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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 and Co-Author of the book, "Zero Click Marketing," 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: It has never been easier to create mediocre content. No, literally, if you want to make a video, write a newsletter, launch a podcast, start creating on social, the production barriers are basically gone. Today, you don't need fancy equipment. You don't even need to be that good at writing or editing yet. AI can get you surprisingly far.
[00:00:23] So if I were a wannabe creator today, I wouldn't spend that much time worrying about tools. I would worry about whether I have anything worth saying.
[00:00:34] Amanda Natividad: I'm Amanda Natividad. Welcome to Zero Click Marketing. I've been thinking a lot about the creator economy lately, and in particular, how much it has changed.
[00:00:45] For a long time, when we said influencer, there was a pretty specific image that came to mind. Someone attractive, someone aspirational, incredible skin, toned body, maybe even a BBL, and they're on a Bali vacation with a private pool, or at least cooking in their pristine all-white kitchen. And obviously, those creators still exist, but the creator economy has grown up.
[00:01:12] We now have creators who are medical doctors, financial analysts, entertainment lawyers, defamation lawyers, employment lawyers, honestly, lots of specialized lawyers, and more. We have people building audiences around really specific areas of expertise. That's particularly obvious in B2B. In June 2026, LinkedIn launched Creator Marketplace, a product specifically designed to help brands find and work with professional creators.
[00:01:44] LinkedIn says 82% of B2B marketers believe creators increase credibility with decision makers and 70% say buyers rely more on peer voices and experts than on brand produced content. So clearly somebody thinks there's money here. But I think the interesting part is why. Because we're simultaneously living through this enormous explosion in content production.
[00:02:14] Everyone can make more stuff now, which means merely making stuff becomes less impressive. The scarce thing becomes having a reason for someone to care about what you made. Maybe you have deep expertise, you've done something unusual, or you're just exceptionally good at explaining something complicated.
[00:02:37] But there has to be something there. And I think that's one of the most important shifts happening in the creator economy right now. As content gets cheaper, credibility gets more valuable. LinkedIn's own research points in this very direction. In its 2025 B2B marketing benchmark, 55% of B2B marketers said they were already using influencer marketing and marketers said authenticity and credibility were their top considerations when choosing influencers ahead of things like raw reach.
[00:03:15] Which brings me to the marketing side of this. Influencer or creator marketing is zero-click marketing. Creator marketing has exactly the same measurement problem that so much modern marketing has. You can pay a creator, you can see the impressions, measure engagement. Maybe you have a tracked link or a promo code.
[00:03:40] Maybe you can even attribute a handful of signups. And then eventually someone asks, " Was it worth it?" And there is rarely one perfect number that answers that question. Someone might see three different creators talking about your company, never click any of their posts, Google you two weeks later, read a Reddit thread, ask ChatGPT about you, and eventually buy from you six months later, attribution be damned.
[00:04:08] So instead, if I'm a marketer paying a creator, I want to be really clear about what I'm actually buying. And before I even get to my three criteria, there is one question which decides if the opportunity is worth pursuing. Does this person have the authority with the audience I actually care about? Not how many followers do they have, it's do the right people care what this person thinks?
[00:04:38] A creator with 15,000 followers who is deeply respected among cybersecurity leaders might be dramatically more valuable to a cybersecurity company than a generic business influencer with half a million followers. You need the right audience and credibility fit Assuming those things are true, here are the three things I would evaluate.
[00:05:01] Number one, message transfer. Can this person communicate the idea you want associated with your brand? And importantly, can they say it in a way that sounds credible coming from them? Because I don't want to hire a creator and hand them eight approved talking points like I'm programming an animatronic spokesperson.
[00:05:24] Part of what I'm paying for is their interpretation. Maybe I'm trying to establish that my product is the easiest solution in the category. Maybe I'm introducing an entirely new category, or I'm trying to change how people think about a problem. Did that idea transfer? Did this creator explain it in a compelling way?
