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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] Josh Ho: If you don't have an anecdote of like actually what a customer is, is saying or what is important to them, like then you're just sort of guessing, then it's just a, then it's just a hypothesis.
[00:00:11] Amanda Natividad: I'm Amanda Natividad, and welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
[00:00:17] All right, Josh. Thanks for joining us. I'm excited to have you on because we've been friends for a couple years now, and you've been- Mm-hmm ... running this company called ReferralRock for quite a while. And I don't even remember exactly how we met. But I feel like we just sorta crossed paths on Twitter.
[00:00:36] We're just sorta following each other's work.
[00:00:39] Josh Ho: I think it was early, early, yeah, when it was called Twitter. Early Twitter days. I don't think you were even working for SparkToro yet. Like, I think it was pre that. I know you were early on on sort of, like, the style of, of posts and things like that. And it was like, I think we just started interacting then.
[00:00:56] And then kind of like, yeah, just started DM'ing and talking shop about marketing and, and whatnot. So yeah, it's been a minute.
[00:01:04] Amanda Natividad: Yeah, that's funny to think about. I really like these kinds of friendships where you li- you don't exactly remember how you met or if there was like, "Oh, we met at this thing," and then we said hi.
[00:01:15] I kinda like when it's like, "No, you just, we've been reading each other's stuff. You were there. I was there."
[00:01:21] Josh Ho: Yeah. Should go back and look at the DMs. And then we just started talking. Twitter. I should, I should scroll back in the DM Twitters and find out how long it's been. But then you got to meet in person at the- Yeah
[00:01:30] at the first Spark Together Live. So it was like I was real excited to, to, to go show up there and meet you in person as well. So that was pretty cool.
[00:01:38] Amanda Natividad: Yeah, that was fun. You're CEO of ReferralRock. But you are one of the CEOs, one of the executives who's pretty hands-on in marketing, where you have a good pulse on what's going on, what's working, what's not.
[00:01:53] Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think your m- your background is in marketing specifically. It's been something that you've learned along the way as a founder, right , as an executive. First of all, I, I appreciate when there are leaders who take a moment to kind of to listen to what I'm saying, how I, how I approach marketing.
[00:02:13] Because a lot of the way I approach it isn't very traditional. Like, I don't, I'm not a very, like- This is gonna sound, this is gonna sound so bad. But I'm not a super metrics-driven marketer, not vibe-based either, but I'm a little bit- Right ... in between. And I appreciate that you recognize that nuance in marketing.
[00:02:33] And so I've been excited to see just... 'Cause I know that, I know that ReferralRock has been crushing it, right? And you guys have been doing some interesting things along the way. So maybe my first question to you really is just what was marketing like for ReferralRock like five years ago, and what does it look like today?
[00:02:56] Josh Ho: Ooh, five years ago. Well, yeah, that's very different. So I wouldn't say I'm, we're crushing it. I hate that term, but, but- Okay ... um, I think we're doing well. I mean, we're bootstrapped. Yeah. We control our own destiny. It's like if you go back and look at from a founder and, you know, smaller company perspective, it's kind of the things you, you, you hope for with, with flexibility and not worried about investors.
[00:03:21] And it's like we wanna grow, but we're also not, like, gonna kill ourselves over it either. But yeah, so like five years ago was definitely heyday of SEO and inbound, and that's probably where I first got my first tip in into general marketing. Like when back before I even had ReferralRock, I had this other startup called UberNote.
[00:03:41] It was like a Evernote competitor. This is way back in like, you know, 2010 types of timeframe. But one of the early things I figured out was like- had a rank for like online notes. And um, and did some early PR before I even knew what I was doing. I like, we got cited on Lifehacker and a couple other sites.
[00:04:02] And all of a sudden my, my little UberNote thing was, you know, number one or two for online notes. So it drove a lot of inbound. And then I kind of figured out, oh, that's what, you know, this HubSpot and these people talk about and inbound marketing, that's kind of what I'm doing. And as anyone would talk about now, like those were the good old days of like inbound and SEO and that type of thing.
[00:04:26] So that's kind of where I first got to, you know, build our first base of what our quote-unquote go-to-market was for ReferralRock, was like, okay, there's enough people searching for this stuff, enough people that want information on how to build referral programs, how to... What are good referral program examples?
[00:04:43] And you kind of figure out and you, me having an engineering background and kind of like liking the numbers and sort of the trying to figure out how Google it works with all these pieces. And those were back five years ago, that was the heyday where those skills aligned. The world looked at inbound marketing in a certain way, and most people were searching on Google.
