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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.
Rand Fishkin (00:00):
If you want to give advice, you have to take a position. Advice that is not taking a strong position is bland and meaningless. And I do see a lot of people do it in the business world because they don't want to be perceived as difficult or contrarian. They would rather no one get offended or upset than more people resonate with their work.
Amanda Natividad (00:23):
I'm Amanda Natividad and welcome to Zero Click Marketing. All right, Rand, so this is the special edition episode of this podcast for the book, which as people already know, I hope, it's called Zero Click Marketing.
Rand Fishkin (00:42):
The podcast has a similar name.
Amanda Natividad (00:44):
Yeah, it does. Good catch.
Rand Fishkin (00:47):
It's almost like you're good at branding.
Amanda Natividad (00:50):
Almost. I don't know. Well, I thought it would be kind of fun to talk about the book itself first. Something that I was struck by when we recorded the audiobook, so we each record, we assigned ourselves chapters, we kind of split it up pretty evenly. I was a little bit nervous going into it because I thought, oh no, what if as I'm reading this, I start thinking like, I actually don't like this chapter or I don't like how we phrase that. And at least for me, I felt like there was very little. I was glad that I liked it more.
Rand Fishkin (01:24):
Yes, I agree with you. I was pretty impressed with us. I was like, wow, we did a darn good job. This is a good book. I think it's awkward to talk about because one of the things that's hard to say is I did a good job at this thing that I want you to buy. It just never lands for me. I think it's kind of some of the worst marketing that you can do because you're telling instead of showing and you're self-interested. You just can't have that trust, right? Instead, the kind of marketing that you and I both usually like to do is, hey, let me talk about this topic or share this story or show this research and then hope that you, the listener viewer will think to yourself, oh, they know what they're talking about. Hey, I wonder if they've done anything else on this topic.
(02:19):
Oh, they have a book. Maybe I'll go check that out. And I think that's how you and I usually coach people to do marketing and recommend it. It's hard to talk about our book with us and then say, it's really good, you should buy it.
Amanda Natividad (02:33):
Oh, I mean, there is nothing more painful to me than saying, yeah, you should buy my book because immediately my brain goes, or don't, you don't have to. It's okay. But please do, which is not good marketing to say.
Rand Fishkin (02:47):
I think one of the worst things about this is that many of the people who are quite successful at marketing their own work feel no shame and insist that their work is great even when it is not. And unfortunately, some of those people are actually quite effective at selling their stuff. And it's always been a mystery to me. My suspicion is that there's simply a type of person who is attracted to that kind of showy, shameless salesmanship that I've just never done a good job of bringing to my audience or I'm just not that kind of person. And so people who are like that wouldn't like me.
Amanda Natividad (03:30):
No, I agree with you. I mean, there is a part of me, I'll be honest, that envies that, that I think, you know what? I want to be like 5% of that, just a little bit because I kind of admire that.
Rand Fishkin (03:43):
Why can't I be an AI shyster for a day? Just some sketchy Jamok who's like, "Yeah, buy my book. You'll be great." No, I can't do it.
Amanda Natividad (03:55):
And the AI thing for, I don't know why my brain's going here, but come with me. I do think AI is incredible. These tools are amazing, but few things bum me out more than hearing about other marketers talk about it.
Rand Fishkin (04:08):
I do think there was a huge era of gatekeeping from programmers and engineers who basically told anyone who wasn't technical, "Hey, you are sort of weak and you cannot accomplish all the things that I can accomplish and I don't have time for your BS because I have important things to do." And that gatekeeping was super real. Even as the CEO of an organization running a 50, 60 person plus engineering team, I heard it all the time. Engineering was like, "No more requirements, no more demands. We can't do it." Even today at Snack Bar, I love Miriam to pieces. I think she's a wonderful engineer, but she is also very much like, "Oh, you got to stop adding features to the game because it comes with real cost." And I think for a lot of people who've struggled with that, AI feels like this. I don't need your permission to do things.
