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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.
The best-of-breed marketing stack era is ending. And most of us haven't noticed yet.
That's what I want to talk about today.
Hey, it's Amanda. Welcome back to Zero Click Marketing. This is one of those episodes where I've been chewing on an idea for a few weeks, and I think I finally have it in a shape worth sharing. So bear with me. We're going somewhere.
Okay. To explain where we're going, I have to back up to where we came from.
If you started your marketing career, like I did, in the era of Marketo and Eloqua and old-school HubSpot — you remember monolithic software. You bought one platform. It did email, and landing pages, and lead scoring, and reporting, all in one place. It was expensive. It was clunky. It was kind of bad at most of those things. But it was one thing.
Then around 2015, 2016, something shifted. SaaS got cheap. APIs got open. Zapier showed up and made it trivially easy to wire any tool to any other tool. And the smart move — the correct move, for the conditions of that era — became: don't buy one platform. Pick the best tool for each job, and stitch them together.
That's the unbundled stack. Klaviyo for email. Postscript for SMS. Clearbit for enrichment. HubSpot for CRM. Calendly for scheduling. Each one of those tools was better at its one job than the equivalent module inside an old monolithic platform. So you paid for seven tools instead of one, and you came out ahead.
And for a decade — roughly 2015 to 2024 — that math worked.
I want to underline that. It worked. I'm not coming on here to tell you that the unbundled stack was a mistake. It wasn't. It was the right answer for the conditions of that decade.
But the conditions changed.
If you've been listening to this show for any length of time, you can probably finish the sentence. Traffic is shrinking.
Google AI Overviews now answer two-thirds of searches on-page. Small publishers lost about 60% of their Google search traffic over the past two years. Social platforms actively punish you for linking out. ChatGPT summarizes your blog post before anyone opens it. The whole foundation of "create content, get traffic, capture leads, convert leads" — that foundation cracked.
And the cost of leads went up. Way up. CAC is up. Conversion windows are tighter. The volume of leads coming into the top of the funnel is a fraction of what it was three years ago. You know this. You're living it.
The unbundled stack — Klaviyo plus Postscript plus Clearbit plus HubSpot plus Zapier plus Calendly plus Stripe — that stack was designed for cheap, plentiful traffic. When you had a thousand leads a week coming in, it was fine to lose ten percent of them to tool-handoff issues. The SMS platform doesn't know the email tool unsubscribed someone. The CRM didn't sync overnight. The Zap broke and you didn't notice for three days. Nine hundred good leads still made it through. The math worked.
Now you’ve only got a few hundred leads trickling in each week, and every single one has to land in the cup. You can’t afford to lose ten percent to your stack being held together with duct tape and a Zapier subscription.
In an abundance economy, the cost of stitching tools together was low and the gain from best-in-class features was high. Now, in a scarcity economy, stitching costs more than it used to — because every lead that falls through the cracks is more expensive to replace.
Now I’ll tell you the early signs that this was going to start happening. We obviously didn’t know this back then.
I used to love Clearbit. If you weren't a B2B marketer in the 2010s, Clearbit was magic. You'd capture a lead's email address — just the email — and Clearbit would pull back their job title, their company, headcount, industry, sometimes even their LinkedIn. You'd ask one question on a form and you'd get fifteen answers back, automatically, without bothering the lead.
It was the single best example of doing more with less that I'd ever seen in marketing software.
Then in 2023, HubSpot bought Clearbit. And then eventually, they folded it in. They turned it into a feature of HubSpot, which is great if you use HubSpot, and a tragedy if you don't.
I was sad. I think a lot of us were sad. And I kept waiting for someone to launch the replacement. Some new startup that would do what Clearbit did, standalone, accessible to small teams.
Nobody did. For two years, nobody did. And I just sort of accepted that the era of cheap, instant lead enrichment was over.
Then last month, I found out it had been built. Just — not where I was looking for it.
It had been built inside Typeform. The form tool.
Now, full disclosure, this episode is sponsored by Typeform, which is what got me looking at this in the first place — but I was poking around their new thing called Growth Flow.
And I discovered they had built a version of Clearbit into the form tool.