[00:05:06] You had 80 or 90% of like market share. If you were ranking there, you, you had the eyeballs for anyone that was sort of in the buying motion for the types of utility or software that we did. So it's definitely not like that anymore, but, but those are the good days. Yeah.
[00:05:23] Amanda Natividad: How is ReferralRock getting most of its customers now, most of the new customers?
[00:05:28] Josh Ho: It still is through inbound, and we've had to diversify a bit more in terms of doing some ads and getting into more of like, as you would even say, like More like classic marketing, so it's like the, the ad side, the, you know, thinking about more, more about calls to action, thinking about more of, like, how do I, how do I punch through to, to people with, you know, specific needs?
[00:05:52] 'Cause before, we had it kind of on easy mode because of those aligned things is we could rank for those terms. People would follow the traditional, like, look at an article or see this Google search, click an article, read a article, and be like, "Oh, these guys know what they're doing. Let's, let's get a demo," or, "Let's, let's get a sign-up."
[00:06:09] So that's still there, it's just changed, right? Everyone's search behavior's changed. I know you've talked a lot about, like, AEO and these different things, but for us as a B2B SaaS, I feel like a lot of people are just researching differently, so we've had to adjust on we're now serving for robots and serving for AI, as well as serving for end users as well.
[00:06:32] Like, a good example is I just did-- I just redid a bunch of our, like, alternative pages, which honestly previously I never paid a whole lot of attention to. But if someone in the buyer search is, are putting those terms in, there's a natural progression when you're researching to being like, "Oh, I'm looking at softwa- such and such software.
[00:06:51] I'm thinking about running a referral program." And they go down, and a couple different services come up. "Oh, well, how does so and so compare to this?" Right? And you still go down those. And if you're not naming and claiming and owning your own voice, which for now at least Google and a lot of these things will take your first-party information as a highly cited source when it's drilling down to things like that.
[00:07:13] But I'm like, if we're not saying what we actually do and how we're different in a nice, fair way, not like slamming any, any competitors, like, who else, where else are they gonna get it from? And so it incentivizes you to surface that type of information, have a fair way of putting that information out there, so.
[00:07:31] So to answer your question, it's still there, but we're also needing to add to the mix of, you know, we're doing some stuff with some Meta ads and, um, looking at new ChatGPT ads and different things like that. But for the most part, yeah, it's like our own word of mouth plus, plus our own, uh, enhancing the way people are searching, um, when they're in the buyer journey today, so.
[00:07:55] Amanda Natividad: Yeah. I think the inbound piece is especially interesting today because, well, we know what I'm saying, right, is Attribution is mostly broken, right? We don't really know, like we'll know if an organic effort is working, but we don't really know always through which channel it's working best or which ones are most efficient.
[00:08:17] Channels meaning like organic through social, Google- Mm-hmm ... LLMs. Do you have a sense of where a lot of this inbound is coming from?
[00:08:29] Josh Ho: I don't have a good sense anymore. I used to. But I, I felt like you used to... And I mean, this has all changed over the years too, with like, you know, more mobile searches than desktop searches, like all these things.
[00:08:41] So if you're thinking, you know, multi-device and whatnot, I just, I've probably gone off the f- fully trusting all the direct click attribution train for probably at least the past, like five years or so. So I've, uh, my brain has slowly adjusted, so it wasn't like a huge, a huge thing where I'm like, I can no longer cite if someone clicked an article and did this exactly to like our metrics.
[00:09:07] And, and I, I think I, I shed that earlier than kind of the, the age we're in now, which I think has been helpful. 'Cause if I have to shed that, like quickly, plus like people are searching differently, that's a lot to manage, a lot of change. Kind of like how you're mentally modeling how people, how people find you.
[00:09:25] But yeah, like I, I think early on I started looking at, um, just like branded traffic more, or direct taking, taking, you know, it's like, okay, if someone's coming direct, but let's say I am kind of trying to tinker with things in Google Analytics, I'm like, if they come to us direct and go right to the login page, like I, I don't want to count that as a new user because that's an existing user.
[00:09:50] And it's like, and then I could have a basic equation of looking at direct traffic and understanding, let me at least like take away from, like un-credit what should be. And it's almost like you go the opposite way. It's like, what can I subtract to get the number versus what can I add and get the number?
[00:10:07] At least to give me like a clean number to like look at and be like, all right, if we're raising direct traffic that are not people just coming in to log in, like that's a, that's a general directional metric that I can look at. But that's kind of how I started thinking about it a few years ago.
[00:10:22] Amanda Natividad: Yeah. And now we know like, you know, that direct, uh, some, you know, X, um, X percentage of that direct traffic is some kind of referral traffic from social media- Right
[00:10:32] or an AI tool, whatever. I w- wanted to ask about So when people are coming in, like they're searching for your solution- Mm-hmm ... do you know like what they are, like what they're searching for when they find you? Like maybe don't even think about the platform, but like- Right ... do you know like kind of the intent, right?