(05:04):
I want to connect up this piece of software and this data source and I can just tell Claude to do it now and it happens. Oh my God, that's incredible. And I'm glossing over the fact that it doesn't quite work that way, but it's not that far off. It is close enough that you can, if you struggle with it a little bit and work through the problems and get all the things set up, you can do it with no expertise whatsoever. That feels really good to people. I think this is the same way people feel about AI art, people with no artistic, myself included, I have no visual artistic talent. And so being able to describe a visual drawing or an illustration or something and then get it makes you feel like, oh my God, I don't have to contract a person or I don't have to feel like I am kept out of this thing.
(05:59):
The fact that it sucks donkey literature is beside the point. It feels like freedom. I think it's more about the vibes than the reality.
Amanda Natividad (06:11):
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I go back to I built the zero click marketing website with Claude and that felt really empowering to me in the
Rand Fishkin (06:22):
Sense - Super empowering.
Amanda Natividad (06:23):
Right. Because it was just me working on it. I didn't have to hire someone, but at the same time it was like, well, it's just a static website. It's not like I'm processing customer information, I'm not taking payments. It's just a static website. It's just me. I don't feel like it would've been a job worthy of a designer in terms of what I was aiming to accomplish with a website. So it didn't feel like there was a good match for like, oh, I'm going to hire an agency to build all this stuff when it's like, no, I really just need a simple website to put some stuff on it. And then from here, I do my own little edits in the HTML. I know where things go. That felt like magic putting together because it was super fast. But yeah, I don't
Rand Fishkin (07:07):
Know. I find it both empowering and deeply insulting at the same time. Quite a challenge to intellectually reconcile these two things. I have empathy for people who feel like they were kept out of all these spaces and now can build things and can build their own website for... You have the resources to do this, but I imagine there are lots of people like you and I who want to build a static website like Zero Click Marketing and just don't have the resources to hire a designer. And now they can do it in a way that is effective and useful and gets the job done just like you did and more power to them. I think that's wonderful. And also, sometimes I will click on someone's article that they point to on their social and they've clearly written it with AI and I just close the browser in disgust and basically I'm like, show me less content like this.
(08:03):
And what sucks is I think that in the future when I see pieces from that person, I scroll past them. I don't click anymore. I won't engage with their stuff because I feel that they have sort of fooled me into thinking that they did their own thinking when they didn't or that they've created something. I feel the same way about AI art.
Amanda Natividad (08:26):
If this has at all, how has this affected the way you create content now?
Rand Fishkin (08:32):
I try to be weirder. I keep wanting to write this post on SparkToro called, I don't care what the future is, but my future is weird and human. I can't say that you and every other business out there or every marketer should embrace weird and human. I can tell you that I'm going to, because that's the type of person that I want to attract. That's the type of audience I want to build. That's the way I want to contribute to the world. I have stopped trying to correctly write M dashes. I just use a hyphen hyphen because it's wrong. It's incorrect. I don't try and get my punctuation perfect anymore. I don't really worry about my capitalization as much as I used to. My sentence structure, I try and make it a little stranger than I used to. Everything's just a little weirder. I try and make my visuals a little more amateur, but I want people to know that I did that.
(09:28):
I don't know, it feels worth it.
Amanda Natividad (09:29):
It's also worth it because that's what you want to do.
Rand Fishkin (09:33):
You're not
Amanda Natividad (09:34):
Measuring it's worth it in terms of business ROI, although that's a separate question, right?That's a
Rand Fishkin (09:39):
Different question. I think there is business ROI to building a brand and sticking to it. Whether your brand is I'm AI first or AI powered or AI assisted or your brand is I'm Rand Fishkin and I'm weird and human. It
Amanda Natividad (09:56):
Actually reminds me of the early for me days of Twitter, what, four years ago, five years ago when I was more focused. Well, when Twitter was called Twitter, when it was Twitter, when people actually used it, when I was creating content there,
(10:12):
I though very consciously of I want to create what I want to be out there. I don't want to create content that complains about things I don't like. I don't want to write about, oh, I hate how people do this in marketing. Although every now and then having a little rant is fun. But for the most part, I wanted to be like, no, I want to write about the way I have done these things. I want to write about the way I think people should do these things. If anybody disagrees, they're free to do so. That's fine. But I focus very much on like, no, I want to put out the energy that I want to see in the world.
