And like those sales will also come in, but we won't be able to prove it. But we're gonna mostly focus on this. And then we're gonna see if time series lift happens in this geographic area after we do this campaign.
And, oh look, it did. So we probably think that, ha, that this had this much lift or impact, but it could have been something else. Maybe you got featured in a big press piece at the same time, maybe you suddenly started appearing in AI answers. 'cause ChatGPT retooled their model. Maybe Google's AI overview started featuring you who, who knows, right?
Like you can't prove a tactic. And so instead what you're doing is. What I'm doing trying to convince executives that they have to go back in time to the same way they used to do marketing and their predecessors did marketing in the 20th century where they take bets on sources of influence. They have tactical impact, they measure the impact, and then they show correlation, not causation. And that is really uncomfortable for a lot of digital marketers.
[00:07:11] Amanda: You know what's interesting is I think what you're bringing up too is. That's how they track success. You know? I mean, at least like in general, right? Or more broadly. That's how they track success for out-of-home advertising,
[00:07:23] Rand: Hmm.
[00:07:24] Amanda: Like for billboards, that was originally how they did it. I mean, obviously not originally they didn't have like digital dashboards or whatever, but I mean like they would look at incremental lift in revenue in certain key regions, right?
Where they had the billboards and that's what they do today, just in a more modernized way.
[00:07:41] Rand: the frustrating part is it is quite easy still to get. Um, a lot of big brands especially to like, Hey, you should buy a Super Bowl ad. Or, Hey, let's run a radio campaign. Let's do tv. Let's do out of home, um, let's, let's do, you know, print media or, or let's do a big Google ad spend. And those things, like, they seem to have this comfort level with, I, I'm saying Google, but I mean Google display. Like they seem to have this comfort level with, oh, those things are hard to measure. We're gonna do correlation. It's lift based. But then as soon as you flip the conversation to, let's do an influencer campaign.
Hey, let's do pr. Hey, let's do some whatever, SEO or or AI, SEO, or content marketing, suddenly their brain flips and they go, oh, everything must be perfectly attributed. You can't attribute it. I'm not gonna invest in it. Show me the referral traffic.
[00:08:45] Amanda: so there's something I've been thinking about that I've been. Said it, I've said it a couple times in presentations, but I haven't really fully, um, wrapped my arms around it, which is really just thinking about leading and lagging indicators to help you gauge how well you're doing it.
Things like zero click marketing, so for like. A leading and lagging indicator might be the leading one, might be the thing that happens short term, right? So it might be you optimize a post for social, like you optimize for it to get seen and to get commented on. So maybe a leading indicator would be what's the quality of discussion like.
Right. And quality meaning like, are people engaging with the content in the way that they're meant to? You know, like, are they answering the question that you ask? That's like, that's, that's one thing. And the lagging indicator, you know, might be, I mean, I'm making this up, right, so it wouldn't be perfect, but a lagging indicator might be somebody who converts, you know, three months from now and is like, oh, I've been seeing all your great LinkedIn content.
I mean, that's a very perfect scenario. That doesn't always happen. It rarely happens.
[00:09:55] Rand: right?
[00:09:55] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:09:56] Rand: we, we know in our brains it's real. It's just hard to measure. We've all done it before, right? I started reading this blog. I followed this person on Instagram. I subscribed to their YouTube channel. I got their email newsletter and then, and then I signed up for their Patreon, and now I'm paying them five bucks a month, you know, to support their content efforts.
And then I'm buying products that they recommend, like we know it's real. has a long cycle. It can't be proven. It's correlation, not causation, but I, you're totally right that there's lagging and leading indicators, whether those things can overcome the, I need to prove all my digital marketing to myself is, is hard to say.
But you know what I, when it comes to that conversation, I always think, oh. You know, for every person who says, I can't convince my boss, my team, my client, myself, to make that investment for everyone, everyone who says that, I always think, ah, that's kind of great 'cause it'll leave more room for the rest of us. Right? Like,
[00:11:02] Amanda: Nah, that's true.