[00:10:52] Are they certain... Are they searching certain keywords when they find you? Are they looking... Like, yeah, just tell me more about that.
[00:10:59] Josh Ho: I mean, there are a few money, I would say, like keywords, as people would say. So for me, it's more of like the... Those are the things I try to look at more specifically, is like there, there are still ones like referral software as a query, or referral program software.
[00:11:15] Those are the biggest like ones. And it's very industry specific, 'cause if you looked at something like CRM, if you were asking for CRMs, I think you're not necessarily even getting like vendors in your search queries, but sometimes you might now with AI overviews. So again, the game keeps changing. But I knew for our industry, Google would rank like actual service terms like ReferralRock, or they would allow for you, you look at the top 10 queries, and you would kind of figure out, oh, first does Google even care to like, is this what users are looking for?
[00:11:47] And they raise those. So there's definitely some high intent ones, and those are the ones that I, I always kind of, are always on my top of my board of like, how are we still in like the top three? So if you're in the top three, it kind of trickles down from there, 'cause then it, they're, you're o- more often to show up in other places.
[00:12:05] And but that, that's, those are the queries I kind of look for. And then there's a lot of long tail ones, which I know, again, a lot of this I feel like you have to go with sort of a base instinct of kind of some of these things where you're like, okay, how did people search before? It might be like, okay, I didn't get the query I want there.
[00:12:21] It's like, okay, referral, referral programs for small business, or referral programs for banks. Like people try to add their own specificity. So those are other ones that we'll look at. But most of those do no- don't necessarily rank a brand term or a like company or service. Those ones usually lead to articles on how to start one for this.
[00:12:43] So then it's like, oh, is that, is that something that should be surfaced by like an article instead of trying to have a services page about
[00:12:53] Amanda Natividad: Yeah, I'm always interested too in those longer long tail keywords because of the specificity. Like sometimes you, you know, you might look at the top keywords that show intent to your website and it's like referral software, and you're like, well yeah, but, but like what else?
[00:13:08] Josh Ho: Right.
[00:13:08] Amanda Natividad: But I, I, I always think it's really interesting because oftentimes you can find or kind of discover a blog post or some piece of content, right, that, that's more in- directly related to that long tail keyword, um, which is often a signal of higher intent. Right. Right. Do you... Are you able to look or have you looked at the like AI prompt topics that people are searching for when they find you?
[00:13:34] Josh Ho: I have. And again, I g- I... The hard part about what those ones are like, again, you have to kind of, because there's no real I think, specific way to find what people are actually searching. Like, there's not, you know, I guess in the SEO world you got to see at least keyword volume and some things like that.
[00:13:52] But there's, I, I think I go back to that same, like, predictive sort of what is the intent if someone's, like, looking for something from an industry perspective, and then you might just have, like, a longer worded version. But I think again, those, the game keeps changing with those, with people talking about fan-outs, when people talking about these other ways, or there's probably five ways to talk about this query, and also how much of it is built into the context that they already have saved on their own, like, AI query anyway, right?
[00:14:21] So I'm not gonna, uh ... Again, I'm sure, like, any of my Claude or any of these other things, like, know enough about you. You're Amanda, you work for this, you, you're, you're a marketer, and you won't have to add those words to your query 'cause you might just say, "Okay, I'm looking at this. What is this?" And it, it, it as- it could assume different context that is sort of putting in with your queries.
[00:14:42] So I do try to put in those same base ones around. Mm-hmm. Like, again, if it's, like, certain industries, certain things. But again, as long as we're being surfaced, and I think a lot of it for us is more on ca- can I just make sure we have something in that area that we wanna be, be surfaced for? But we go back to a lot of our own, I w- I guess, our own audience data to kind of figure out what are the people we are getting inbound, who are the people that are finding us.
[00:15:10] So we kinda use it as sort of a loop. We have Fathom recordings of customer calls, and so we're always kind of sorting through those and trying to find, you know, different signals. We have a couple customers that are really successful in, like, a, like a credit union does, does really well, so it's like, okay, well, what are the words they used in the transcripts on the intake calls and these types of things?
[00:15:31] And we kinda go, "Well, is that worth tracking or, you know, should we, should we put articles out there, you know, for that? Or, you know, what questions can, can come up those pieces?"
[00:15:42] Amanda Natividad: That's cool. That's super interesting, and I think most people aren't doing that. Like, literally listening to your customers or, you know, when they're talking to you, like, thinking about, looking a- looking at the, the way they describe their problems, the way they talk about them in the context of you, that's so important.