Rand Fishkin (10:48):
Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, there's a slight challenge in the, if you want to give advice, you have to take a position. Advice that is not taking a strong position is bland and meaningless. And I do see a lot of people do it in the business world because they don't want to be perceived as difficult or contrarian. They would rather no one get offended or upset than more people resonate with their work.
Amanda Natividad (11:18):
Yeah. No,
Rand Fishkin (11:19):
That's true. I think that's a poor trade-off, but I understand why people make it. I think especially in a corporate world, like corporate environments, that makes a lot of sense.
Amanda Natividad (11:29):
No, that makes sense. But I will say I did some of that punching up, but it was also very careful in doing so in the sense that I was like, I got to make sure I am punching up and not
Rand Fishkin (11:40):
Punching
Amanda Natividad (11:41):
Down. It's like choose your enemies wisely, wisely as defined by how you feel. What is wise to you? What's a worthy enemy to you?
Rand Fishkin (11:53):
I think that's smart. I mean, one of our big advice pieces to people was always have an enemy, have a condiment enemy.
Amanda Natividad (12:00):
Yeah, I think so. Okay. Let's talk about zero-click marketing. Let's talk more about that. So has there been any sort of explanation or presentation you've given that you felt like, "Oh, I'm going to explain zero-click marketing in this newer way," or a way that you've explained it in a given setting where you're like, "Oh, I think this audience really understood it."
Rand Fishkin (12:24):
Well, to be honest, I think the core concept is very easy to digest, and I have not felt a lot of challenge or pushback when I've explained it. The core idea that basically all the major platforms are taking away traffic, and as a result, you have to do marketing in the places your audience pays attention instead of driving over to your website. Where people have struggled much more is in the details. So I have seen significant pushback and friction around some of the ideas in the book, particularly around attribution. I think there is such a resistance to switching from attribution-based measurement to lift-based testing and incrementality testing and testing turning down your ads and running different cohorts in different geos or at different times to see how performance goes. That entire field is just too addicted to their attribution models and the systems that they built.
(13:35):
And I think the success that I've had with that has been convincing the already skeptical of how to build a measurement correlation dashboard or what metrics to put in their systems to test the lift-based measurement, but not the fundamental idea of throw out attribution. I just don't think people are ready. I don't know what's going to cause that to happen, but I do have a feeling that somewhere in the next five to 10 years, people look back and be like, "Hey, Amanda and Rand were calling this years ago. If you read their stuff, they were telling us that we had to do this, and now we see that we do have to." I think history's on our side, not because that's a good thing, it's a bad thing. The big tech platforms have basically taken all the attribution stuff, hid it intentionally so they can make more money.
(14:24):
We're not saying it's positive, we're just telling you that it's happening. That's been a real challenge. You know what people hate, absolutely hate the idea of? They hate the idea that you can't effectively run a post-purchase survey to find where your customers came from. Oh,
Amanda Natividad (14:39):
They do hate that.
Rand Fishkin (14:41):
God, I have never seen such illogical, obviously wrong, poorly defended arguments against this. And for listeners who may not know what I'm talking about, if you have ever purchased a lot of consumer products, you go online, you buy a new pair of shoes, and then at the end of the checkout process, after you put in your credit card, it says, "Success. How did you hear about us today?" Or, "What brought you to us?" And then sometimes it's an open input form and you're supposed to put Google or ChatGPT or Reddit or my friend Steve or whatever you want. Or it's a dropdown and you choose one of the options and you're like, "It was an influencer." And then sometimes if they want to get real detailed, they'll be like, "Which influencer?" And you're supposed to check that off. Sometimes it's optional. Sometimes it seems like it's mandatory, but it's not.