[00:11:04] Rand: You know, you don't believe in this thing. Fine, like
[00:11:09] Amanda: Right, right. Because those are the people Yeah. Those are the people who are like, well, I know that if I spend more on my, my, um, SEM ads, that I will get a positive return on my investment. And I'm like, cool, you have fun with that. Go spend your 30 K for the month on that, or, you know,
[00:11:27] Rand: Exactly. Exactly. And,
[00:11:28] Amanda: yeah.
[00:11:29] Rand: they recognize and we recognize that every platform that's like that, where you can just throw money at it and see. Uh, essentially a, a return on ad spend of any kind that the return on ad spend shrinks every year, and that the margin that you make will shrink and that it will be more expensive next year than it was this year.
And, and so someone else who's investing in zero click marketing and, and like not only believes this stuff but actually internalizes it and makes the, um, know, makes these correlation based measurements, they're gonna win. They're go, they're going to over time you because they get better margins.
They get, a higher return on investment. They can afford to put that money toward or toward product improvements or growth, whatever. It's.
[00:12:23] Amanda: Let's talk on the, about like the other side of this. So for people who aren't really bought into the concept of zero click marketing,
[00:12:31] Rand: Yeah.
[00:12:32] Amanda: I'm curious about, do you have conversations with people where, um, not, not, you know, not that they're denying the decline in, you know, in in referral traffic.
Not so much that, right, but, or, or there is that too.
[00:12:48] Rand: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
because in certain industries for certain products or um, you know, websites or whatever, there is still growth, right? And so there's so much growth that it outweighs whatever Google is answering in its results or whatever, AI's taking away whatever social's taking away. And so they, for whatever reason, right?
Like they, they think, hey. Randy and Amanda are full of it. I can still get traffic. Here's the proof. Look at my, up into the right graph in Google Analytics. I, I mean, like there are a few people who are still growing their traffic. I'm not telling you to stop trying to grow traffic, but I, um, it's, it's very few and far between.
[00:13:35] Amanda: Yeah, I think it's more that like. It's not the game that it used to be. It's not, it's not as dependable as it used to be. It's not as predictable as it used to be. And now we're just at the point where like, you can't really count on that. Like if it, it might be working today, but the clicks are declining.
The referrals are declining and you know, as we know, the long tail of the web right, is getting less and less traffic to from the, um, you know, the top 100, what a top 200 or so websites.
[00:14:07] Rand: So I, you know, in terms of the conversation to have with people who are not bought into zero click, I, I think thing you have to do is sort of say, well, let's assume, let's assume in this scenario, first off, that for some reason I want to convince them, right?
[00:14:23] Amanda: Right. Usually you're like, I don't care. Do.
[00:14:26] Rand: Exactly like. You know, I think that my job and responsibility in the, in the world of marketing, which has been very good to me in, in my career, is to give back. Right? And to say like, Hey, I am supposed to uncover research and recognize trends and then report on those things in a way that I feel the, there, there's very little media that effectively does this, um, first party research directly. Uh, the way that I'm. I dunno, willing and able to do it and, and because I have this giant platform, you know, I think it's my job to use that platform to continue to inform marketers, um, just as marketers helped me early in my career. And so that is, it has an indirect financial benefit. Like hopefully people go to Alert Mouse and SparkToro and they're like, oh yeah, these are cool products that Ann's working on. Um, a lot of it is not. Not financial at all, right? It's just sort of do good deeds for a community. And when I'm trying to convince someone, right, because I, I really want to help them or, or someone in their organization needs my help convincing them. AI has been really helpful. It really has because people who, even people who reject the idea of zero click marketing are almost always on the AI hype train. And so I can use that. Their sort of un erring, you know, belief, overwhelming belief in the future is gonna be, ai, AI's gonna be everywhere it, it'll take all the jobs. You know, like I can often use that to say, well, what's the logical conclusion of an AI that summarizes content? And sort of extracts that from all the websites and presents it directly the interface, whether, whether that's chat GPT or Claude or Google AI mode or whatever they, they, they use that often helps get through that barrier of, I don't believe in zero click.
