Latest / Content, Briefly / Rand Fishkin on Zero Click Marketing

Transcript

Rand Fishkin on Zero Click Marketing · Content, Briefly

• 0:00
  There's no video component in this. We don't do YouTube, so No video? No video. Yeah. Oh, you guys, how's anybody gonna see this beautiful Drake's tie that I've got on? We can add it to the thumbnail.
• 0:08
  We'll add the tie and, uh, your beardless face. [laughs] That's- Nice... thank you? [laughs] Hey, folks. Jimmy here, and thanks so much for tuning in to another episode of Content Briefly.
• 0:20
  Today, I am so excited to have one of my marketing idols on, Rand Fishkin.
• 0:26
  If you came into the marketing world around the same time as I did, I think in, like, 2009, 2010, and kinda growing up in this age of SEO content, Rand Fishkin is truly a legendary figure.
• 0:36
  He was the founder and CEO of Moz, current co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, which is an audience research tool, and over the years, has just contributed so much to the world of marketing.
• 0:46
  I j- I remember watching Whiteboard Friday videos, uh, man, probably 2011, 2012. If you've never watched those, like, if you didn't come into marketing, uh, that early, g- go watch them.
• 0:58
  You know, some of the tactics have changed, but the premise of basically everything that Rand talks about, and also the sort of, an example of a type of marketing that you can do, uh, is sort of rich with that.
• 1:09
  You know, he did, uh, these SlideShare presentations that went viral, and there was one in particular I recall that I believe was b- was called Why Content Marketing Fails, and I, [laughs] I went and looked it up today.
• 1:20
  It has 7 million views, and, uh, and w- in, in addition to just being an extremely helpful way to deliver the content and some really good ideas in there, just kind of a cool, like, outside-the-box way of going about your marketing.
• 1:33
  So I love that Rand not only has a lot of really interesting information and ideas to share, but is always doing it in a way that is also original and provides inspiration, too.
• 1:42
  And so today, we're primarily talking about zero-click marketing.
• 1:45
  Rand and his coworker, Amanda Natividad, who you may recognize from this very podcast, have just published a book called Zero Click Marketing, and it's, it's basically all about this world that we all live in.
• 1:56
  Y- you know, as consumers, we all recognize it, that we don't click through to websites as much as we used to, whether that's in Google, LinkedIn, X, or anywhere else.
• 2:05
  You know, these platforms wanna keep us there, and so Rand and Amanda have created a new playbook for how companies can go about marketing their products and services in a world where
• 2:15
  fewer people are coming to a website. Not none, and that's an important distinction which Rand does talk about in our conversation, but, but certainly fewer. Um, so much good stuff to learn here.
• 2:24
  I find it to be a very holistic and evergreen way of thinking about marketing. If you wanna order the book, would encourage you to check it out.
• 2:31
  I think it's a very helpful way to just, you know, kinda upskill yourself a bit. And interestingly, AI is only one little piece of this. This trend was happening before AI, and, uh, actually I went back and checked.
• 2:43
  Amanda first wrote about zero-click marketing on the SparkToro blog in July of 2022, just a couple of months before ChatGPT launched and changed all of our marketing lives forever.
• 2:56
  Um, and, and most of what they talk about actually has nothing to do with AI. It's more about the trend of platforms wanting to keep attention and, uh, engagement for themselves. So anyways, I'm gonna get out of the way.
• 3:07
  Uh, seriously enjoyed this conversation. Just so appreciative that Rand took the time to do this and have this convo with us. Enjoy it, and I'll see you soon. Hey, everybody. Jimmy and Alex here from Superpath.
• 3:18
  We are so pumped today to have Rand Fishkin with us, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, along with a long list of other, uh, career and marketing accolades, some of which we're gonna talk about.
• 3:29
  But first, Rand, thank you so much for being here, and how are you? I am very well, with the exception of my lack of facial hair.
• 3:36
  You know, it's a, it's an exciting day [laughs] because Zero Click Marketing, our, our new book, came out today, and that, um, yeah. I've been getting some very nice messages and reviews and all that, so good day.
• 3:48
  That's fantastic. We're obviously gonna link to that in the show notes and would encourage everyone, go get your copy, read it. We're gonna talk about it today some- Yeah... of course.
• 3:57
  Rand, I thought about so many different ways that we start this conversation. I was hoping to go back to, like, 2011, 2012. [laughs] Hey. You know, I've followed your career forever.
• 4:06
  I'm talking, uh, Whiteboard Friday, SlideShare. You killed it on SlideShare for years. There was inbound.org, uh, the Will Reynolds CEO swap. I, I remember reading all about that.
• 4:18
  These were, like, pretty formative experiences for me as a young marketer. Mm.