(15:35):
And sometimes it's fully mandatory. You have to do it in some B2B checkout environments, you have to do it.
(15:42):
We go through a ton of all the reasons why it doesn't work and all the research and the citations and the experiments that we've run to prove that this is just total bunk and you can't trust it. And people just hate that. They hate it. They really want to believe that these surveys are effective. Even when they'll agree with the data, with all the points they make, they're like, "Rand, I agree with you, but I still think it's a valuable data point in concert with other things. I don't know how to reconcile those. So you agree that it's biased, you agree that it's wrong, you agree that it's misleading, you agree that it doesn't work, but you still think it's a valuable data point. Donk. What are we doing?" I don't know.
Amanda Natividad (16:28):
For folks listening too, in the book, we have an example where Rand consulted for a company where he helped them with the post-purchase survey and suggested they put in, because there's a field for heard about the product through an influencer. And so Rand suggested including an influencer name who has never talked about the product and was kind of a far out enough example where it's like, oh, there's no way it's really this person.
Rand Fishkin (17:00):
And they were quite well known in the space.
Amanda Natividad (17:03):
Yes. And they were well
Rand Fishkin (17:04):
Known. Yeah.
Amanda Natividad (17:08):
I don't remember the stat offhand, but
Rand Fishkin (17:10):
I think it was 30% of people picked the fake influencer. They
Amanda Natividad (17:14):
Picked the fake influencer. So whomp, whomp. I mean -
Rand Fishkin (17:19):
Yeah. And that's just one of so many examples. There was some great research that we cited in the book as well
(17:28):
Where I believe the professor at the university basically had students go through a process and then the next day, next day or the next week, try and remember what process they went through. Nobody can remember. You cannot remember the steps that you took. And then there's just the, as we put in the book, right Amanda, let's imagine everyone was perfect. All your customers, unlike every other human on the planet, your customers, absolutely perfect in their recall. We still know that it's between six and 60 different steps, like touch points before an average purchase is done, and you asked for one. So you're only going to get one. And even if you were like, okay, fill out 60 fields, everyone does it absolutely perfectly. Guess what you're never going to get? Opportunities. You're never going to find opportunities where you're not already present. You're only going to hear the sources that you're good at.
(18:26):
Anyway, I'm not sure why this logic can't sink in, but tons of pushback there. I continue to search for ways to more charismatically explain this so that people get it. I feel like it's like explaining housing density in the early 2000s. People just don't go for it.
Amanda Natividad (18:47):
That one's
Rand Fishkin (18:47):
Hard though. You're live recording. Miss. It's
Amanda Natividad (18:50):
Live.
Rand Fishkin (18:50):
This is a live recording.
Geraldine DeRuiter (18:52):
Hi. Hi.
Rand Fishkin (18:54):
Hi
Amanda Natividad (18:55):
Geraldine. Hi.
Rand Fishkin (18:55):
Problems in here.
Geraldine DeRuiter (18:57):
I just wanted to say hi and say hello, Amanda.
Rand Fishkin (19:01):
Hi.
Geraldine DeRuiter (19:02):
And for those of you who are watching this -
Rand Fishkin (19:06):
I'm just kidding. It's not live.
Geraldine DeRuiter (19:07):
Amanda just flew home after she flew up this weekend for Rand's grandfather's memorial, and it was really sweet. It
Rand Fishkin (19:16):
Was so sweet.
Geraldine DeRuiter (19:17):
And I just wanted to say thank you.
Rand Fishkin (19:19):
Of course.
Geraldine DeRuiter (19:19):
It meant a lot and it was so lovely to see you.
