Zero Click Content Marketing

0:00okay so today we're going to talk about something that I call zero click content the art of zero click content we are going to get into why this is what this is and some best practices for moving forward so when we think about how you know traditionally content has been right um how typical content marketing has been we've seen people do something like this right they look post uh they'll post a tweet that represents some kind of like hey want to know X join our webinar right pretty straightforward stuff or they'll put in a relatable statement and then read the blog or sometimes they might even just put in

0:40like an intriguing question with some context and then read this right all pretty typical stuff that we've been seeing on pretty much any social media platform but how's it going how is this how is is any of this successful well that first example there were two retweets three likes the second example there was only one retweet and six likes and the third example had three retweets and 16 likes performed better but oh you might be thinking well maybe these are really small accounts maybe it's really new all that stuff but the first one has over a hundred and thirty thousand followers it's verified account and it's a government

1:27organization the second one has over 80 000 followers it's an individual person also a verified account and it's a credible author and then finally the third one it's a newer account has over a sixteen thousand followers and represents some kind of Niche interest excuse me

1:53but it's not so clearly it's not going very well and a lot of this content is new so I'll also point out you know when I said how it started and pointed out some ways in which people or marketers typically share their content online um that's how we've been doing it for the past what 10 15 years but these examples are all pretty new so we're seeing that it's not very effective but why right why is this not effective I think it could be you know some kind of chicken or egg situation right where maybe the algorithms have trained us or maybe our own behavior has trained the

2:33algorithms where we no longer see or engage with that type of teaser content it could be a little bit of both and so what are some reasons for this a few things are certain right we know that Google manipulates the serp they're not putting answers directly in the search engine results page in 2020 over 65 or so like 65 percent of Google searches ended without a click which can be a good thing for users so let's say you're Googling how tall is Paul Rudd or Paul Rudd height boom you see the answer directly in the search engine results page you don't really need a blog post to um

3:15to click into that to find out more um but this can also be really bad for Publishers and small businesses kind of my favorite example um so a couple years ago the music lyric site or song lyric site genius.com accuse Google of scraping their content or stealing their content and putting it directly on serp which meant that people fewer fewer people were linking to genius Google denied it and so what genius did was they use a watermarking system that embedded patterns in the formatting of apostrophes in its lyrics right so some combination of straight um straight apostrophes and curly apostrophes and saw that the exact watermarking pattern showed up in Google

4:03search proving their point that Google actually was stealing their content but you know it's not just it's not just Google that's trying to keep people on their platform social media does it too right social media rewards this native content Twitter's algorithm favors threads over linked content right you know this guy sahul Bloom has like 700 000 followers at this point very famously writes these threads um linkedin's algorithm favors comments so you see people like me who put things like link below in the comments in their post we don't even link to the actual content within our posts we put it in the comments and finally Instagram doesn't allow

4:49links in their captions right and they only recently only this year began allowing them in stories and so it's not just these main platforms right it's not just the ones I mentioned it's Reddit Pinterest Decorah all of them favorite in platform content like linked lists posts images and videos Tick Tock and Snapchat are linked lists Youtube cuts off video descriptions that include links so the old way of marketing your content your event your product your business it just doesn't work anymore instead of optimizing for Google we now need to optimize for Impressions AKA we have to write really really good content but it's hard how do we do it so how do

5:38we create this type of share worthy content that people actually will take action on through zero click content right this is content that offers Standalone value with no need to click clicking is only additive to the user experience and it's not required we see lots of examples of this from our peers like Rand fishkin for instance he embeds these two minute videos directed directly on LinkedIn we don't even Host this on wistia or YouTube anymore because there kind of isn't really any point for us posting it on LinkedIn ensures that the video gets seen and Ran's videos will get hundreds of thousands of Impressions each time

6:20for myself I repurpose all of my blog posts into Twitter threads um and that's right I I rewrite them as threads I don't say hey look at my blog post you know in like in the thread format I I distill it into an actual thread where people don't even have to click on the blog post and then people like Brendan Hufford right Brenda Brendan writes these 150 word or so insights and he posts them directly on LinkedIn right and Brendan runs a B2B SAS consultancy so this is also just the best way for him to drive interests and leads for his business and it's not just the B2B industry right