• 4:22
  And, you know, as I was thinking about Zero Click Marketing, AI, kinda like the world that we live in today, I sorta had this realization that you've actually been doing this for your entire career. Hmm.
• 4:32
  Whiteboard Friday, SlideShare, CEO swap. In my mind, these actually are sort of timeless marketing things that you could do. I mean, I think the big,
• 4:40
  yeah, the big difference though, right, Jimmy, is that those things all got promoted on our website. Whiteboard Friday lived on moz.com/blog.
• 4:50
  The CEO swap was, you know, that was just moz.com/blog and, and a SEER post about it. All, all the SlideShares, those were all embedded on our blog. Most of the views came from there.
• 4:59
  It's so different from today, where whenever we create something, like the, the, this podcast, for example, right? It's gonna be listened to on, on Apple or on YouTube or, you know, wherever.
• 5:10
  It's not necessarily people listening to it on Superpath. Some will, but not the majority. Rand, that's a really interesting distinction. I think, okay, maybe we should define zero-click marketing.
• 5:19
  That, I think that would probably be helpful, but also, when I think about this, when I think about the way that companies build a brand, there's, like, a set of marketing activities that you can do.
• 5:28
  There's, like, a checklist of content and paid and these other things.
• 5:31
  I think one of the things that I've appreciated about the way that you've marketed the companies you've worked with and for and, and marketed yourself also is they're really different.
• 5:39
  A CEO swap is going to attract attention kind of regardless of the algorithm and the platforms that you're dealing with. I mean, maybe it limits the reach, you know?
• 5:48
  But it, because it's so differentiated, like, that's the thing that, that creates the awareness, that draws people in, maybe via a click, maybe general awareness as they pass through a feed.
• 5:57
  Maybe there's some semantics in there that are worth kinda putting in the context of, like, what zero-click marketing actually means. Yeah.
• 6:02
  So Amanda created this term basically to refer to what started working for SparkToro, for our own marketing, that was very different from how I'd done marketing, especially at Moz, but even in the early days of SparkToro, right?
• 6:15
  If you think about the classic flywheel of content marketing and, and SEO and blogging and all that stuff, it's really, like- Have a great idea, maybe do some keyword research around, you know, what people are searching for in Google so you can rank for something.
• 6:28
  Publish it on your own website. Try and get it to rank well, try and promote it through your social feeds, you know, send out the email notice about it. Maybe you do some PR for it.
• 6:38
  But everything is centered on bringing people back to the website.
• 6:42
  And the content itself, while it can certainly be useful, really the goal is get the person on the website so that you can potentially capture their email address through a subscription, cookie them so that you can follow them around the internet like a lost puppy dog with your retargeting ads, right?
• 6:59
  Get data about them so that when they come back, you can start to build models and an analytics framework and eventually sell them something.
• 7:08
  That is the model that was not working for us and, and stopped working for a lot of people. It's not entirely dead. I wanna clarify this. That model still works.
• 7:18
  It just doesn't work as well and in decline, and that is because of what the big tech platforms are doing.
• 7:24
  All of the social media websites wanna keep you on their platform, and so they have either algorithms or restrictions on links that point out. You know, Meta just launched their, what is it?
• 7:35
  Meta One subscription, where now you have to pay them, you know, $200 a month if you wanna put an unlimited number of links, or you can pay them 20 bucks a month for putting two links, you know, up on your p- whatever a month.
• 7:46
  That's the most egregious of them, but Twitter has an algorithm designed to suppress posts with links. LinkedIn has an algorithm that suppresses posts with links.
• 7:54
  Threads has an algorithm that suppresses posts with links.
• 7:56
  Reddit used to be a place where you could put a lot of external links, and now almost every community there either doesn't allow them or just nobody upvotes those posts.
• 8:05
  YouTube used to have links right below the description. Now, if you put a link in the description, YouTube will automatically cut off your description wherever the link is. In all these cases, it's the same thing.
• 8:17
  It's, it's keep people on the platform, don't let them leave, and as a result, we find ourselves in this world where we have to rethink that flywheel, rethink how content is distributed and where and why, and how we're gonna measure it.
• 8:32
  So zero-click marketing is essentially that reimagining. It's taking that flywheel and saying, "Okay, maybe we're still gonna produce that content on our site, but you know what?
• 8:41
  We know that for every person who visits our website, 1,000 people are gonna learn about us on sites and platforms we don't own or control."
• 8:48
  They will see the content, and if we can make that content bite-size, short-form video, told in three sentences on a, on a tweet or a, or a Threads post, we know we're gonna reach 1,000 times more people.
• 9:00
  So let's do that. Let's distribute the message, and what we're gonna measure is not can we cookie the person? Did we browser fingerprint them? Can we capture them r- in our analytics? It's what's the lift?