Rand Fishkin (19:22):
Thank you, Amanda. It was
Amanda Natividad (19:23):
So lovely. I couldn't have missed it. It was really
Geraldine DeRuiter (19:25):
Important. It was really, really special. So thank you. I saw that Rand was on a call with you and I wanted to come say that because I didn't get to say goodnight or goodbye to you this morning because you left at 6:00 AM. Okay. I believe I got you this. I
Rand Fishkin (19:43):
Don't know what it is, but thank
Geraldine DeRuiter (19:44):
You. It's a little pen with a porcupine. Anyway, just wanted to say hi, Amanda. Hi. You're the best. You're the best.
Amanda Natividad (19:50):
Bye.
Rand Fishkin (19:53):
Bye. Thank you for my pen.
Geraldine DeRuiter (19:54):
You're welcome, my love. All
Amanda Natividad (19:56):
Right, let's do one more question. So on the post-purchase survey thing, I went to your LinkedIn profile to kind of scroll through the comments here. A couple of people are talking about don't use check boxes. Try free text entry only. That seems
Rand Fishkin (20:12):
Interesting. Which as I mentioned, that similarly ineffective, and often you will get a much lower rate of response. So one of the other, of course, challenges of these post-purchase surveys is that the... So survey takers, let's assume that you are making the survey optional, right? So they're not forced to fill it out in order to purchase your product. It happens after checkout or it happens in the checkout process, but it is not a required field. In that case, some channels are going to send visitors to you, purchasers to you who are less likely and more likely to fill that out. That's a big problem. That will bias your results again, making your data even more inaccurate and incorrect. And folks who feel like the open form field is a solution, this will simply lower it even more. And what will almost certainly happen according to the research is that you will get people filling it out with sources they think make them look good to you.
(21:22):
So basically let's say this is a B2B sort of tech world thing. They will say Claude or they will say a particular model of ChatGPT. But if it was actually Google's AI mode, they might not say that even though it's AI because they're like, "Well, does that seem as advanced? Does that seem as in the know? Do I seem cool if I do that?" They might've heard about you on Reddit and they don't feel great about the fact they heard about you on Reddit, but they want to fill something out so they say LinkedIn, you're just going to get biased and incorrect data. Many times, this is not people lying to you. It's just them. It's their own brain sort of building a story, a plausible story that feels good and fits the narrative that they're in. And this is not like your customers are evil and they lie to you.
(22:23):
They don't. They can't remember. They're biased in all these ways. The question is just bad. It's just a bad thing to ask.
Amanda Natividad (22:31):
I would love for one day to see the freeform response, and I would love for someone to type in, "Oh, I typed in best audience research software and you came up first in organic results, and so then I clicked on that and became a customer." I really want someone to say that one day.
Rand Fishkin (22:49):
I mean, I'm sure it's happened, but yeah, I think the other thing is let's say that we had this data. Let's say SparkToro in particular had this data and it said, "Okay, 40% said Google search and 20% said one of the major AI tools and 11% said LinkedIn and 6% said Reddit and 4% said email list and 2% said conferences and events." What do we do? What are we going to do different that will improve our business, our product or our marketing because we now have that data? I don't have a good answer for that. I think the thing people assume they will do is then they will go to their boss and say, "Hey boss, look, the Reddit marketing we're doing is working because it's 11% this quarter and it was only 9% last quarter." And then you look into the data and you're like, "Oh, well that's actually just five people and Reddit sent us less traffic this quarter than last quarter.
(24:01):
Huh, I wonder what's going on there. I guess it's all meaningless." You just throw up your hands. Yeah, it bugs me that people are so addicted to this. I think it's similar to AI visibility tracking, Amanda. Super addicted to that. It does not seem to be useful, seems to be poorly correlated with anything. There are metrics that you can track in there that if you assume all your users are logged out and have no personalization, and if you assume that you could somehow get to prompt quantity, like actually estimate how many people search for a particular prompt or a particular prompt topic, maybe it would be meaningful, but you can't, so it's not. So what are you doing? I don't know. You know what's funny? That one seems to resonate more.
Amanda Natividad (24:54):
Probably because it's newer and so it's easier to be skeptical about a thing that's newer.