[00:05:46] That's valuable even if nobody clicked, and this is one reason creator marketing starts overlapping with PR, thought leadership, brand marketing, and even word of mouth. I'm paying to put an idea into the world through a person people already believe is worth listening to. LinkedIn's 2026 research found that 83% of B2B marketers surveyed said credibility matters more than traditional brand messaging.
[00:06:18] That is a pretty strong argument for letting credible people actually sound like themselves.
[00:06:24] Number two, audience saturation. This one is really interesting to me. Let's say I hire one creator in my space to talk about my product. Cool. Their audience sees it. Some people remember it, most probably don't.
[00:06:40] Now imagine I have enough budget to find three, maybe even five credible people who overlap with my target audience, and all of them talk about my company within roughly the same week. Your audience can start thinking, "Gosh, these people are everywhere." That feeling is incredibly powerful, and you don't necessarily need enormous reach to create it.
[00:07:06] You need concentrated reach among the right people. If I'm selling to 20,000 specific people in the world, I would rather have 4,000 of them encounter my brand three times than spray a million impressions across people who will never buy from me. That's classic zero-click marketing. The desired outcome isn't necessarily click this link right now.
[00:07:30] The desired outcome might be remember us, understand what we do, believe that people you respect take us seriously. LinkedIn says 56% of B2B buyers who use creators rely on creator input during the final stage of the buying process to help validate recommendations, which makes sense to me. By the time you're actually shopping, familiarity matters. You've heard of that company. That matters.
[00:08:02] And number three, asset value. This one is wildly underrated. If I'm paying someone to make a video about my product, what exactly am I buying? Am I buying that one post or am I buying a marketing asset? Can I repost the video, cut it into a couple clips, embed it on my website?
[00:08:26] Can I use the creator's explanation of my product as inspiration for my own messaging? Can I amplify their original post with paid media? Obviously, you have to negotiate the appropriate rights for those things. In LinkedIn's own creator marketplace, creators explicitly control how sponsored content is used, which is a good reminder that usage rights should be part of the deal rather than an assumption you make afterward.
[00:08:52] But I think marketers dramatically undervalue this part. Suppose I spend $10,000 on a creator campaign. If I'm judging that investment entirely against the impressions and clicks generated by one post, $10,000 might sound expensive. But if I got the creator's distribution, which includes their endorsement on video and in text, clips I can use, a link back to my website, a testimonial my sales team can use,
[00:09:22] and language that helps me understand how a credible third party naturally explains my product. Now I'm evaluating something very different. I've created an asset with a much longer life than the original post
[00:09:38] And by the way, this also means you probably shouldn't choose creators based only on distribution. Someone might have a smaller audience but be phenomenal at making things. They might understand your product unusually well. They might create something so useful that you're still using pieces of it six months later.
[00:10:01] That creator could easily outperform someone with five times the reach. So zooming all the way back out, I think we're entering a very strange era of the creator economy. We are going to have more content than humanity has ever had, a stupid amount of content. AI will make it easier to write it, record it, edit it, translate, repurpose, and distribute it.
[00:10:29] And I don't know that that would kill the creator economy. I think it changes what the creator economy rewards. Making content becomes table stakes. What matters more is expertise, taste, lived experiences, and a reputation for being right or at least useful matters more. And for marketers, I think that means we need a better way of evaluating creator partnerships.
[00:10:59] Of course, you should measure the measurable stuff. Track impressions, engagement, referrals, use promo codes. Yeah, yeah, but do all of that. But don't confuse what you can easily measure with everything you bought. Ask whether the message transferred, whether you created concentrated awareness among the right audience, whether you came away with assets you can keep using.
[00:11:25] And most importantly, ask whether you borrowed credibility from someone who actually had some to lend. Because when anyone can create content, creating content isn't the advantage. Being someone worth listening to is That's all I have for today. Next week, I'm going to republish this episode I did. Well, you haven't heard it yet, I don't think.
[00:11:50] That's all I have for you. If you enjoyed this, please tell me. I'm kind of getting burnt out. I love doing this show, but I'm tired. So say hi maybe, leave a kind review. Anyway, love you. Bye.