• 9:12
  Like, after this big LinkedIn campaign where we're putting up a bunch of zero-click content on LinkedIn, nobody's visiting our website, but we're seeing engagement and likes and comments and shares and followers.
• 9:23
  Do we see a lift? Do sales go up? That's, that's how we measure and invest in zero-click marketing. So the, the whole concept is basically just do marketing that doesn't require a website visit. Right.
• 9:33
  Many years ago, Andrew Chen writes this blog post called, uh, The Law of Shitty Click-Throughs. The, the gist of it- Yeah... is like, okay, the, like, a new marketing tactic emerges.
• 9:42
  It's really effective at first, and everybody does it, and the effectiveness of it decays over time.
• 9:47
  And speaking a bit from observation and some from experience too, some marketing programs feel like a collection of decayed marketing tactics that only work a little bit, and you just keep stacking- Yeah...
• 10:00
  on more and more decayed tactics, and then you just are constantly trying to maintain all these things. I'll go back to the CEO swap one last time.
• 10:07
  And it stands out to me because part of the challenge I think companies have, at least from a content perspective, when it comes to, like, kind of breaking through the noise, which I think is, in my mind, is, is part of zero-click as well, but tell me if you disagree.
• 10:17
  If you want to be seen in a feed on LinkedIn, YouTube, wherever, in order to break through, you have to have something interesting to say also.
• 10:24
  And I actually think from a content perspective, that's where most companies struggle the most. My question for you, with Moz or, or SparkToro, I think each company, from my perspective, is born with a soul. Hmm.
• 10:33
  The founder, you know, you're, you're prolific. You have a lot to say. You're not afraid to share an opinion. I, I think you're just being you, and seem to be having fun doing it.
• 10:41
  But so many companies are not born with a soul. They have a product. They have a solution, a service, or whatever.
• 10:46
  Now that they live in this zero-click world, I think many of them are struggling to figure out, like, what are we gonna do? What do we have to say that would actually fuel a zero-click playbook?
• 10:56
  So that was a super long and convoluted question. How do you engineer a position or an opinion for a company who, like, isn't kind of born into the world with it from day one? Um,
• 11:06
  I think, I think this is where content strategy comes into play. Like, the whole concept of content strategy is who are we? What's our brand? What's our unique value proposition? What's our selling point?
• 11:18
  What's our personality and characteristics? And then how do we tell a story that engages people consistently through whatever medium we're doing with our marketing?
• 11:28
  You know, back in the day, if you go back, back to the 20th century and you think about the personality that companies had, it was told through advertising. Like, a lot of it was just- Yes...
• 11:38
  what's the one-page ad in the newspaper, or what's the billboard, or what's the radio spot? And those things had a personality that told a story, and all of it was zero-click marketing 'cause there was nothing to click.
• 11:51
  There, there was no click possible at all. And it worked. It built most of the iconic consumer brands that we know today, right?
• 11:59
  You look around and you're like, "Oh, yeah, most of those were built through very traditional kinds of advertising, like not through SEO and content and ac- you know, those kinds of digital channels."
• 12:09
  That's what I think a lot of modern companies and companies over the last 25 years who've gotten, gotten used to the idea that, like, we're just gonna hire a content person or an SEO person, a PPC person, an email marketer, and, like, we can just throw money at these digital channels, and then we don't need to worry about having a brand, a personality, a point of view, a story.
• 12:31
  If there's one thing that I like about the era of influencer marketing, it's that stories are back. You wanna just post a link to your blog post about your new product line on Instagram? Get out of here.
• 12:44
  It's, it's gonna get zero likes, no comments, right? Maybe a bot'll come by and leave you a little AI comment, but it is just the most pointless thing you can possibly do. So, Jimmy, yes.
• 12:57
  I mean, for all of these companies, if you don't already have a content strategy and you don't have answers to these questions, you have to start there. That's not a solution to zero-click marketing.
• 13:07
  That's a solution to marketing. That's a great point. Part of the reason I bring this up is because this is something I've been dealing with in my day job recently.
• 13:14
  There's a bit of pushback, I think, from some people that, like, were we really gonna engineer a personality for our brand? And my feeling is, yes, of course. Yes.
• 13:21
  And I have never thought about it in terms of, like, the Mad Men era of advertising, but it's, it's not that different. Yeah, it's, it's who are you, right?
• 13:27
  If you're Volvo, you start from what are, what is unique about a Volvo car? And I think all of us have exactly one word in our head. Safety. Safety, yeah. Like, a Volvo is a safe car, right?
• 13:38
  And, like, this, you know, the same thing would be true of, like, a Mercedes. You're like, "Oh, that's performance." Or, like, a Lexus, "Oh, that's luxury." Like, you name it, right?
• 13:46
  They've, like, built their little spaces in the market. They have their thing. If you wanna launch a new car today, you need a, you need a thing.
