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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.
If you've ever felt like your marketing is working, but your analytics are telling you it's not, you are not imagining it. A lot of the impact of marketing now happens before someone ever visits your website. So today is the anchor episode. If you only listen to one episode, it should probably be this one.
By the end, you'll be able to explain zero click marketing to a coworker in one sentence and give them one example. They'll immediately understand. I'm Amanda Natividad and welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
In episode one, we talked about the problem. The click base model doesn't map cleanly onto how people actually learn, evaluate, and decide anymore. So today we're doing two things. One, we're defining zero click marketing in a way that's not squishy. And two, we're building a mental model that you can use to plan and measure.
And if you're the type of person who likes something that you can literally copy and paste into a doc and share with your team, stick around. I'm gonna give you a simple ladder and mini playbook.
Alright, let's define zero click marketing. Here is your official one sentence definition. Zero click. Marketing is a strategy where you optimize for impact that can happen without a website visit. Things like comprehension, trust, recall, preference, and downstream demand. It's not no clicks, it's. Impact without being dependent on a click to happen.
What it is, is designing your marketing so that a person can learn something from you, form an opinion about you, trust you, remember you, and choose you later, What it is not. So sometimes people get a little bit weird about this.
So here's what Zero click is not. Zero click is not. Don't care about your website. Your site is still where conversions happen, where pricing lives, where product lives, where your positioning gets locked in. But the persuasion and awareness almost always starts somewhere else. Zero click is not just post more.
If you hear zero click and your brain goes, cool, so I should just blast content everywhere. No, that is the opposite of what we want. We want you to post content where your people are. Zero click is also not a synonym for brand marketing. There's overlap. Sure, but this isn't only about vibes. It's also about practical, observable outcomes.
Those outcomes might just need more time to occur. Here's what impact looks like today. If you've been in marketing long enough, you already know this is true because you've experienced it. Someone shows up on a sales call and says, I feel like I already know you, or I've been following you for months, or, I saw that thing you posted on LinkedIn.
Or Instagram or TikTok And you can look at your analytics and go, I cannot see any of that. That is zero click impact. A quick receipt if you want the most concrete proof that this phenomenon exists at scale. One of the clearest examples is in search behavior. SparkToro's 20 24 0 click search study.
So using DA's clickstream data found that for every 1000 Google searches, only about 360 clicks go to the open web, depending on the market. So this is because behavior is shifting toward answers and consumption happening on platform. Behavior is no longer click and bounce around the web. So that's the definition and that's what it's not.
Now we need the mental model.
Here's a simple model I just started using. It's the zero click ladder and it has five rungs, seen, understood, remembered, preferred, and sought out.
Let's walk it. So the first one seen this is exposure. This is they encountered you. Great. They saw you we're on the right track. But remember, your goal isn't just to get seen. Your goal is to reach the right people with the right message in a way that they'll actually consume and that resonates with them.
Two. Understood, understood means they didn't scroll past you. They got the point. This is where a lot of content fails, by the way. Not because it's bad, but because it's trying to do too much, or it's written for the writer, not the reader. Understood is the first level where your consumer is actually learning something comprehension.
A good zero click artifact can stand alone. So an example, a LinkedIn post where the idea is fully contained. A slide where the takeaway is clear without a caption, a short audio episode like this one where the listener can repeat the concept at the end. If you want to pressure test your work, if you remove the link, would it still be valuable?
Would the idea still make sense? Could it still be something people can respond to? Three remembered, remembered is they can recall you later. This is not vanity. This is the bridge between content and demand because people don't buy when you post. They buy when the timing is right for them. Data from Gartner shows that B2B buyers are making most of their decision making process without their pool of potential vendors.
they spend only 17% of their total purchase journey talking to sales reps, and that's split between all vendors. So your company's individual impact is going to be much less a small fraction of that 17%. So the question is. Will they remember you when they need you? Remembered comes from repetition, consistency, and distinctiveness.
A lot of B2B marketing is forgettable because while it may be correct, it's indistinguishable in that sea of sameness. Zero click pushes you toward, what is the phrase? The idea, the framing, the positioning that sticks with your audience. Four Preferred. Preferred is when they think about solving a problem.
You are one of the solutions. This is where trust and taste matter, and I wanna say something that'll save you time. People don't prefer you because you have the most content. They prefer you because you've consistently helped them make better decisions because preference is built by being clear. Useful and being right often enough that they start to rely on you.
This is why zero click isn't squishy brand talk. It's earning credibility in public and five sought out. Sought out is the top of the ladder. This is. They type your name into search. They go directly to your website. They subscribe. They forward your stuff to a coworker. They bring you up in a meeting.
