Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / How CMOs Use Zero-Click Content to Win the Feed
Transcript
- Lucas: So last week I was scrolling LinkedIn — as you do — and I saw a post from a CMO I follow. It was a carousel, maybe six slides, breaking down how she restructured her team's budget. No link. No call to action. Just the slides. It had over twelve thousand reactions and hundreds of comments. Luna: And I bet the post after it in her feed probably had a link to a blog post and got maybe two hundred likes. Lucas: Exactly. That gap is the whole reason we need to talk about zero-click content. It's not a new concept — platforms have been pushing it for years — but in 2026, it's becoming a formal pillar of marketing strategy. CMOs are literally planning campaigns where the primary deliverable is something that lives and dies inside the feed. Luna: Define it clearly for someone who hasn't heard the term. Zero-click content means... what, exactly? Lucas: It means a piece of content designed to deliver value — information, insight, entertainment — entirely within the platform, with no requirement to click a link to an external site. A LinkedIn carousel, an Instagram Reel that teaches you something, a thread on X that tells a full story in the replies. The platform's algorithm loves it because users never leave. And the user loves it because they got value in under thirty seconds. Luna: But if there's no click, how do you measure success? How do you tie it to anything a CFO cares about? Lucas: Great question, and that's where the tension is. Traditional attribution models break down. You can't track a conversion back to a zero-click post using a last-click model. So CMOs are shifting to proxy metrics — brand recall, share of voice, earned amplification. A study Edelman put out in March of this year found that zero-click posts on LinkedIn had a forty percent higher brand recall than posts with links, controlling for reach. Luna: Forty percent? That's huge. But I can already hear the sales team saying, 'Great, they remember us. Did they buy anything?' Lucas: And that's the right pushback. The answer is: not directly, no. But brand recall correlates with consideration at the top of the funnel. The real play is that zero-click content builds earned attention — people share it because it's useful, not because they're being asked to do something. And that earned distribution lowers your cost per impression dramatically. Luna: Can you give me a concrete example of a brand that's doing this well right now? Lucas: HubSpot. They've been running a series of carousel posts on LinkedIn called the 'Marketing Grader.' Each carousel walks through a specific audit — like 'How to grade your email subject lines' or 'Is your landing page converting?' — with actual scoring criteria. No link to a full report. The value is in the slides. One of those carousels hit two million impressions last quarter. Zero outbound clicks. Luna: Two million impressions with zero clicks. And they're fine with that? Lucas: They are, because those two million impressions drove a measurable lift in searches for 'HubSpot marketing grader.' People who saw the post went and found the tool on their own. That's indirect attribution — harder to track, but the brand team knows it works. Luna: It's almost like you're trading direct response for brand building within the feed itself. And the platforms are designed to reward that. Lucas: Exactly. LinkedIn's algorithm, Instagram's, X's — they all deprioritize posts with external links. It's been a slow change, but by now it's well-documented. If you post a link, you get less organic reach. So CMOs are making a rational choice: if the platform penalizes links, we'll stop giving them links. We'll give them content that keeps people inside the walled garden. Luna: And then you use retargeting on the backend. Someone engages with your carousel, you can still serve them an ad later. Lucas: Right. The zero-click post isn't the end of the relationship — it's the open. You get the engagement signal, then you can retarget that user with a link-based ad or a direct response asset. The zero-click content becomes a top of funnel awareness engine, and the retargeting does the conversion work. Luna: You know, this actually reminds me of something a listener recently wrote in about — they said they'd started using a few of our marketing insights in their own team's strategy, and it made me think about how much value can come from a single, focused piece of content. No ask, just useful information. Lucas: That's exactly the spirit. And it's why conversations like this one are worth having — because when you share something genuinely useful, it tends to come back around. If these kinds of marketing deep dives have sparked an idea or a tactic you've actually used, we'd love for you to keep them coming. You can support the show at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to keep these episodes ad-free and focused on the substance. Luna: Yeah, every little bit helps us keep the conversation going. And now back to zero-click — one thing I want to dig into is the content itself. What makes a zero-click post actually work? It can't just be a repurposed blog post. Lucas: No, it has to be designed for the medium. A carousel needs a strong hook on slide one — something that stops the scroll. Then each slide should deliver one clear idea, visually. Text overlays, simple