• 13:53
  I can't even remember some of the new car companies, like Polestar or whatever, right? Like, they need a, a unique brand association, and then they have to build that brand association over years and decades.
• 14:03
  And the same thing is true if you run an agency. It's true if you are a personal brand. It's true if you sell crayons or software for restaurant reservations or engineering projects.
• 14:16
  Every one of these needs to have a positioning. And there's, there's two things that can happen. These are your only two options. Almost everything in marketing, the answer is, "It depends."
• 14:25
  This is not an it depends answer. You, you get two. One, you engineer and define the brand, and you publish and promote that.
• 14:32
  And two, the market decides what you are, and that can be very chaotic and out of your control.
• 14:37
  And then you're five years in, and you're like, "Oh, I guess we're this," because that's, that's what the market has told you you are. Yeah, that's fascinating. You know what?
• 14:45
  I, I, I love the framing of zero-click marketing was the only type of marketing up until this point, where we all sort of got hooked on it.
• 14:52
  And I wonder, I, I think it l- certainly in my case, like, I'm a little biased from the SaaS world. When I started marketing, that was the only type of marketing there was, and so I never really thought much about it.
• 15:02
  And there's, there are some good examples of this in the SaaS world. One that comes to mind, for example, is, um, Zuora. Mm. Probably 10 to 12 years ago.
• 15:09
  It's, like, subscription billing software, and they come up- Okay... with this term, the subscription economy.
• 15:14
  And there's just, like, tons and tons to say about the subscription economy once you have a term for it and a bit of a philosophy around it. And that can just drive months and months and months of marketing easily.
• 15:24
  I think it's a very good example, at l- in, in the software context of, yeah, you, you can, quote, unquote, invent a term, a phrase, an idea, and then work to attach it to your brand.
• 15:33
  Uh, my hope is that content marketing gets to be a very important part of that- Yeah... over the next, you know, five to 10 years.
• 15:39
  When I think about the way that content marketing works in a zero-click environment, it is not that dissimilar to what you were doing on your own website. It really isn't.
• 15:48
  If you were effective at content marketing on your site, that meant you had a brand and a perspective and stories that you kept telling, problems that you were solving for people, questions you were answering, right?
• 15:57
  The only way you could rank for anything in Google is if you actually solved someone's problem with your content. The key now is the distribution.
• 16:04
  So whereas before you took this central URL, right, of whatever content you produced, and then you tried to get everything else to come to it, now you're taking this central piece of content, the idea, and you are spreading it in the places you know your audience pays attention with a message and a medium that resonates in those places.
• 16:23
  You wanna do well on Instagram? You better be good at short-form video or, or very, very, very good at an image, a photograph or something, something like that. You wanna do well on Reddit?
• 16:33
  You better be great at arguing with strangers, right?
• 16:36
  And, like, [laughs] having just, like, a, a very compelling sort of discourse and discussion that fits in with that crowd and attracts their sort of unique point of view. You wanna be great at LinkedIn?
• 16:47
  Actually, you only have to be mediocre at LinkedIn because the floor is so low. It's just ridiculous. Nobody seems to be good. I don't know what people are doing on LinkedIn, honestly.
• 16:57
  But the reason I think that Amanda and I stand out on LinkedIn is not because we're amazing creators. On Instagram, for example, we suck. Like, we're not, we're not good at it at all.
• 17:08
  But on LinkedIn, we're quite good because the competition is not good. It's sort of like Geraldine and I are, are often like, "Well, you know, I'm a Seattle seven, New York four," but that's- [both laughing] Right...
• 17:19
  that's fine. Um, and, like- That's fine... you know, I'm an Instagram four, but a LinkedIn eight. You know, I can really- Yeah. [laughs]... I can really crush that.
• 17:27
  And I think your job, your job as a marketer is figure out those sources of influence for your audience. In your space, it might be one of these social networks, but it might be AI assistants. It might be podcasts.
• 17:38
  It might be YouTube channels they subscribe to. It might be conferences and events they go to. It might be email newsletters they subscribe to. And you gotta find a way. You gotta find a way to be in those places.
• 17:48
  That distribution is what zero-click marketing is all about, and that's what's so different about this era versus the previous era.
• 17:55
  I wanna jump in here for a second and talk about a specific person we have in the Superpath world.
• 17:59
  Envision someone who, from kind of our last generation of marketing, came in, started in the 2000s or early 2010s, really in this, like, upswing of blog-driven content marketing.
• 18:12
  I want you to picture somebody that went to journalism school, decided to go work for an enterprise B2B company writing blog posts instead of becoming a journalist.
• 18:21
  Obviously, you know, that world evolved, but there was some template for how it worked, and they came in and they wrote long-form blog posts, got good at SEO, and learned to do that craft very well.