[00:16:02] Um-
[00:16:02] Josh Ho: I mean, it's definitely been one of my favorite, like- Yeah ... like, sort of epiphanies or stumbling upon, 'cause it's like we, in the early days when we were doing referral programs, we realized quickly that people needed a lot of help. Like, 'cause there was a, there's a lot of, I would say, myths and, "Oh, I'm gonna go viral like Dropbox," all these types of things out there that are really hard to dissuade.
[00:16:25] 'Cause someone might come in the door, and that's what they're excited about. So you don't wanna be like, "Yeah, it's not gonna be like that. We gotta reset your expectations." And but yet you're also trying to help them set these things up. And we realized early on that we needed to put people on it. It wasn't just a PLG type of thing.
[00:16:42] But lo and behold, since we've kind of stuck with that, it's, it's kind of come full circle back to like, it's great that we can offer, we offer, you know, a person on every one of these. And then the richness of all these calls, uh, you know, we, we, we got on, like, things like Fathom and stuff early on. So we have this stuff, and it's like the wealth of research for our own product on customer insights and, and all these other things.
[00:17:06] If we remember that you have it and can, you know, figure out a way to lean into your own loops is, is pretty good. Um, a, a really fun one lately has been, like, when customer... We look for a couple keywords when, uh, like we have these ones in Fathom. There's this tracker, and you could say, when customer is really happy, and it can, like, send it in Slack so it goes to, like, a shared Slack channel.
[00:17:29] So other people that don't interface with the customers directly get to see, get to see, like, customer reactions to, "Oh, this new feature is amazing." And it's, like, pretty good to see in terms of, like, a lifting energy around, among their developers and other people that have been slaving away working on something.
[00:17:46] And then they get to actually see, like, end user reactions and stuff. So that's been, that's been another low-key kind of hack at that.
[00:17:54] Amanda Natividad: That's cool. Wait, let me put on my, my audience hat. Sure, sure, sure. Can you walk us through what that is? Like, how, how did you implement that? Maybe, like, for somebody listening who is interested in getting more, like, customer insights without necessarily having to pick up the phone and call the customer.
[00:18:10] How did you implement that?
[00:18:12] Josh Ho: It, it starts with if you even have calls. So , so for us, we fortunately have, we've been using Fathom, and it's been part of, like, our day-to-day, you know, whether it's sales calls, onboarding calls, all of those things. So at this point we have, like, probably maybe two years' worth of, of, like, recordings.
[00:18:32] And, um, the way we've hooked it up recently is Fathom has this little feature called a tracker, and you can kind of like Google Alerts or AlertMouse or whatever else. You can just put little, like, queries in them, and it scans for those types of things and kinda grabs a little snippet and will either
[00:18:52] You can sign up to either, like, have it emailed to you or have it sent to a Slack channel. So that's in its core, like the base little piece. And, and someone on my team just set one up, and I just went and looked at it. I was like, "Oh, that's really cool." Like, you are constantly reminded of the, the utility of being able to hear the customer's voice on different things.
[00:19:11] And then, so then I'm like, "Ooh, can we find out when someone does, you know ... They just set up the HubSpot integration. What did we improve? Like, is that working really well? Let's go, let's go look at that." So it's almost addictive to go in there and have on tap this type of, this type of information. And then even worse, if you wanna go
[00:19:29] I mean, worse or better if you want, depending on how you see digging yourselves down these rabbit holes. But if you start hooking up the MCPs to get the, you know. And then you're just like, ooh, now use it to go through. I wanna find my 10 best customers that are this. Cross-reference it with all of the ones in Fathom, and these are the things you can kind of cross-coordinate to, uh, to figure out, like, again, uh, should we build this integration or should we f- how often does this happen?
[00:19:59] Is this, you know, or does this only happen against the enterprise customers, or does it happen with a volume of small customers? So I feel like once you have those, those things setting up and, and kinda the sky's the limit to those, so it's like a, a lot of different utilities. Like I said, just having good custom- good energy among the team to remind themselves of, of those things or products or like we talked about when we first started getting into it, like research for articles and, and what is, what, what are the types of customers that are coming in, and how else can we find more of these?
[00:20:32] It's like, oh, there's five new customers came from this. Like that are in banking and maybe we need to write more articles about those. And what did that person say and recommend? Like, where else have they tried? You know, we've, where else could we use that information?
[00:20:47] Amanda Natividad: That's super cool. And that is something that I am much more interested in as a marketer in, in developing my strategy from.