When someone submits a Typeform with an email address, the form can enrich that response in the background using trusted third-party data providers. A richer profile can come back: location, demographic details for personal emails, and professional or company details for work emails. Typeform says match rates can reach 92% for B2B and 71% for B2C, based on real product usage.
I didn't ask for this. I didn't know it existed. I was looking for a form tool, and I found my missing Clearbit hiding inside it... which means this isn't just a form tool anymore. It's an end-to-end workflow.
And that’s when something else clicked.
Let me make this concrete, because I've been talking abstractly for five minutes and I want to ground it. And also, I want to talk about skincare products.
Imagine you're running marketing for a small DTC skincare brand. I'm not going to pretend this isn't influenced by my devotion to Medik8 — if you read the newsletter version of this, you already know — but pick any skincare brand in your head and follow along.
Here’s a pretty typical DTC experience: Your big lever is a quiz funnel. A customer lands on the homepage. There's an opt-in: build your routine in sixty seconds. They take the quiz. Six questions. Skin type, primary concern, budget, complexity. At the end, they get a personalized three-step routine recommendation. They drop their email to receive it. And now you have thirty to ninety days to turn them into a customer.
The old way to build the back-end of this funnel — and this is what most small DTC brands are doing right now — looks like this.
The quiz lives in your form tool. When someone completes it, an automation fires that pushes the lead into your email service provider. The ESP sends the welcome email with the recommendation. Another automation pushes the lead into your CRM. A third automation, conditional on the lead's quiz answers, pushes the high-intent ones into your SMS tool, which fires off a text. And then the last automation pings someone on Slack if the lead matches a high-LTV profile. And if there's any lead enrichment happening, that's a fifth tool, doing its work in a sixth dashboard, populating a seventh database.
That's five handoffs. Five places the lead can die. Five subscriptions. Five logins. Five places where if one tool changes its API, your whole funnel breaks at two in the morning and you don't know until Monday.
Years back, I actually worked at a company once where we really did build this in Typeform… but it was stapled together with various automation and email tools.
But today, in Typeform's Growth Flow, all of that lives inside the form tool itself.
The quiz fires. The contact record creates itself. The enrichment (the Clearbit thing) runs in the background. The email sequence kicks off automatically. The SMS goes out to the segments that qualified for it. The Slack ping happens. The checkout happens inside the email, via Stripe.
The reporting happens in the same dashboard.
One tool. One bill. One place where the data lives.
Now — I want to be careful here. I'm not telling you Typeform is better than Klaviyo at email, or better than Postscript at SMS. It's probably not. Klaviyo has fifteen years of email infrastructure investment. Postscript is the deepest SMS tool out there. If you're a hundred-million-dollar brand running predictive LTV models off your purchase data, you should probably keep Klaviyo. You keep your dedicated stack.
But you're probably not that brand. Most of you listening aren't.
If you're a small team running a small brand on small lead volume — the cost of running seven tools, each at sixty percent utilization, is way higher than the cost of running one tool that does each job at eighty percent.
That's the math that just flipped.
So here's what I'd actually do if I were you, this week.
Pull up your credit card statement. Highlight every SaaS line item that's part of your marketing stack. Add them up.
Then ask: what's the fewest tools I could run my entire customer journey through?
Not "what's the best tool for X." That's the question from 2018. The question now is: what's the fewest?
Some of those tools you'll keep, because they're load-bearing. Klaviyo at scale. Shopify for ecommerce. Your CRM, if you're actually using it. But I'd bet — I'd genuinely bet — that you have at least two or three tools on that list that exist because you needed them in 2021 and forgot to re-evaluate.
The answer is probably smaller than you think.
That's the episode. If you want the full breakdown of the Medik8 quiz funnel example — including the seven-tool stack laid out explicitly, and why I think every small DTC brand should be running this play — I wrote a longer version on the Substack this week. Link in the show notes. It's also where you can find every other episode of this show, and the newsletter, and the very small amount of marketing wisdom I've accumulated over the years.
If this hit, send it to a marketer or a founder who's drowning in tools. They'll feel seen.
I'm Amanda Natividad. This is Zero Click Marketing.
Thanks for listening.