• 18:33
  Now they're kind of facing a big shift in what that role looks like. I'm curious what advice you'd give them about what they bring to the table, I think, first, in, in terms of storytelling.
• 18:42
  That's still very powerful in the future.
• 18:44
  But as you think about the different distribution channels moving away from the traditional company blog, what do you think are the most important skills for them to develop, and, and where do you see them being able to have a leg up with the 15 years of experience that they bring to the table?
• 18:59
  Yeah.
• 19:00
  I mean, I think that if you have been writing to an algorithm in the past, which I think almost every content marketer has been, m-most of them to Google's algorithm, but some for email deliverability and open rate and click-through rate or newsletter subscription rates.
• 19:16
  You've been playing to these kinds of metrics your whole career. This is the same thing. Exactly the same thing. Do you have to tweak the format and like, like learn a new algorithm?
• 19:25
  Yeah, but like Google change its algorithm every six months, so you're used to that, right? If you need to figure out like, "Hey, all right, what's gonna, what's gonna work for me on YouTube Shorts?"
• 19:34
  You figure out the YouTube Shorts algorithm. The YouTube algorithm, not that dissimilar from the Google algorithm, right? Like it's a lot of inputs and engagement. The ranking factors list still exists.
• 19:46
  All, all that stuff is there. So I think folks who have that experience are extremely well-poised, and they've been having to update their workflow and, and what they do to address those algorithms for decades.
• 19:59
  There's one thing I think that is very challenging for that group, that I've found at least, which is we, we are used to a, a lot of technical optimization for technical algorithms, which is different from creative storytelling and creator-led ideation for content platforms.
• 20:22
  What I've been telling folks is in 2006, for example, in 2006, the marketing superpower that was most impactful was you can rank number one in Google.
• 20:32
  And the marketing superpower that's most impactful right now, in my opinion, is you can get 100,000 people to watch your short-form video all the way through.
• 20:39
  If you can make a 15-second to two-minute-long video in vertical format that people wanna watch and share, that is a superpower. That is absolutely huge. But it's not the only superpower.
• 20:52
  You could, you could very easily say like, "Hey, I can write three paragraphs on LinkedIn that really grab people's attention, that present a spicy point of view, that are like, whoa, I'm not used to seeing this here, and also I've been thinking about that same thing.
• 21:09
  Oh my God, this person is saying this thing that I believe, or this person is saying this thing that I totally don't believe and wanna fight against, and I'm gonna argue with them."
• 21:16
  And that works really, really well on LinkedIn, on Threads, on Twitter, on Blue Sky, some parts of Reddit, that written content that you can do in, in similar semi-short form.
• 21:27
  So I, I don't think these people are out of a job. I don't think their value is any less.
• 21:32
  In fact, I strongly, strongly believe, and I think a ton of my engineering friends believe this too, that the era of AI means that the bar to create software or physical product or really build companies is so much lower.
• 21:48
  The only thing where the bar has been massively raised, where it's so much harder, is earning attention.
• 21:54
  If you wanna know what I think will be one of the biggest growth jobs of the next two decades, I think it's marketing, because there's gonna be a ton of people creating stuff and having no way to stand out in the crowd, and marketing is the only solution to that.
• 22:06
  Like, how do you build that attention? You take that algorithmic prowess combined with creativity and ability to create and sort of the discipline to make things and test and, and learn from it.
• 22:18
  I think that's a hell of a career. That's awesome. You know, that reminds me of something else I wanted to touch on, Rand, is, um, is, like we gotta talk about AI at least a little bit.
• 22:26
  We had Amanda on this podcast- I think they kick you off the podcast platforms if you don't have like 10 minutes- That's true... devoted to AI. Yeah. It's-- That's right. It's like if you put a link in, though.
• 22:33
  [laughs] The-- So we had Amanda on this podcast two years ago, and we're talking about zero-click marketing, and I think that she had written the first post about it- Yeah... at least two years before that. Yeah.
• 22:47
  And it-- If I-- If my timing is correct, it was a few months before ChatGPT. It was like a few months before AI changed all of our marketing lives forever.
• 22:56
  It just has me thinking like, this is sort of an AI story, and like so much of the, I think, the challenges that content marketers are facing right now, we attribute to AI, but like this shift was already happening- Yeah...
• 23:06
  before AI. And may- maybe AI accelerates it because we have a new-- we have LLM searching. That's like a new, new-ish thing. But this is, this was happening regardless.
• 23:16
  Do, does that-- Do you agree with that, or am I oversimplifying it? I, I 100% agree with it. I think Amanda was prescient in noticing this trend from basically search social content platforms, right?
• 23:25
  'Cause Google was already on their sort of war path of like zero-click everything since 2011.