[00:20:55] You know, like I am so much more interested in creating content around whatever messages or, like, whatever content you get basically from Fathom. Like- Mm-hmm ... what are people asking? What do they hate? What do they like? What are they having trouble with? That, to me, is so much more interesting to create content around, rather than to focus just on the high volume keyword sort of thing.
[00:21:17] Yeah. Of course, if you can do both, that's ideal. Yeah, right. But I think it's so much more fun to... It's also immediately useful, right? Even if you don't get the ROI of organic traffic right away from that piece of content, then you'll know, like, well, if someone's searching for this, for this information, like they need help with this thing, it's gonna be somewhere on our website, and they'll find it when they need it.
[00:21:38] And that- Right ... to me is just really interesting and even just more sustainable as a content marketing effort. Like, cool, you know it's gonna help your business. Doesn't, you don't have to know if it's gonna happen today or if it's tomorrow, but you know it's helpful because you know customers are asking for it.
[00:21:56] Josh Ho: Right.
[00:21:57] Amanda Natividad: But yeah.
[00:21:57] Josh Ho: I think it's, like, required, especially, you know, as you talk about in this zero-click world now. It's like if you don't know what is actually, you know, without banging the whole, like, customer research drum, but- Mm ... at the same time, even if it's just, um Just, yeah, just something small, like if you're just talking about like what are, what are the vibes of that, that people in this industry are even talking about and thinking.
[00:22:21] And if you can have a, a little hack way or two, not in a nefarious way, 'cause all of these are like everyone knows it's recording. Fathom's one of the ones that pops up right there. It's not like low-key in the background recording anything. But just, yeah, having those is just like I wouldn't even know where to go anymore if you, if you do it.
[00:22:38] Then it, that is, before it was a, you know, you could look at the search queries, but now it's like actually I think it's even more interesting to look at these things and look at these patterns. And as much as AI has blown a lot of things up for us, it's also like given us these other power tools in these other areas where like if it wasn't for being able to hook it up to these recordings, if you had to be like, "I have to listen to all these recordings to find all the gems," like that just sounds exhausting.
[00:23:06] It does. But on the flip side, you can just access these and yeah, it's, it's kind of amazing on that front.
[00:23:13] Amanda Natividad: Yeah. It's funny, but we were, uh, I was asking you about the, like if you know what AI prompt topics people are asking when they find you. I was actually looking for it in SparkToro for you.
[00:23:23] Josh Ho: Oh, okay.
[00:23:24] Amanda Natividad: Yeah, 'cause we could s- But I was com- sort of comparing it against the keywords that people search for when they find ReferralRock. They're pretty similar to the AI prompts. Like, uh, eh, the AI prompts here are like affiliate tracking platforms, affiliate management software, a partner tracking software, referral tracking software Anyway, I thought it was fun.
[00:23:47] I was also thinking about, you know, B2B SaaS here, right? Like, for some reason I was reminded of this example of when I became a Formspree customer. Mm-hmm. Formspree.io. They power contact forms on websites. Okay. And w- when I was building my website for zeroclickmarketing.co, I was like, "I n- I need a contact form," right?
[00:24:10] And then whatever the ones, I don't even remember what they are now, but the ones that I knew of, like, just as a marketer, I'm like, "Oh, there's this one I can use." They were all the ones that you have to use their logo, like the kind of- Mm-hmm ... their branding embedded on your website. Right. And I was like, "I, I don't think I get that many, like, that many contacts, but I do want it to look nice.
[00:24:32] I want it to just be kind of plain, but also in my style." So I was working in this in Claude and asking Claude for, like, which, you know, services should I consider. And it told me to use formspree.io. And I was like, "Well, can I... Is it easy to use?" Like- Right ... "Can I just quickly do, like, s- put it in my we- my own, my m- my website skin," so to speak.
[00:24:55] Right. And it was like, "Yeah, all you need is, like, unique code," da da da. Like, and so based on my prompt, I was like, "It sounds really simple." So I was like, "Great. I'll just, I'll just go to Formspree and use that." I might have even clicked the link through Claude. Anyway, became a Formspree customer. And then funny enough, ended up meeting the founder, CEO at the MicroConf conference, and he was like, "How did you become a customer?"
[00:25:22] And I was like, "Oh, through Claude." And he was like, "Oh." And I am very not technical. Like-
[00:25:27] Josh Ho: Mm-hmm ...
[00:25:27] Amanda Natividad: I know a little bit of HTML and CSS. That's, that's it. Other than that, I don't really know how the internet works or how computers work, I mean. And when I go to their website now, back then too, Formspree, Formspree.io, it says, "The form solution for any developer."
[00:25:44] And like the hero image is like a snippet of code. Right. And so if I went there and saw that, I would've been like, "Oh, I can't use this." Yeah, nope. "This is too hard."