[00:16:31] Amanda: That's interesting. So then it becomes sort of, okay, fine. If you don't believe in that, well the future is ai or like we are fast moving towards that. So don't you want to kind of. Like, like a benefit from that? Like you want to get mentioned? Yeah, totally.
[00:16:52] Rand: for, for a ton of those people, it's the, like, I know you're, I know that everything in your world is, Hey, let's ride this AI wave. And that has been quite helpful. Zero Click Marketing obviously started, and the zero click problem started well before the current era of ai.
You know, post-ChatGPT-3 or whatever. But since its rise, it's been easier to get a lot of these people who previously were holdouts to get on board.
[00:17:22] Amanda: it's funny that, that AI has, it's like given us a new mental model to be like, Hey, here, here's how you can kind of. Directionally track the success of your zero click marketing. we can't look at AI rankings, right?
Or LLM rankings. It isn't that. However it is that if you are doing the marketing that where you are getting mentioned in the right places, if you're, if you're starting the conversations you want to be starting, if you are talking about your product and the way that you want it to be talked about and you're getting noticed for it.
Then you will show up at some point in those answers when, when people are prompting it with the relevant prompts.
[00:18:06] Rand: I really want to but realistically I don't want to do, I want to see someone else do, uh, more research to, to prove that, right, to basically show time. And again, hey, you get mentioned in these places. You will see your visibility in Google AI overviews or chat GT's responses rise commensurately, and here's the degree to know, which that happens.
And here are the, sort of number of times you would need to be mentioned. Here's how often the models are getting refreshed so that you're in the sort of training data as opposed to just in the retrieval augmented data. I think that this is, you know, it's another. Core problem of, of our industry is there's just not that many people producing good research on all these topics.
[00:18:54] Amanda: And so as a result, a lot of people don't recognize the trends that are happening. And then even, when they do, they get misled by snake oil salesmen, wait. I do wanna talk about, then I wanna talk about your AI visibility research
Because that just came out recently
[00:19:14] Rand: I mean, admittedly I'm not a super research person, so I don't know the scope or like, um. How much people have tried to do this type of research. I know that since you published yours, we've seen a couple of other people replicate some things, like run additional prompts to see if they can replicate some version of like AI rankings, like within chatGPT or Claude or whatnot.
[00:19:40] Amanda: So maybe tell us first how you decided to run this research and then what you hope to learn from it.
[00:19:49] Rand: I mostly, mostly started it because. As I was using AI tools myself, I could see that every time I sent exactly the same prompt, different answers back, which made me think, what is the dang point of tracking your rankings or visibility in this thing if it's gonna give you random answers based on a statistical lottery of words that frequently come after other words. So I started seeing this was. year especially, um, this huge rise of AI tracking companies, like tons of, I'm sure your LinkedIn, um, dms have the same thing, mind you, which is like, Hey, you know, we are an AI tracking tool. Will you promote us for a thousand dollars? Put up a post on, you know, LinkedIn or whatever.
I have so many of those. I think there must be a hundred companies who sent me an email or a dm and then everyone, you know, I'm like, I don't do that. Like you, you have mistaken me for someone who will, would be willing to do that. And funny that they all believe in influencer marketing.
That's pretty great. Um, the, those companies, um, I thought basic immorally stealing money from marketers and marketers, budget. Like, I thought that they were, I thought it was a scam, right? Like the whole AI tracking thing was just, that industry was just a scam industry because these results were so, um, randomized. then, you know, um, my buddy Patrick, Patrick O'Donnell, who's, who's one of the co-founders at, uh, gum shoot, he, I can't remember if he was at Gumshoe or he, he might have joined it later, but basically, you know, was over for dinner one night.
