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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.
[00:00:00] Amanda Natividad: There's nothing inherently wrong with best practices. Best practices can be useful. They can give you a baseline and help you avoid obvious mistakes. The actual problem is that best practices are usually just generalized averages. They are what tends to work across many audiences. Many contexts and many companies, so when you apply them without personalization or a strong point of view, you're not making a strategic decision.
[00:00:40] Amanda Natividad: You are quite literally making a statistically average one. I am Amanda Natividad. Welcome to Zero Click Marketing.
[00:00:53] Amanda Natividad: By definition, best practices are factually correct. They're problematic when they're used without personalization and without personalization. You just get boring, beige and beige marketing is the real problem. And that matters a lot more now when everybody has access to the same playbooks, the same prompts, the same LinkedIn algorithm takes the same AI tools and the same tired list of things they are supposedly supposed to do.
[00:01:27] Amanda Natividad: So what do we do about it? How do we personalize the best practices and make them different colors, just not beige. We do audience research. The reason I'm so passionate about audience research is that it was basically how I had always done marketing. I just didn't have a word for it. 12 years ago, I was one of the early B2B marketing hires over at Fitbit, and we had very different kinds of marketing challenges.
[00:02:01] Amanda Natividad: We were already a known and beloved consumer brand. We didn't need to increase our awareness among B2B buyers. They already knew who we were. What we needed to do was build trust within that B2B segment and building trust had very little to do with owning keywords and Google search, and a lot more to do with proving how our offering was better for businesses.
[00:02:26] Amanda Natividad: So there was a lot of opportunity to create content, but not so much creating content to rank for what is corporate wellness, but rather content like case studies showing proven outcomes or thought leadership pieces that proved what we knew would become the future of employer employee wellness and benefits.
[00:02:49] Amanda Natividad: This also included needing to be where our buyers already were. And one unlikely source of information for me, really, a valuable source was a PR agency who was in the RFP process to win our business. One thing they did was they spent several slides in their deck telling us all about our audience. They were showing, Hey, we know your audience is reading Psychology Today and Entrepreneur Magazine.
[00:03:19] Amanda Natividad: We also know that they care a lot about social psychology. And they went through this with us in a couple of minutes. And of course I was really impressed that they did all this research in our audience, but it also gave me a ton of clues as the marketer. So then now I was thinking, oh, that's where we should consider doing a full page ad.
[00:03:43] Amanda Natividad: Or here are some topics that should guide our next thought leadership pieces. And so. That informed how I did my job and how I then started talking to our audience. Now, the point of the story is not, wow, I was so ahead of the curve. The point is, good marketers have always been doing some version of audience research, even when they didn't call it that.
[00:04:08] Amanda Natividad: Because when you are close enough to a hard problem, you realize pretty quickly that averages will not save you. That is what audience research changes. You start asking, where does this audience actually spend time? What language do they use? What and who do they trust? What do they ignore? What would feel useful to them?
[00:04:38] Amanda Natividad: And in the case of B2B especially, what can we do that will help them get a promotion at their job? And once you know all these things, all sorts of other decisions get a lot easier, and you start making things that your audience actually cares about. If you market to other marketers, best practices would probably tell you to write blog posts about SEO techniques, and that may be true, but what about them?
[00:05:08] Amanda Natividad: Audience research might tell you what to say about them. Like. What clicks signal to Google search and how that impacts your search rank and visibility. If you market a skincare product, best practices might tell you to publish a post about what a seven step nighttime skincare routine is. Yeah. But so what audience research would probably tell you that your audience is already pretty knowledgeable about skincare routines and what they really want to know is the difference between.
[00:05:43] Amanda Natividad: Serums, ampules and gels. If you market a prediction marketing site like Kaci or Calci, you might think you ought to keep a close eye on a competitor like Poly Market and try to outdo them constantly, and maybe you would get decent marketing results. But I have a feeling that your time will be better spent researching your audience so that you can find high leverage under invested opportunities that poly market hasn't taken yet.
[00:06:14] Amanda Natividad: And maybe some of those opportunities include expanding reach into the sports betting space, like sponsoring podcasts like Wager Talk, and Tiny Nicks giant picks. Opportunities like all the ones I just mentioned. You don't get to those by following best practices. You get to them by better understanding your audience.
[00:06:36] Amanda Natividad: Now, the good news is there are lots of ways to do audience research, and it doesn't require money or not much money or even a ton of time. You can start small. Talk to just five people in your audience. Seriously, just five. Ask them to complain to you about a problem. No, seriously consider an emotionally charged word like complain so that they're more candid with you, and then you can hear their actual pain point language, or ask about their most recent purchase and what made them choose that brand and that product.
[00:07:15] Amanda Natividad: Ask them where they spend their time online, the social networks they enjoy, and for what use case. Along with the social accounts they follow. Of course, you should be thinking about these questions as they relate to your brand. If you're a B2B marketer, I don't think it's useful to ask someone in your audience what was their last skincare purchase.
[00:07:40] Amanda Natividad: Keep these interviews to pretty tight 20 minute conversations so that you can keep things moving. Or you can also use an audience research tool like SparkToro. Which full disclosure is the launch sponsor of this podcast? SparkToro is literally designed to help you understand where your audience spends time, what they talk about, and what they pay attention to.
[00:08:04] Amanda Natividad: You can find things like the keywords they search for on Google, that topics or prompts they use on ai. Tools like Chat, GPT and their most followed YouTube channels, podcasts, social accounts, websites, and more. And honestly, I use the insights from SparkToro to give you those suggestions for better marketing ideas in B2B skincare and sports betting.
[00:08:32] Amanda Natividad: Doing audience research should speed up your ability to come up with better marketing ideas. It can spell out patterns you might not have found on your own or reveal outliers surprises. You should take a closer look at. But audience research is really a habit. It's the habit of paying closer attention and asking better questions, noticing what people actually care about instead of what marketers assume they care about.
[00:09:05] Amanda Natividad: And frankly, some of the best audience research is free. You can look at. Subreddits. You can browse product reviews on Amazon, Sephora, G two, or Yelp. You can pay attention to the exact words people use when they are delighted, confused, skeptical, disappointed, or ready to buy that stuff is gold. That stuff is gold because now you are not looking at your audience as a demographic blob.
[00:09:38] Amanda Natividad: You are looking at them as people with language preferences, anxieties, aspirations, objections and habits, and that's where better marketing comes from. A best practice might tell you what format tends to perform well. Audience research tells you what to say in that format. It tells you what kind of example will resonate, what kind of pain point will feel real.
[00:10:05] Amanda Natividad: And what kind of joke or metaphor will actually land audience research improves taste, and mostly taste is built through exposure, pattern recognition, and spending enough time with your audience that you can feel the difference between what is technically correct and what is actually compelling. Once you better understand your audience, your content gets sharper, your messaging gets clearer.
[00:10:35] Amanda Natividad: Your channel choices get smarter. Your examples get more specific, your point of view gets stronger. That's a huge advantage. So here's a takeaway. Best practices are not bad. They're just incomplete. They can give you a place to start and they can help you avoid obvious mistakes. They can point you in a decent direction.
[00:11:02] Amanda Natividad: So. Best practices can get you on the field. Audience research is what helps you actually win. Thank you for listening to Zero Click Marketing. If you like this episode, I'd love it if you shared it with a marketer who might be stuck in beige right now.