Rand Fishkin (24:59):
I bet you're right. Yeah. Yeah. The post-purchase survey is so tried and true or feels so tried and true.
Amanda Natividad (25:05):
Yeah. And it feels it's intuitive or it feels like, no, but that makes sense. After someone buys, you ask them how they heard about us. It
Rand Fishkin (25:13):
Just makes
Amanda Natividad (25:14):
Sense. Yeah.
Rand Fishkin (25:15):
Yeah.
Amanda Natividad (25:16):
And also there's some like, well, what's the harm in trying it? I do think there's a little bit of like, well, let's try it for the next month or so. We'll see what we get.
Rand Fishkin (25:28):
And again, I have two responses to that, which is one, let's say that it showed Reddit at 9% or Reddit at 11% or Reddit at 60%. What would you do differently?
Amanda Natividad (25:42):
Yes. Yes.
Rand Fishkin (25:43):
What would you do differently based on this response that you're going to get in this first month? If you make a plan and you're like, look, if more than 12% of people say Reddit is influencing them, I'm going to go out and I'm going to eat an elephant ear at the fair. Okay, great. You have a plan at least. That's something I think almost no one does. The thing that you're hurting is that spot, that one spot, because you really could only ask one question at the end of a checkout process and with any reasonable expectation that people would answer, you could ask other questions there. You could ask, "What problem are you hoping to solve with our product?" Now, that is flipping useful. That is such great data because if people tell you that they're going to solve a problem and you're like, "Wait a minute, we don't solve that very well.
(26:39):
No wonder we have a high return rate or people aren't coming back or they're not recommending us." Now you've learned something. Now you've really got something valuable. Or if a lot of people tell you that they're planning to put your data into an API or they are going to use it in their AI tool, you can be like, "Oh man, we need to prioritize an MCP." Or if people tell you, "Oh, I am going to do this thing in this region," and you're like, "Oh shoot, our product is not so great for that country or that geography." There you go. You could ask another question. You could ask what sources of influence are most important for you? Which of the following social networks do you have a presence on? Check all that apply. And then you're like, "Oh man, a lot of our customers have a presence on Blue Sky.
(27:31):
I would not have guessed that." They're not saying they heard about you on Blue Sky, they're saying they're there.
Amanda Natividad (27:37):
That's interesting because that gives you a lot of meat for what you could consider doing next. Even the first question of what problem are you hoping to solve or what problem do you want to solve? I think what I really like about that too is that creates a lot of opportunity for marketing because it's not only how does this inform our product or our line of products or whatever it is you sell, it could inform the content you create. It could inform your customer support articles. I don't know. It could inform what you do in the email onboard
Rand Fishkin (28:12):
Sequence. Advertising.
Amanda Natividad (28:14):
Absolutely.
Rand Fishkin (28:14):
Yeah, totally. I think when people are like, "What's the harm?" The harm is you've cost yourself an opportunity to get more valuable, more useful data from those people who checked out, and you've given yourself data that you almost certainly won't use.
Amanda Natividad (28:29):
Oh, that's super interesting. Do we have that in SparkToro right now?
Rand Fishkin (28:34):
Do we ask?
Amanda Natividad (28:35):
Yeah, after someone purchases.
Rand Fishkin (28:37):
We do. We ask - We have a question. When they're doing setup, so if you look at that SparkToro admin page that Casey built, the stats will show you... What's the question that we ask? We say, "What are you hoping to do with SparkToro?"
Amanda Natividad (28:52):
That's what it is. What are
Rand Fishkin (28:53):
You hoping to
Amanda Natividad (28:54):
Do?
Rand Fishkin (28:55):
So we can say, "Oh, people who signed up last year were very focused on content marketing, and this year it's a lot more personas and market research." I suspect that if everybody who had one of those post-purchase, how did you hear about us surveys instead said, "What are you trying to solve?" Or, "I've seen this one and I like this one too. It's a little more marketing-y. I don't quite love it as much as the product one, but it is," What was your catalyst to buy? What caused you to buy today? "Sometimes people will put in the referral source, but sometimes they'll say like," Oh, I bought your software because we just hired an agency and we want to audit their work. "Or they'll say," Oh, we just bought your software because we've got a new social media influencer budget to go spend, "or whatever it is.