[00:25:52] Josh Ho: Be like, no.
[00:25:53] Amanda Natividad: No, I would've been like, "No, no, no, no, no." But it's probably one of the easiest web tools or- Mm-hmm ... whatever that better word is. One of the easiest ones I've ever used, and it's, it looks beautiful on my website.
[00:26:07] So I always, I just always think about how like... I mean, I know that they know they're getting a lot of inbound through LLM tools, but I always think about how there are so many ways your customers can be finding you based on the way that they are talking about their pain points, the way they're searching.
[00:26:26] Right. And most of it you can't even see, which is wild.
[00:26:32] Josh Ho: Yeah. It, it is pretty, it is pretty crazy 'cause it's like, like I was saying about some of the alternative pages. It's like the stuff that I didn't care about five years ago, now I'm like, "Oh, I got to make sure..." Like, if I'm not, if we built a feature and I don't put it on our website, like we're not gonna get the credit for it.
[00:26:49] Like, people can't find, you know, such and such that we do this, or there's gonna be some information out there that is, you know, doesn't represent us. So-
[00:26:57] Amanda Natividad: Yeah ...
[00:26:57] Josh Ho: there's definitely a shift in ter- terms of like making sure that when people are doing those things, like for Formspree, it's like, oh yeah, I, you know, yes, we are one of the ones that you can alter X if that's important to you.
[00:27:10] And being able to find that. Like, it's almost like get credit for the stuff you've done, but now you've got to... Honestly, like I'm, I'm a little more, I would say, I don't know if the right word is like anal about it, but like oh, I have to get this out there. Or Hey, our support articles have to be accurate because, you know, before it was like, oh yeah, so what if that?
[00:27:31] And then they'll, they'll reach out and they'll, we'll fix it for them. But it's like all these things, your body of work is all like- Has to be out there. But I think that, yeah, that's where that, that game has changed, but it still hasn't changed whatever the other side of like, like we were talking about, the anecdotes.
[00:27:47] Actually, that's, that's the word I've been thinking about lately, as I heard it on another podcast, where they're like, "If you don't have an anecdote of, like, actually what a customer is, is saying or what is important to them, like, then you're just sort of guessing. Then it's just a, then it's just a hypothesis."
[00:28:02] So but yeah, I kind of find that that was, like, one of those things. I wrote down before our call, I was like, "Audiences plus anecdotes." I was like, "You need to know where the, where the audience is, and then you have to hear the actual, like, anecdotes almost before you invest in a campaign or decide." 'Cause it's like I might s- be able to point, and SparkToro can help me point there, and I think it can now start to help point out possible anecdotes, but then if I can try a couple calls, go into a couple communities, and read what they're saying, and get the vibe for what that thing is, like, at least, at least now I have a, a, a much better shot of, like, resonating, resonating in that area if it's a, if it's a real anecdote versus, like, the
[00:28:43] Us marketers love to kind of sit back and be like, "Yeah, I think that's what they would say. Yeah, yeah, t- totally. That, that, that's what goes on in those communities," and it's easy to get enraptured with a campaign idea and start to build those things out before you go, "Next. Let me, let me go take a little one step further and see if this is
[00:29:01] Oh, actually, this, this is not what I thought at all," right? And it's like, that might- Yeah ... change your mind. Maybe I'm in the wrong place, or maybe I just have the wrong, the wrong, uh, the wrong vibe, so to speak.
[00:29:11] Amanda Natividad: Totally. Or taking the anecdote and really looking at that as a buyer persona for yourself. Mm-hmm.
[00:29:17] You know, like, to think about, okay, this anecdote, this tells me a really good story about this customer's journey. Maybe that's not representative, representative of 100% of my customers, right? But it's, it is representative of a key, of a core customer that we serve. So-
[00:29:34] Josh Ho: Right ...
[00:29:35] Amanda Natividad: what else can I do to support them on this journey?
[00:29:38] How can I make sure they don't churn? Right. What are the next things they need to know? After they've done their successful setup, what should they do next? Or, you know, even things like, okay, their contract or account, whatever, is up for renewal. What should they know before that happens? Right? Like, that gives you a lot of, a lot of really specific guidance on what you do next with your next campaign.
[00:30:02] Josh Ho: Yeah, yeah. I also like looking for the little weird spikes at times too, and those are the things, like ... I don't know. Have you ever read the book Unreasonable Hospitality?
[00:30:12] Amanda Natividad: No, but I want to, and I watch The Bear, so-
[00:30:17] Josh Ho: Okay. Yes ...