• 23:31
  But the AI era has accelerated it so much, hugely not just because of ChatGPT or, or Claude or Perplexity or Copilot or any of these.
• 23:41
  I think the latest stat I saw was something north of 75% of Google searches have an AI overview. That is AI, right? That's, that's crazy. That's like AI taking away clicks. It's also AI, even if someone clicks.
• 23:53
  Even if someone clicks on a result below the AI overview or, or inside of it, they have learned who your brand is, what you do, what Google says about you from that overview.
• 24:04
  So essentially that surface area of influence, that is zero-click marketing.
• 24:09
  By changing what, what Google's AI overview says about your company or your product or some team member or a comparison or even the space that you're in, the problem that you solve, you are influencing, again, like many times more people than just the people who click through.
• 24:26
  I credit Amanda with being very smart and prescient, but also very lucky. It's not like she knew AI was [laughs] you know, about to take over the world. [laughs] Right.
• 24:35
  You know, one other thing is, uh, is the measurement, and I, I would imagine that that's a big hang-up for a lot of folks who are like, "Okay, we kinda get... Like zero-click mar- It makes-- We get it."
• 24:42
  Like, we see it in our own lives as on the consumer side, so we kinda get how we need- Yeah... to change the way we do marketing to adapt, but like, ugh, like our dashboards all suck now.
• 24:52
  They-- All the lines are going down, and like, what's the new way we do this? I was listening to the Zero Click Marketing podcast the other day, and you were explaining why post-purchase surveys are so terrible.
• 25:01
  That's the thing I hear all the time is like, "Oh, well, if we're gonna do AEO or GEO or whatever, then we gotta put in a post-purchase survey so that we can find out- Yeah...
• 25:10
  did they find us in Claude or d- you know, what, what happened?" Could you just maybe briefly explain like why that is such a horrible way to measure the effectiveness of your marketing? Yeah.
• 25:19
  I mean, I can, I can go real deep on this 'cause I've spent a lot of time on it because so many people push back.
• 25:23
  I think a survey at the end of someone purchasing something can be absolutely wonderful But I don't think asking them, "How did you hear about us?"
• 25:33
  which seems to be the only question a lot of people ask, is a good idea at all. I don't think it gives you useful information. I used to believe it was awesome.
• 25:41
  We started doing it, we had it for a long time, and I was only convinced of this through reading lots of research about it and then analyzing our data and trying some experiments.
• 25:51
  So if you look at a bunch of the studies out there about how people buy things, what you will see is that at the very, very, very lowest end of, uh, purchase cycles, like customer journeys, there's four to six touch points, right?
• 26:05
  Like, if you're gonna buy toothpaste, you probably already have all the things in your head, advertising and sort of life and all your friends and your dentist and, like, everything is already...
• 26:15
  Like, that touch point has already been done. Maybe there's only half a dozen of them. For anything more complicated than toothpaste, the number expands.
• 26:22
  What we found for our research for, for, uh, zero-click marketing was it's on average between 14 and 40 different touch points that someone has in a customer journey before they make a decision.
• 26:32
  And you just asked me, "How did you hear about us?" What the hell am I supposed to put in that box? All 15 things? 17? It's 35. Do you want, do you want 35 answers?
• 26:43
  Can you reasonably ask a human being to remember all 35 touch points? Not possible. Totally impossible. Can you even expect that someone will give you one of the answers that's accurate?
• 26:55
  And to confirm this, I, I can tell you the answer's no, but to confirm this, we ran an experiment a few years ago where we put in fake influencers, like people who had never said something nice about this particular product.
• 27:07
  It was in, it was in the food space.
• 27:09
  We put in some, some, like, famous food influencers, people whose names you would probably recognize from, like, television or the internet, and inevitably, folks were like, "Oh yeah, Martha Stewart, she totally...
• 27:18
  That's why I'm here." She has never said a word about this product. That's wild. But like 30% of people, 30% of people said, "That's how I heard about you." Are they lying? No.
• 27:28
  They're just, they're just like, "Yeah, I know Martha Stewart and I know your brand. That's probably how I..." Right? They're just trying to get through it quickly.
• 27:34
  There's no benefit to them if they answer accurately, right?
• 27:38
  Like, they don't, they don't get something for giving you a correct answer, and people are going to give you the answer that they think is gonna make them seem smartest, best, most informed, which is why if you're in B2B right now, I guarantee that even if no LLM, no AI tool has ever recommended you, a ton of your customers will say, "AI is what sent me your way," because it makes them look smart.
• 28:04
  And they, they probably did use AI at some point around something related to the problem that you solved. It may not have ever recommended your company.
• 28:12
  It may not have been how they found you, but it, it probably was in their, their process or their path somewhere. It's one of those 40 touch points, so they're gonna say AI, and you're...