(29:46):
You buy something from a hardware store and they're like," Well, what caused you to buy today? "And they're like," My deck is broken because a tree fell on it. "You're like," All right, good to know. "Yeah.
Amanda Natividad (29:56):
No, I like that.
Rand Fishkin (29:57):
All that stuff is also useful. And potentially actionable. It's good for content, it's good for marketing, it's good for product. Great. I think that's wonderful. So opportunity cost is real.
Amanda Natividad (30:09):
Yeah. And also if anyone has this connected to their company Slack channel, I'm sure a lot of people have this kind of workflow where the survey will then ping the channel what the insights are. It's also fun. It's delightful. I think if I filled out that question for half my purchases, it would probably be like, because I'm in my luteal phase and I'm pissed off for no reason and I needed a mood boost, which that's a thing too. That's a need.
Rand Fishkin (30:39):
I was talking to someone earlier today about how if you have a product that is primarily bought and sold based on the visuals of that product, there is a lot to this, not impulse purchase necessarily if you don't believe in that, but a lot to the, all you need to do is see it on Pinterest, see an Instagram video of it, see a person recommending it on Reddit, that kind of thing. And then you're like, "Yep, that's for me." Because you were already primed to be in the phase of whatever, I deserve cute new shoes or I want a new necktie. And then something comes across your feed and you're like, "Oh, there you go."
Amanda Natividad (31:23):
Yeah. Okay. I want to ask one last question on video game marketing. So for folks who might not be aware, Rand is creating a video game. His third company right now is Snack Bar Studios and they're creating a video game. So this is kind of a two-part question, I guess. My first question to you is how do you, you specifically Rand Fishkin, how do you go about learning marketing in an industry that's not your regular industry? Because video games, I mean that's very new to you, right? How did you start to learn about how do you do marketing in this space?
Rand Fishkin (32:03):
First big thing we did was that giant crawl, that analysis. So the guys from AlertMouse did this big crawl of Steam with me and we pulled out all the games that were not AAA, huge studios, huge budget that had received more than 200 reviews on Steam and had ever announced their sales. So a lot of people post on Twitter, "We crossed 100,000 sales of our indie video game today." Great. So then we built this giant correlation thing and I just looked through all the games that had been successful over the last few years. The numbers weren't huge. We're talking about maybe 1800 games and anything that was close to Snackbar's genre, I went and watched their trailer, looked at their social feed, all that kind of stuff. And then I started subscribing to all this stuff. So I'm subscribed to all the indie gaming subreddits.
(32:57):
I follow a bunch of creators on Instagram and Reddit and YouTube. A lot of times while I'm doing my morning planks for my physical therapy exercise, I'm just watching YouTube videos of other indie game trailers. And then I'm looking at how many likes and views and then how many wishlists they got on Steam and trying to figure out like, okay, this one worked, this one didn't work. This one got a lot of action on YouTube, but it didn't translate to wishlists. And then hiring people. We hired an agency, Bravado, which is based in Poland. It's these two guys, Tom and Adam. You know what's great about them? They're not geniuses. They are curious and skeptical and data driven. When I ask them a question, they're like, "Hmm, this is a good question. We'll research and come back to you." And I love that. I love that they're not just like, "Here's the answer." We of course know what we're doing.
(33:55):
And they could give that answer. They did a ton of the marketing for all of 11 bit studios, which has had a bunch of indie game hits, but they don't. They're extremely research heavy. They clearly put a ton of though into everything that they do. We're working on the trailer design right now and they've been wonderful for that. We've made, I want to say five or six different versions. We've tried all sorts of different soundtracks for it. Still iterating, I suspect we'll keep iterating up until November. And yeah, it's been quite a learning process. But what I did not want to do is assume, Amanda, I was so scared that, oh, I'm supposedly someone who's very good at marketing, so I'll just use my existing knowledge and no way. It's too important a bet on this company and this game to have that happen.