[00:30:17] Amanda Natividad: I'm, I'm with
[00:30:18] Josh Ho: you. We watch The Bear, too. And, and, um, but one of the, one of the super interesting, and, and I, I won't spoil the book for you.
[00:30:25] I mean, the book is great. It's just like a narrative about all- Yes ... of this stuff. But one of the things early on that, that I really liked, and I have, like, a couple examples I always think of, is like when you have something that kind of just spikes through and, like, you wouldn't suspect, and you don't, you wouldn't get that unless you're, like, looking in, in, into these, into these details.
[00:30:45] And one of the things I think he did early on is, like He really wanted, he found these like really unique I think blue spoons. These like, they were like handcrafted in Europe or something like that. So when, I forgot his, Will, Will was the, the author, Will Guidara, when he first went and had his first gig at like kind of running, I think it was a, it was like an ice cream cart at the Modern Art Museum in New York.
[00:31:11] And he's like, "I want those blue spoons." So he like got these blue spoons specifically for the cart, and everyone would just buy the ice cream for the spoon because it was such a unique spike-out type of thing. And ag- again, you know, spurring word of mouth, spurring like, you know, a lot of people. And then someone walking around with this really interesting looking, you know, blue spoon through the thing is like, "What is that?
[00:31:35] Where did you get that? What is, what's going on there," right? And reminds me of the kind of the, you know, you c- you told a couple stories this summer on the, on the, the Zero Click bootcamp stuff about like shareable experiences, I think. It was like the, the shoes and the knives and stuff like that. There were, and there was definitely one with those.
[00:31:52] But it made me think about those and like looking for those, those spikeable, shareable experiences but that you're not gonna find in, without digging into these details, without kind of looking at like or just finding your impulse of, ooh, that kind of could be interesting, and where can I tuck that away to, to, uh, kind of spike through to an audience?
[00:32:13] So...
[00:32:14] Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And I love those, I love the blue spoon example because it, it, it's all, it taps into a bunch of things for your marketing, for your growth, right? It gives something people to talk about. It surprises and delights them. It becomes a unique sort of branding element, right? Where it's like, "Is that the place with the blue spoons?"
[00:32:36] Right? Like people- Right ... will know eventually. It lends itself very well to the sort of billboarding of it, where people will take photos on their Instagram and like, "They have the blue spoons," or like, "Oh- Right ... they, they're eating ice cream at that place that has those spoons." And I'm sure it also, they also had some amount of people, right, saving the spoons.
[00:32:56] I assume they're disposable. Maybe they're not. But still, I'm sure-
[00:32:58] Josh Ho: I don't remember the details, but it might, yeah- I'm sure some people- They may not be. They either are like c- carved in some w- I, I remember they were not cheap- Yeah ... because he was like- Oh ... "I wanna put my budget of this 'cause I think it's worth it.
[00:33:10] Like, it's one of these, one of these like types of things that is, is worth the margin on that." And it's like, I, I t- I think he shaved margin on a bunch of other areas to make sure that the budget could, could support this, 'cause he thought that was gonna like make the difference, so.
[00:33:25] Amanda Natividad: I love that. I want whimsy to be a big part of everyone's marketing if that if that's possible.
[00:33:32] Where's the whimsy in your marketing?
[00:33:35] Josh Ho: Yeah, and, and some of the other ones, there's like definitely some... Is it the, uh... Another example I always think of is... And I like to collect these examples. The unfortunate part is like it's, it's hard to use in our software. It's not like sometimes you go back to your B2B software and you're like, "Maybe there's an angle where I can like do a Blue Spoon type of thing."
[00:33:55] But sometimes you're like, "There isn't." But I still love these ideas, and there's like the, um... Have you heard of the Savannah Bananas? Have you heard of them too?
[00:34:04] Amanda Natividad: No.
[00:34:06] Josh Ho: So it's like this quick story. It, it like, it started as like a minor league, like a not very good minor league baseball team, and some guy turned around, and they have all these events.
[00:34:14] They're now like a basically like an events company, and kind of like the Harlem Globetrotters but for baseball. So they make up their own crazy rules and stuff like that. And the person doing that, if you look them up, is like obsessed about all these little details, and one of the ones, he's like, "Oh, I hate ticket fees.
[00:34:32] Like I want there to be... Anytime there's a ticket price for any of our stuff, it is exactly the price. If it's $10, it's $10. There's no like add-on fees." And it's one of these things where like I think people got excited about that, or just also just in general, it's like all the experiences that stack up of all these little things and gives this general vibe of like, "This is what we're about.