6:59we can see this in d2c this company is ddc's meet our protein company force of nature meets they have over 90 000 Instagram followers at this point who are very engaged with their content if you're not in their target audience you would glance at this chart not really pay attention to it but really this chart is the meat of the information right this dives into um I don't know what it is but it dives into um it dives into a lot of detail about food and nutrition and this performs really really well for them so for their target audience they want this kind of content other examples right this is this to me

7:39is sort of a classic example Howard Stern the radio host right he has a long-form interview show on SiriusXM has he has over a million YouTube subscribers and what he does on YouTube is he posts two to five minute clips of just the juiciest parts of his interviews it's Standalone you don't really need to watch the rest of the interview but you'll probably want to after you see a clip that's just so good that you want more um other examples right this one this one's kind of out of the box here so Redfin there the Redfin CEO Glenn Kellman is now starring in a Netflix show about home buying and selling so

8:21what's interesting here is this is going to be zero click content right you don't need to be a Redfin user or customer in order to benefit from watching this show it's just it's just to show about buying and selling homes so definitely zero click content here Okay so we've gone through all these examples might seem like okay cool but how do you do any of this uh we have a couple of repeatable Frameworks ahead um you know ones that don't have to involve producing your own Netflix show oops uh okay so your overall strategy in social media you could think of it like this optimize for engagement streaks to get Social

9:05visibility followers and traffic you give the networks what they want which is content that keeps users on the platform so no links posts that earn either replies or repeat visits and clicks more so than likes or shares and visual and video format so give them shocking headlines and or surprising and unexpected content now give followers what they want consistency of focus you know sadly people tend not to like deviation from the initial reason they follow you so if you are posting saying that you write about tech and Entrepreneurship but you actually mostly tweet about what you're having for dinner that night people aren't going to like that right they

9:52followed you for Tech and Entrepreneurship um followers also like high controversy and belief reinforcing content and content that's easy to consume and process right shorter more visual more emotional content tends to work really well and most importantly give your followers what they want right at least your target audience what they want and you can do this there's some kind of combination of social listening and keeping a pulse in your industry so here are some tools to do just that I think about this on the sort of macro to micro spectrum of research on the macro side you have your industry or category Trends on the narrowest or

10:33micro side you have what your audience consumes so to understand the macro right the industry or category Trends you can use tools at Google Trends exploding topics but Sumo right on the micro side you consume what your audience consumes so maybe in this in this Tech focused audience people are reading TechCrunch or they're listening to Gartner Talent angle right Gartner's podcast you go from macro to micro how do you go from understanding industry Trends to suddenly knowing what your audience consumes you bridge the gap with tools like sparktoro doesn't have to be sparktoro ideally it should be you can also use tools like Feedly which gives

11:20you um gives you a feed of information based on your niche you could try a newstip.com it's a great PR resource for understanding what journalists in your Niche are writing about or even just who are the journalists in your Niche or frontpagemetrics.com which will help you discover some of the fastest growing subreddits so all of these things will help you better understand how to give your followers what they want and so once you know all this you can engage people drop traffic and repeat right so you create high engagement and not you you write a high engagement non-promotional post another one of those High engagement non-promotional posts then you can kind

12:03of sneak in your promotion with a call to action and then go back to your high engagement posts so the thing is these high engagement non non-promotional posts this is what actually helps you earn brand exposure and new followers and it's the promotion with CTA that capitalizes on your algorithmic reputation and ultimately sends clicks back to your site so I've gone through this the overall sort of strategy right we know how to uh we know theoretically how to create high engagement content the importance of it but what are some tactic like super tactical ways that we can go about this so here's I have three here's the first