'cause we played Dungeons and Dragons together. And so he's over and he's, he's like, well, yes, they're random, but they're random in this way that is measurable. So like, let's do some research together. I think I suggested the research. Like I was like, oh yeah, prove it to me. And, uh, you know, he, he, for those of you who play d and d, he rolled a 20 on his charisma check and convinced me that, um, you know, we should, we should work together on this.
So we, Essentially recruited a huge panel of participants just from like LinkedIn and Threads and um, Sky. Like I put up a post and said like, Hey, fill out this form if you're willing to help me test this thing. wanna say I maybe put up three or four posts total and I got 600 volunteers,
[00:22:27] Amanda: Wow.
[00:22:28] Rand: that tells you a metric ton of people are really interested in this.
Like
[00:22:33] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:22:34] Rand: care. I think they're also worried that they're getting scammed, that this industry is baloney. So with those 600 volunteers, we asked them to run the same AI prompts, uh, I think a total of 14 of them over and over and over again. So we got, uh, between 70 and a hundred responses to every prompt that we sent.
You know, we send different groups, different prompts, whatever. We asked them to do it in chat, GPT in Claude and in Google. We did not ask them to try and do any depersonalization or like any of that junk. We just wanted to see how wild. Lead different, the answers could be in normal environment, like if you just asked a random hundred people, what would you get back then they copied and paste all their responses into a, a Google form survey, and then extracted all the brands and products or, you know, location, right?
Like, like La Volvo Dealerships was one of 'em. So we like extracted the name of every LA Volvo dealership from the answers. We had to do a normalization process. Poor Christie had to like dig into the data and make, make sure that if, you know, it was like whatever, Brentwood, Volvos, or Volvos of Brentwood, like, oh, that's the same one.
We need to make sure that's that way. So, and then we did this big analysis where we were like, okay, how many times would you need to ask chat GPT exactly the same thing, to get the same answer in the same order? And the answer is like a thousand. Like you just, you know, it's super random. Exactly what I thought. Ma. Making the rank tracking of ai, baloney
rank tracking, like your position,
[00:24:12] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:24:13] Rand: In ChatGPT, you're number two in Claude. That's Bs.
[00:24:18] Amanda: Right.
[00:24:18] Rand: Fully bs. You should not believe it at all, There were brands that showed up more that more often than other brands with statistical commonality.
Enough to make us believe, to make me believe, despite my skepticism, that that's real. Like the percent of times you are visible is a real metric. brands were visible close to a hundred percent of the time, well, maybe 90% of the time, right? So like if you ask are the best, um. You know, headphones for travel or something, you know, like, like Bose is there almost every time in almost every model. That's pretty good. Sony's there almost every time. In almost every model where they fall in the rankings and which particular model is mentioned can be different. it's something, right? Like it does mean something that's something you can track over time. So this, the results of this experiment have been, um. You know, massive citations, tons of people talking about it. And I hope, I hope it has also changed a bunch of minds of people who were gonna throw way too much money at rank tracking instead made them go, Hey, I should question how my ai uh, uh, you know, tracking system is running their prompts, how many times they're running them, whether they're getting statistically significant data, how they're getting those prompts, like all those right questions.
[00:25:44] Amanda: Right. So I mean with this research we saw that where we've, we're seeing that it is worth looking at your visibility and I mean, it seems like people can kind of can replicate this to some extent simply by running their own queries over and over again, right? Like
[00:26:02] Rand: you totally could. Yeah,
[00:26:03] Amanda: yeah.
[00:26:04] Rand: It's a, you know what is crazy about this is like, These tracking companies, that software can be useful, especially if you don't wanna build it yourself. But if you're light on budget and you've got a tiny bit of coding and Claude skills, you could definitely get like Claude to write you the code to build a one of these quite fast and then just sign up for all the APIs and pay them. That's a plenty fine solution.
[00:26:29] Amanda: Oh, that's pretty smart.