• 28:22
  The next hot thing that comes out, right? I, I don't... It could be like, oh, virtual reality is gonna be huge in 10 years. Guess what? Everybody's gonna say that the metaverse drove them to your...
• 28:31
  So I don't actually think the metaverse is ever gonna be huge. But I'm just saying, right? A few years ago, you could see people filling these out and saying stuff around, not crypto. What's the, what's the...
• 28:41
  Blockchain. They were like, "Oh yeah, this blockchain community or whatever drove me to you." It's like, oh, I guess I gotta do some blockchain marketing. Like, no you don't. That's re- [laughs] Let's, let's stop.
• 28:50
  But, but I, I just wanna really impress upon people that even if you're like, "Hey, my customers, unlike every other human on the world, they are perfect. They will always give the accurate answer,"
• 29:04
  they're always gonna give you one answer out of 14 to 40. And then let me give you the final problem that is even more pernicious, even worse. Let's say everyone gives you perfect information.
• 29:14
  They are able to give you all 15 touch points. You will never know the channels that could have influenced them where you're not present.
• 29:21
  You will only ever keep investing in places where you're already doing well, and you will always under-invest in places where you have opportunity and your competition is kicking your butt. What are you doing?
• 29:31
  Why are you asking? Like, what, what are you getting from this? It, it just blows my mind how many people are addicted to this thing when a simple, logical, you know, three-sentence conversation will make them go, "Oh.
• 29:43
  Oh yeah, you're right." [laughs] Yeah, yeah. That's so fascinating.
• 29:46
  Back in the day, I worked for a content agency, and I, I recall a conversation with one of our customers where he said, "The better we get at content marketing, actually the messier it is."
• 29:54
  Like, the, the more sort of complex the journey is before someone signs up and it makes the attribution- Oh, yeah... a total mess. But w- I know it's working.
• 30:02
  I mean, I, I believe it's working because I see all these positive signals, and I remember trying to think, like, how do we turn that into a dashboard? You know? [laughs] Like, how do we- Yes.
• 30:10
  This is, this is the correlation dashboard. Every one of us builds it in our heads. Like, we build it in our head around everything that we do in life.
• 30:17
  Like, I have had a lot of success at work when I've had conversations with my boss or my team in this way. And so you, you know, you sort of record those in memory.
• 30:25
  You don't have, like, a dashboard in Excel where you're like, "Okay, it's really good if I use the word synergy," you know? [laughs] Or whatever. Yeah. But, like, you have a dashboard in your head.
• 30:34
  Your brain makes these connections. And as a business owner or a CEO or, or CMO, like, you do the same thing with your marketing channels.
• 30:41
  You're like, "Oh, we did really, really well on YouTube the last couple months, and I see sales are up. None of our other channels are outperform- I bet it's YouTube." Yeah. You do that mentally.
• 30:52
  You know what's awesome about the AI era? You take these numbers. You take your, you know, whatever, YouTube impressions and views and channel subscribers. You take your, uh, LinkedIn, how well you're performing there.
• 31:03
  Reddit, how many, you know, impressions, the posts that, that you're, uh, or your mention got, how many subscribers there are to those subreddits. You take your Instagram, like whatever channels you're in.
• 31:13
  Email, your blog, you know, homepage visits, like all this stuff.
• 31:16
  You throw it into a big old dashboard with the, with the channels that you invest in, and then you say, "Hey, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, where's my high ROI opportunities here? What's, what's underperforming for me?
• 31:28
  Like, what, what maps well and doesn't map well to these things?" And it'll tell you. It'll be like, "Ooh, you know what?"
• 31:35
  LinkedIn looks like it's actually more of a top-of-funnel channel than a middle and bottom-of-funnel channel. These kinds of investments really make sense for you there. These kinds don't work there.
• 31:45
  It's really good at this, because math surfaces and, uh, logic, that's AI's bailiwick, so. Build that correlation dashboard in real life, you can really have something.
• 31:56
  Casey and I just did this for SparkToro, and, like, we were kind of blown away by the results, to be honest. Meaning that they were... It told you something you didn't expect? Lots of things we didn't expect.
• 32:04
  It, it told us to change our pricing, and we were like- Oh. "Ooh. Yeah. Wait, what?" We've been running an experiment where we, we turned off one of our pricing packages. Now we're gonna test some new pricing packages.
• 32:13
  Revenue has gone up. It can clearly do some very impressive math.
• 32:17
  It also basically told us that our social media content, which, which is a ton of our, like, marketing, so LinkedIn, Twitter, Threads, um, YouTube, those are sort of our, our primary ones, that is strongly correlated with sales somewhere between 60 and 120 days after the impression.