[00:34:54] We're about this entertainment. We're not about trying to nickel and dime everyone. We're about..." And I think it was... There's, there's countless examples with Savannah Bananas, 'cause they, again, they get fun events for kids and types of things like that, and they sell out like massive areas for this. Uh, maybe it's bigger on the East Coast, 'cause I think they s- started in either Atlanta or somewhere else.
[00:35:15] But it's again, one of these ones that just like leans into like trying to make their whimsy and their experience like all, all-encompassing, and, and it's all these little details that matter, so.
[00:35:29] Amanda Natividad: Yeah. Oh, I love that. That's so funny. I was, I, I was I was also thinking about just how you were saying like back to B2B SaaS, like what- Mm-hmm
[00:35:39] what can we do with the Blue Spoons?
[00:35:41] Josh Ho: Yeah.
[00:35:42] Amanda Natividad: I think we have sadly, or maybe not sadly, depending on your perspective, I think our Blue Spoons example in SparkToro right now is- It's like an opposite of Blue Spoon. It's like- Okay ... a beige spoon. So we recently rolled out some new rebranding of SparkToro. We have a new logo, lots of new bold colors.
[00:36:05] I love it. I think it's really beautiful and distinct. But it's not for everybody. Right. That's also kind of the point of a brand, right? Right. Right. A brand is not for everybody. You have to repel some people or whatever. And Casey, our co-founder, CTO, he, he took it upon himself to build in this feature where you can kind of turn down the new branding.
[00:36:28] So like for when you're pulling reports in SparkToro, like, you know, when you can sa- you can save the graphs, so if you want to embed them in presentations, you can, but again, it's in our bold brand branding. He made a version that's basically just black and white. I think there's maybe one c- one, one accent color.
[00:36:46] Hmm. But to just kind of, for people who don't want all those colors in their presentation, he made this more discreet version. I've already had a couple people call it out to be like, "Hey, I really appreciate that. Like, I didn't even ask for that feature, but I really like it." Which I love the idea, right?
[00:37:03] Right. Of t- I mean, the unreasonable hospitality angle of like- Yeah ... giving people what they want without them having to ask for it. Right. Which I love, but I'm also like, "Oh man, I love the bold branding."
[00:37:16] Josh Ho: No, that's a great example. And the fact that people, you know, brought it up and who knows how far that's going too, where like it may not even be the reason someone else is gonna tell someone about SparkToro or even talk about it, but it's the reason it might like stick in their brain about like the type of software or the type of, of vibe and the type of, you know, research and stuff you can get out of SparkToro.
[00:37:37] So that's cool.
[00:37:39] Amanda Natividad: Yeah, absolutely. All right. We are at the top of the, well, top of our time together. Josh, I have to ask, how can we best support you?
[00:37:50] Josh Ho: I don't know. I, I never like talking too much about... I almost feel like I talked too much about ReferralRock already today on this call, but like, I don't know, if you're in the market for a referral program or whatever, check us out.
[00:38:02] We help people with their referral automations and referral operations. We definitely try to like lean more on like how do we make that a low lift? 'Cause one of the things we realized early on is there aren't really a referral marketing job title, so there's not like communities, there's not like whatnot.
[00:38:19] So anyone kind of coming into this likes to lean on the help that we can hopefully provide. So if you're interested, you know, check it out if you're in the market. That's, that's, that's probably it.
[00:38:30] Amanda Natividad: Cool. That's also how I market my book. I'm like, "Hey, I have this thing. Check it out. If you don't want to, that, that works, that's fine, but like you should."
[00:38:39] So friends, check out- Right. There's
[00:38:41] Josh Ho: people that appreciate it, so you know, if you're in that area and you wanna hang out- Right ... and you wanna stop by, great. You know.
[00:38:47] Amanda Natividad: Yeah. I'm
[00:38:47] Josh Ho: cooking good food over here.
[00:38:48] Amanda Natividad: But, but we, but we know like the customers we want are the people who want to be customers, right? Yes.
[00:38:54] Like if you don't want referral software, it's fine. Right.
[00:38:57] Josh Ho: Yeah,
[00:38:57] Amanda Natividad: yeah, that's fine. But friends, check out ReferralRock. Yeah. Also, check out Fathom. This ep- episode is not sponsored by Fathom, but it should be. If they wanna send me money, they can.
[00:39:07] Josh Ho: Yeah,
[00:39:07] Amanda Natividad: go for it. I think this is how it works. This is how it works.
[00:39:09] I think so.
[00:39:09] Josh Ho: I think so.
[00:39:11] Amanda Natividad: All right, friends, we'll see you next week.
[00:39:13] Josh Ho: All right. Thanks for having me.
[00:39:16] Amanda Natividad: Thank you for listening or watching Zero Click Marketing. We'll see you next week