[00:26:30] Rand: Yeah. Who knew You
[00:26:32] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:26:33] Rand: To track ai.
[00:26:35] Amanda: And then you could, you, you could kind of figure out your own sort of benchmarking for certain industries, right? Like if you're, you know, like looking at the research right now, we know that I'm setting your research, which is like average visibility for the top three most mentioned brands were, you know, at least 60%, right?
So then maybe you could think about benchmarking for like B2B SaaS or whatever. You know, your industry is.
[00:27:02] Rand: any topic. I think the other interesting finding, the thing that probably surprised me the most was that synthetic prompts,
[00:27:13] Amanda: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:13] Rand: the, you know, prompts that AI came up
[00:27:17] Amanda: Mm-hmm.
[00:27:17] Rand: Versus the ones that we asked our human volunteers to come up with. 'cause we, we did another experiment where we asked, think, I think I wanna say like 150 plus people gave us their prompt for, a B2B and a B2C query. Uh, and or, you know, recommendation, product recommendation. And when we compared all of the answers to all of those to synthetic prompts, meaning prompts, that AI came up with fake prompts that an AI came up with around the same topic, with the same intent. The difference in brand visibility was null. And this is, this is because the AI tools do this like query fan out thing. So essentially if you ask for the best headphones, it doesn't matter the. You know, you could very wildly vary how you ask, like, I'm looking for the top headphones, or I want the five best headphones. Or I'm looking for a ranked list of 10 headphones that will function in this way. Or I'm buying for a family member.
Let me tell you about their backstory. And then, and then ask. All of those will produce similar, you know, lists of recommendations. And because of that, You know, I overcame my skepticism that you could use AI to come up with synthetic prompts, like fake prompts, that you could then run to check brand visibility around a topic, which is kind of exciting.
Like it's kind of great that to know that you can do that because it means you don't, don't necessarily have to pay, you know, a clickstream data provider, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to get real prompts every month. You probably want to do that once or twice, maybe once a year, but it's not, it's not as essential as like knowing Google search volume,
[00:29:05] Amanda: Hmm.
[00:29:05] Rand: is super important for if you're trying to track SEO.
[00:29:08] Amanda: Cool. Um, all right. I feel like we can kind of wrap, tie this part with a bow, right? Like for zero click marketing, if you are wanting to figure out some kind of indicator for success. You could look at AI visibility. Don't count on the rankings, but you can look at it, you can prompt it, you can build your own sort of AI tools to help you track it.
I do kind of like the democratization of that, that like it's not that hard to do. Um, yeah.
[00:29:41] Rand: uh, gumshoe is a good product, right?
[00:29:43] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:29:44] Rand: I, I put a bunch of screenshots in the research. You can see that even before we did the research, their methodology ended up aligning with how it looked, how it seems to work. So, you know, credit to Patrick, like he's a good dude.
He's a fun d and D player, and a good product builder. Um, so you could check them out if you're interested in that. And then, you know, like. Apply the same logic I would tell people, Amanda, I'm sure you would too, apply the same logic to whatever you're tracking Instagram. Like, Hey, look at your comments, look at your view count, look at your impression count, look at your like count, look at your follower growth over time.
Then try and correlate that with your sales. If you're trying to track, um, you know, YouTube, you look at your uh, views and watch time and. Um, you know, subscriber rate, if you're trying to track Reddit, you see, see the same thing, like all of these platforms have some metrics that they give you, and you can then see, hey, it looks like we're improving, we're lagging, we're falling behind. don't have to be on every one of these platforms, but there's probably two or three that make a lot of sense for you and your industry.
[00:30:52] Amanda: Yeah, probably. And if you need help figuring out how to. Uncover those reports. You could talk to Claude and work with it to,
[00:31:04] Rand: yeah,
[00:31:05] Amanda: I mean, you could, I mean, we're rolling her. I, you're kind of shaking your head, but I'm like,
[00:31:09] Rand: I'm like, my one fear around this, I think, I think if you already have good numbers, good tracking systems set up. Um, good data and you feed that into an LLM and you ask it for sort of like the correlation. You can get pretty good results right now, but if you're like, Hey, build me something that tested this.
