Talking Zero Click Marketing with Amanda Natividad

John Wall (0:14)

Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall. Today, Amanda Natividad is the chief evangelist at Sparktoro. Sparktoro does audience profiling. We've talked to Rand Fishkin, who's actually the founder.

Originally, he was from Moz, somebody we've been tracking for years. Amanda's got her new book Zero Click Marketing. I had a chance to catch up with her in person a couple of weeks ago right after her sold out presentation at Marketing Profs B2B Forum in Boston. I want to thank Marketing Profs too for inviting us. We had our sessions there. There was all kinds of stuff going on. It went really well. And so let's just jump right into the show.

Tell us about the book. What drove you to go down this path and take the time it takes to crank something like this out?

Amanda Natividad (0:58)

So it's 2022 And in conversation with my co-author Rand Fishkin, I said something just as a throwaway comment even. I said, yeah, yeah, I think we'll just create some zero click content. And, you know, I was like, wait, what did you say? I was like, oh, zero click content. I was like, what's that?

And I was like, oh, yeah, zero click content is when, you know, you can create content that's native to platform where people don't have to click to learn more about it. They could just get all the value right there in there. Everybody knows this. He was like, no, not everyone knows this. You need to write this into a blog post. And I said to him, are you sure? I really think most people do.

He looks at me and says, no, you need to write this.

So I did. So they did the first blog post, it was in the summer of 2022, it was about zero click content, right? The counterintuitive way to get people to click, but without asking them to click, something kind of like that. And so at first, to me, was just a way of creating content. But meanwhile, Rand had already been doing this research on the zero click web, right? About zero click searches in Google. So we ended up coming together for this book. And I think where it felt like a really natural fit for both of us was he had already been doing the research of the zero click web and tracking where all this was going. I had kind of intuited some of that and was already kind of doing marketing in a way that was assuming we wouldn't get any clicks, right? Or assuming, oh, no one's going to go here. No one's going to do that thing. We have to market where they are. And so the result is the zero quick marketing book where it's a really nice blend of the recent history of the internet and digital marketing, how we got to this point, how and why attribution has always been kind of a lie, but now it's worse than ever. And the playbook for what to do about it next.

John Wall (3:08)

That sounds good. You had a great analogy talking about our brains being pinballs basically. Like, tell us about that. How does that fit into it?

Amanda Natividad (3:14)

Yeah, so pinballs, right? So we marketers want to say that, oh, there's a marketing funnel and people go down the funnel. And sure, sure, fine. And I still think that's helpful, right? That's how we marketers think about it. But the pinball, the pinball machine is the reality. Like, this is what people are actually doing. And so I think the actual way to think about it is every time you think of something you might buy or you think of a pain point, you're basically launching yourself into the pinball machine of a buyer journey, right? And so then you kind of you as the pinball, right? You're kind of bumping around social media posts, YouTube video.

Maybe do you make your way to the website? Maybe join the email list? The marketer who is pushing the buttons and flappers, maybe they can relaunch you with their email campaign back into the pinball machine. But really what this means is it's chaotic, right? Like we are all just pinballs in the meat space, pinning around. There's no linear journey. There's no, no one, no one says like, oh, I progress through the funnel, right?

But we all zing around in the meat space.

John Wall (4:33)

You had a great slide that was talking about what you want your content to do. Depending on what you want your content to do, there's different ways that you would measure, try and figure out the impact of that. So talk to us about like just even the difference between getting noticed versus being useful.