Amanda Natividad (34:49):
Yeah, that's true. I mean, this is a major project.
Rand Fishkin (34:53):
It has twice the funding SparkToro does. So you got to really... Yeah. Very high pressure.
Amanda Natividad (35:00):
Yeah. I guess this is my last question. Do you think you'll end up doing any paid marketing?
Rand Fishkin (35:06):
Yes.
(35:07):
Yeah. I'm almost certain. Basically the way it works, and this is quite similar actually to how we think about marketing for SparkToro or AlertMouse, which is basically you calculate your views to wishlist conversion ratio. So this would be like for every thousand YouTube views, we see a correlating 16 wishlists on Steam. 16 wishlists on Steam is worth 20 bucks minus Steam's 30%. So whatever the math is there, 300-ish dollars or something. And then the amount we are willing to spend per thousand YouTube views is half of that, $150. So you do the math and you figure it out. Hopefully the math works. If the math is not working, that means we need a new trailer. But the goal is definitely to be able to put, I don't know, somewhere in the low six figures into paid acquisition.
Amanda Natividad (36:11):
That's a really helpful framework for how you figure out the starting point for what your spend should be. Okay, we'll start with this amount or this is going to be the amount for this
Rand Fishkin (36:21):
Month, whatever it is. The nice part about games, especially you can start with organic and then you know what your organic rate is. And so then you run the paid campaign and you just see, does the paid campaign perform worse or better than the organic? If it's better or the same, you know your metrics. If it's worse, you just have to recalculate. But any business can do this. So SparkToro, one of the reasons that Casey and I did this pricing change where we turned off the $50 a month plan is to be able to get an LTV, a lifetime value per new SparkToro customer where we could actually afford to do some paid marketing because historically it's kind of been off the table. B2B SaaS marketing acquisition is in the hundreds of dollars per lead or signup, but with a $50 a month plan, the LTV is not there and it won't be ROI positive.
(37:16):
And so we got to go that way. Games is tougher because the price can't really be above $25 and the sweet spot's probably 20.
Amanda Natividad (37:27):
Does it make sense to do multiple trailers that focus? This is a very
Rand Fishkin (37:31):
Marketing
Amanda Natividad (37:32):
Question. Focus at the very different pain point that you're solving. Not
Rand Fishkin (37:35):
Pain
Amanda Natividad (37:35):
Point, but different.
Rand Fishkin (37:38):
Like how we talked about where you and I were chatting about how if Casey or Evan, my brother, helps us set up this LinkedIn system. I don't know if you saw Darren Shaw is doing this now where he's got organic video on LinkedIn, Instagram, maybe TikTok as well, and definitely YouTube. And then he's got paid spend behind any of his videos that do really well. So if a video pops, then he's like, "Great. Now put paid spend behind it to amplify its reach." And then we sort of calculate the ROI off of that extra spend and try and see what the return looks like and whether we're going to keep investing and what the minimum bar needs to be.
Amanda Natividad (38:26):
Cool. All right. We are coming up on time. I got to cut us off. Thank you for joining us, Rand. We're done here. We're done
Rand Fishkin (38:35):
Here.
Amanda Natividad (38:37):
Well, friends, if you're still with us, buy our book now or don't.
Rand Fishkin (38:45):
I have a suspicion, Amanda. I have a suspicion that almost everyone who listens to your wonderful Zero Click Marketing podcast is already on the pre-order list and for which I'm very grateful.
Amanda Natividad (38:58):
Yeah. Pretty amazing people who are listening.
Rand Fishkin (39:01):
Pretty amazing.
Amanda Natividad (39:03):
Thank you for listening or watching Zero Click Marketing. We'll see you next week.