Like, you, you can get a
[00:31:30] Amanda: Oh, right.
[00:31:31] Rand: Yeah.
[00:31:32] Amanda: What I was thinking was, and I was playing around with, with Claude for this, I was basically prompting it to help me pull reports in Google Analytics for, for SparkToro, and it was telling me like, okay, click here, do this, go to this dimension. It was like, oh, great. So then, then I can run that report and then I can see myself.
Like, okay, this, I, I, I know what I'm looking at and like I know this is the correct report. And then exporting it, giving it to Claude and being like, Hey, can you tell me what some of the top blog posts are, um, in this timeframe with regards to whatever, you know, like giving it some parameters. And then it'll pull, it'll bring back some recommendations or, um, give some top line thoughts on what's working and what isn't.
Now that being said, this also works because I know what I'm looking for and I know what I'm reading. I know what, you know, what I, you know what I mean? Like I would be, I would be, and this might just show my ignorance here, but I would be nervous about doing that for someone else.
[00:32:37] Rand: Hmm.
[00:32:38] Amanda: Like, I don't know their true marketing world and their content world and what they're doing day to day.
I'm comfortable doing that for SparkToro because I know what we're doing and I know what's performing well. So if Claude or whatever LLM were to hallucinate something, I would,
[00:32:56] Rand: catch it.
[00:32:57] Amanda: yeah, I would know. I would be like, oh, that's not true.
[00:32:59] Rand: Yeah.
[00:32:59] Amanda: Um, but yeah, it's still useful though.
[00:33:02] Rand: think this is why AI tools. Have not affected employment. It's because you, you know, maybe they've added some productivity or like some opportunity, but I don't, I don't see them replacing human beings. Like, you still need people to check. You need people to tell them what to do. You
[00:33:21] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:33:22] Rand: to tell them why to an, you know, what they're analyzing and, and then interpret the results and do something with that. Like, you can't just be like, Hey, uh, Claude, why don't you do marketing for me? And then just walk away. Like, nope. Doesn't work.
[00:33:36] Amanda: No All right. I think we can kind of wrap up here. Were there any, like any myth busting you wanna do around zero click marketing?
[00:33:45] Rand: Uh, zero click. Marketing does not mean zero sales. In fact, it doesn't
[00:33:49] Amanda: Yeah.
[00:33:49] Rand: sales will decline eventually. The whole. All the things that happen in Zero Click Environment will eventually lead to the same thing that clicks led to, which is someone, someone who wants to buy some shoes, will buy some shoes, will they buy yours?
That's determined by the environment of influence, but it, they're not gonna, oh yeah. You know what? Google AI mode really solved my problem, and I no longer need anything to put on my feet. That's, that's not, that's not what's happening. another big one is that zero click is just, um, Google. It's not, in fact, I would argue that search is one of the places that is least affected, even though it is substantially affected by zero click, it is least affected um, content consumption world where like we used to go to blogs and websites. And subscribe to their emails and like read the blogs every day and go to little forums and, know, read news and all that kind of stuff.
And now we're just getting all that summarized by on TikTok, people on Reddit,
[00:35:01] Amanda: Hmm.
[00:35:02] Rand: Hacker News. If you're in there, uh, you're, you're way more likely. Everyone is way more likely to go and click on the comments on Reddit. Than they are to click the website that the post on Reddit links to at for the original source.
And that's just, that's just how people are, right? Like people are, um, wanna stay in the platform that they're on now. And the platforms obviously have trained us all to do that. So if you think Google is the only one that's a myth.
[00:35:33] Amanda: that is well said. All right, friends. Thank you for listening to or watching Zero Click Marketing. We'll see you next week.