graphics. The last slide often includes a question to drive comments, because comments boost the algorithm further. Luna: So it's almost like micro-learning. Each post teaches you one thing in under a minute. Lucas: Exactly. And the best ones feel like a cheat sheet. I saw a post from a B2B SaaS CMO that was just 'The five questions to ask before you renew any marketing software.' Five slides, each with one question and a one-sentence explanation. That's it. It had over fifty thousand reactions. Luna: Because it was immediately useful. You didn't need to read a three-thousand-word article to get the insight. Lucas: Right. And that's the strategic insight for CMOs: attention is the scarce resource. If you can capture it without asking for a click, you win the feed. Then you figure out attribution later. The risk is that you become a content factory without a clear ROI story. But the CMOs who are succeeding are the ones who build zero-click into a broader measurement framework. Luna: Let's talk about that framework. How do you report zero-click content to the board? Lucas: You report engagement metrics — but you also report downstream signals. Things like branded search volume, direct traffic to your site, and retargeting pool growth. One framework I've seen is to assign a 'brand value' to each engagement based on historical conversion rates of engaged users. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. Luna: So you're essentially creating a proxy for the click that didn't happen. Lucas: Exactly. And honestly, many boards are becoming more comfortable with that, because they understand that the platform ecosystem has changed. The old days of 'post a link and track the click' are fading. CMOs who adapt early are the ones who will have the credibility to ask for more budget next year. Luna: What about the downside? Is there a risk that zero-click content makes your brand seem less credible if it's too shallow? Lucas: Huge risk. If your zero-click content is just fluff — '10 tips for better marketing' with no real insight — it can damage your brand. The audience is sophisticated. They can tell the difference between genuine expertise and surface-level posting. The best zero-click content comes from real experience, real data, real case studies. Luna: So it's not a shortcut. It's actually harder to do well than a standard blog post. Lucas: In some ways, yes. You have to distill a complex idea into a few slides or a short video. That takes editorial discipline. But the payoff in reach and engagement can be enormous. And because the content is native to the platform, it often feels more authentic. Luna: I want to ask about a specific platform: X. With the changes over the past couple of years, is zero-click content still effective there? Lucas: It is, but differently. X threads are the main format. A thread that tells a story or breaks down a concept across ten to fifteen tweets can get massive engagement. The key is that each tweet must provide value on its own, so even if someone only reads the first tweet, they get something. And the thread format encourages the algorithm to show it to more people. Luna: And on Instagram? Reels are obviously dominant. Lucas: Reels, yes. But also carousel posts are making a comeback. Instagram's algorithm seems to favor carousels that have high save rates. So if you create a carousel that people save for later — like a checklist or a framework — it gets pushed to more users. That's pure zero-click value. Luna: So across platforms, the pattern is the same: give value without asking for anything in return, and the platform rewards you. Lucas: Exactly. And the CMOs who understand this are rethinking their entire content production process. Instead of starting with a blog post and repurposing it into social, they're starting with the zero-click asset — the carousel, the Reel, the thread — and then expanding it into a longer piece if the engagement warrants it. Luna: That's a complete inversion of the traditional workflow. Lucas: It is. And it requires a different kind of creative team — people who think visually and natively for each platform. But the results speak for themselves. Lower cost per impression, higher engagement rates, and stronger brand recall. Luna: So for a CMO listening right now, what's the one thing they should do this week to start experimenting with zero-click content? Lucas: Pick one insight from a recent campaign or a piece of research you've done. Distill it into a five-slide carousel. No link. Post it on LinkedIn. Track the impressions, reactions, comments, and shares. Then look at your branded search volume in the week after. That's your experiment. Run it for four weeks and see what happens. Luna: And if it works, you've got a new channel. If it doesn't, you've learned something about your audience. Lucas: Exactly. Low risk, high potential upside. And it's a signal to your team that you're thinking about where the platform ecosystem is heading, not where it's been. Luna: Alright, I'm going to try that myself this week. I've got a framework on customer lifetime value that might work as a carousel. Lucas: I'd love to see it. And if you do post it, we'll link to it in the show notes — if we can figure out a zero-click way to do that. Luna: Ha. That's the challenge, isn't it? Lucas: It is. But that's what makes this fun. Thanks for the conversation, Luna. Luna: Thanks, Lucas. Talk to everyone next time.