They ask their friend, Hey, do you know these people? This is the moment where clicks return, but as a consequence, not the primary goal. According to Six Senses, 2024 buyer Experience Report, the typical buyer is 70% through the decision making process by the time they reach out to you. And eight in 10 buyers initiate contact with a vendor, not the other way around.
So when someone seeks you out, you've created the best kind of demand, the kind you don't have to chase. Quick recap of our zero click letter. You get seen, your audience encountered you, you're understood. Your audience is learning from you. You're remembered for your consistency and distinctiveness.
You're preferred because you've shown taste and instilled trust, and you've been sought out. Your customer takes action. Now, let's make it practical. How do you know that all of this is working? What to measure If clicks aren't the only signal, what do we measure? So I like to split metrics into two buckets, leading indicators, signals that you're climbing, that ladder and lagging indicators, proof that demand is being created.
So one leading indicators, these help you answer are people seeing and understanding. Examples of this are consumption signals like views, listens, watch time, completion rate, engagement signals like replies, saves shares, dms, repeat exposure, so the same names showing up again and again. Qualitative signals, people paraphrasing your idea back to you.
One of the most underrated metrics in B2B is are people repeating your framing. If they could repeat it, they understood it. If they repeat it without you present, they remembered it too. Lagging indicators, these answer is this, creating preference and demand. Examples of this are direct traffic trends, branded search trends, inbound mentions like I have been following you.
Sales call notes were prospects. Site content. Where did you hear about us? Answers and one of my favorites, unsolicited referrals. Receipt metrics are often messy. They don't show up in one dashboard, which is exactly why zero click. Marketers build a habit of collecting receipts. You're basically building a case file for your marketing, screenshots, quotes, call notes, inbound messages, because if you only count what's easy to count, you'll under count what matters.
Now let's talk about selling this internally. If you need a simple line for your team, clicks are a conversion signal. Zero click. Metrics are persuasion signals both matter, but persuasion often happens offsite now. now let's end with a mini playbook that you can actually try this week. Here are three moves you can try in the next seven days to start doing zero click marketing without adding a million tasks for yourself.
So move one. Create one standalone asset. Pick one topic your audience cares about, and make something that fully delivers the value. Without a link, it should address some kind of problem that you are uniquely qualified to solve. The asset can be a social post, a short video, a carousel, a thread, a mini audio, as long as it's published on the platform where your audience hangs out.
Side note, if you don't know where your audience hangs out, SparkToro can tell you in seconds the rule of this standalone asset. Someone consumes it on platform and then walks away smarter. If you're struggling, ask yourself this. What decision is your audience trying to make and the three things they should consider now decision can be hyper-specific, and in fact it should be so that you can use this prompt dozens of times for your business addressing various pain points and decisions.
Move to build a receipt file for your leading and lagging indicators. Make a doc or a folder called ZCM receipts for one week. Capture screenshots of dms, comments that show comprehension or agreement or questions, quotes from sales calls, how to hear about his answers, anything that signals remembered or preferred.
This only takes five minutes a day. You'll start with your leading indicators because those happen sooner and over time you should be able to collect those lagging indicators. Doing all this changes how you talk about marketing internally, because you're building your case brick by brick. You are collecting proof that isn't, let's just wait and see.
Plus, you'll find that you're getting more inspiration for creating more content. Hopefully you'll find that this creates a creation flywheel for you where ideating becomes more sustainable. Move three, add one conversion pathway. Don't force clicks, but make those clicks easy to happen. Add one consistent pathway so people who are ready can find you. Like a pinned post, A simple start here page. A single memorable URL that goes in your link bio, or even a consistent line you repeat at the end of content. Probably ideal for audio and video. The goal is not to shove everyone into a funnel.
It's to be findable when the moment is right, so that's zero click marketing, a strategy where you optimize for impact. That can happen without a website visit. Things like comprehension, trust, recall preference, and downstream demand, and the latter is seen, understood, remembered, preferred, and sought out.
I have a one pager on all this in the show notes. Don't worry, I'm not gating it. It's totally free. It'll also have some fun facts about marketers, courtesy of our launch sponsor SparkToro. Next episode, we're going to get pretty nerdy about AI research. I'm bringing in my colleague Rand Fishkin because we're going to talk about the zero click ecosystem that we're marketing in now.
If this episode helped you share it with one marketer who's still being judged entirely on click through rate, or please leave a review for Zero Click Marketing. This is really helpful to indie podcasts like mine.