• 32:35
  Oh, wow. Interesting. It's a long- Yeah... long-ass lead time, right? I think, "Oh, I did really well on LinkedIn last week. How come I don't see any sales on SparkToro this week?"
• 32:43
  Because 90 days ago, I did not do well, right? [laughs] Like, 90 days ago- Yeah... I was slacking. Um, th- and honestly, Rand, thank you. This has b- this has been awesome. Oh, yeah. My pleasure. My pleasure.
• 32:52
  I think I just have one last question for you, Rand. So you and Amanda have written the book, Zero Click Marketing. Like I said, we'll, we'll put the link to Damn Gravity, which is the publisher, uh, in the show notes.
• 33:01
  People can go buy their copy of it. Is writing a book zero click marketing? Like, is this a meta example- Oh... in practice right now?
• 33:09
  So books are, books are so interesting as a, as a format, and I, I think this applies to a lot of other things that you could invest in, right?
• 33:16
  Like, if you choose to grow a YouTube channel, or you choose to invest in a podcast, for example. They're all forms of content, of storytelling.
• 33:26
  They're a medium that has their own unique points of resonance and types of audiences with whom they'll resonate. I think... I, I would strongly recommend a- against a book for most people.
• 33:37
  [laughs] Like, it does not, it does not pay unless you already have an engaged audience who knows you, likes you, and trusts you, and you have a complex, somewhat new topic that you are trying to sort of bring into the public consciousness.
• 33:54
  This idea of zero click marketing, the genesis of it was it was a blog post, right, in 2022. Amanda has been trying to take this into the public consciousness, 'cause she's like, "This, this is how things work."
• 34:04
  And, and it matters a lot for me too, right?
• 34:07
  It's not directly connected to what SparkToro does, but SparkToro certainly helps people who recognize that they need to find their sources of influence, so there's overlap there.
• 34:16
  I would say that all of these mediums that you can invest in, they're all zero click marketing in a way, but it's how you, it's how you execute that.
• 34:25
  The frustrating part about a book is, no matter what, you gotta have a link. You gotta [laughs] you gotta have somewhere- Yeah... where, like, people can go on the web and, and make that final transaction.
• 34:35
  And I will say, I think there's, like, this misconception around zero click marketing. I'm sure, Jimmy, you've seen this. People think it means you never, ever click on anything. That's not the, the point at all.
• 34:45
  Like, we are not saying sales are dead. We're not talking about agentic AI making purchases for you.
• 34:51
  What we're talking about is distributing your message in places where people already pay attention, not demanding a link, but certainly creating a pathway for those who are curious, those who want more, those who are interested in the product, the service, the people, the idea, to go down a path that leads to a destination.
• 35:11
  In our case, the book is the destination. If you hear us talk about zero click marketing, we're like, "Man, we've been talking about this forever. It's really important." How do we get people from, "I heard this term.
• 35:21
  I think I know what it means. I wanna learn more"? The book is the, "Okay, let's, let's learn more." Yeah. That's fantastic.
• 35:28
  A- and from the outside perspective, like, the trend, once you put, once you label it with that phrase, the trend is then instantly obvious. And now- Yeah...
• 35:36
  you and Amanda and SparkToro get credit for that in a, in a, probably a more formal way than you do with stuff on the internet. I...
• 35:43
  This was one of my primary objections to writing the book, is I was like, "I want everyone to own the idea of zero click marketing. I don't want it to be, like, our thing. I want it to be everyone's."
• 35:52
  You know, kinda like content marketing. It doesn't belong to somebody.
• 35:56
  I think there are people who would be like, "Oh, I heard about content marketing from Joe Pulizzi," or, "I heard about it from Aaron Wall," or, "I heard about it from Rand Fishkin," or, you know, whoever it was back in the day.
• 36:06
  But it, it, it's everybody. It's all of us. Amanda was like, "We came up with it. We should, we, we sh- I, I want cr- credit for it." [laughs] I was like, "All right, all right." Yeah. [laughs] You know.
• 36:15
  [laughs] I can... I'm not good at, I'm not good at taking credit for things. I don't, [laughs] I'm not, I don't, like, suffer a co- a compliment well. You certainly deserve it. And thank you.
• 36:26
  Thank you for putting it out in the world, and thank you for all the contributions you've made to the marketing world for many years and, uh, for making time to hang out with us today too. Yeah.
• 36:34
  My, my pleasure and my honor. Uh, thank you, Jimmy and Alex, for having me, and thank you for all you do with Superpath. I love that you are helping content marketers build a community and build careers.
• 36:44
  I think that's hugely important. It's so critical not to be feeling alone in times like these when, when there's so much upheaval. Definitely. Definitely. Awesome. Well, thanks, everyone. Thanks, Rand.
• 36:55
  Link to the book will be in the show notes. Go buy a copy. Thanks, Rand. [outro music]