12:47one you can give away the punch line so this works really well for repurposing completed content um when I when I did this so I so this comes from a blog post that I did about audience personas so it's about the idea of Thinking Beyond buyer personas thinking more holistically about your audience and think about them as having as representing a suite of audience personas so I wrote this long like 2 000 word blog posts and it kind of culminated in this joke of this fake buyer Persona template which is not that helpful right and so what I did was I just posted the punchline this stupid joke

13:25um as my tweet it was I made this fire person a template feel free to steal it it got over 500 likes and when I repurposed this as an email to promote the webinar version of my blog post this ended up being our most clicked on email promotion this year and our webinar got over 900 registrants so this worked really well don't be afraid to see to give away the punchline tactic number two summarize the heart of your idea so this works really well if you are sharing an outline the items in a list or a standalone thought um remember when you're summarizing this idea clicking should be optional it

14:11shouldn't be required to understand this so you look at this piece here this comes from force of Nature and it comes from their newsletter they have five grilling tips right one two three four five five Standalone tips that's kind of it right like there isn't there this actually doesn't even link to a blog post this is just a standalone inset that they did to make their newsletter Standalone valuable for anybody who's just skimming through it and when you do this well you should be able to do this multiple times with one piece of content another example of this um West KO the co-founder of Maven she

14:51has this blog post called the you know it's about the brand versus Performance Marketing Spectrum so she's also distilled this into one slide or one graphic and this is just one Standalone tweet right should you prioritize brand or performance this decision will not impact how you define success for any metric but anyway it's the law of brand versus Performance Marketing and on one side of the spectrum yeah Performance Marketing it's focused on short-term conversion on the other side you have brand marketing focused on long-term brand Equity right this this makes sense in of itself you don't really need to read the blog post to understand the slide but of course

15:29it's better if you do read it uh there's a blog post uh last example that I have here is posting a defensible hot take so this works really well if you have long form content with full context and remember if you're going to do this don't be salacious just for the sake of being salacious and um after you get some engagement right after it takes off uh picks up some steam you can add the link to promote whatever it is that or add the link to that Fuller context where in which you defend your claim so in this example Steph Smith who's uh Creator Indie hacker and you know now

16:12she's a podcast host at a16z she posted this extremely popular tweet about the 40 hour work week but the 40 hour work week was established over a century ago since then we've invented 5G Network's automation 3D printing AR VR and a computer that can fit in your pocket nearly all the tools have changed yet somehow people still think the way we need to work needs to say needs to stay the same right great hot take off it took off really well and then she added on a link to her her personal podcast which is which basically was like Hey I have more to say on this

16:49topic come check it out right so this makes it defensible because if anybody's upset by this tweet right they should listen to her her podcast where she has where she dives into the research or dives into some background on it fully defends her claim and most likely man you may or may not you may or may not agree with her to full take but most likely you're not going to be upset about it right you're going to be like okay well she has a lot to say about this all right I respect it um but wait right I know some of you want to ask what about executive buy-in

17:24right what about this I feel like I gotta fly through but I have a few minutes left executive buy-in everybody always wonders this so one way I like to um approach this is to talk about sustainable operations right um when you are creating zero click content right the Standalone valuable content you're ultimately making your content your operations your budget a lot more sustainable because that one blog post or that one piece of content becomes one to two LinkedIn posts it becomes maybe one Twitter thread and three tweets becomes one video a webinar or maybe it even also becomes a a conference presentation right one piece of content

18:08can become all of these things I'm not even saying it can become one of these things although that's true too because also if you are focused on creating content that is just really really good you're going to pretty organically get a lot more out of it right so one blog post equals all of these things and it's possible and it leads to this sort of counter-intuitive outcome here right so this goofy joke this little slide here took me a couple hours to make not gonna lie it took me a while um all led to this 2 000 word blog post where I defended my claim also became a webinar at sparktoro

18:54but then it also led to the opportunity to present this to over 700 people at mozcon so trust the process trust yourself um trust that whatever content you have anything worth saying is worthy of becoming multiple other formats um that's what I have for today if you want to learn more about audience research and more about what I do at sparktoro you can check us out uh check out our newsletter right we have a nice audience research newsletter it actually goes out tomorrow if you want to check it out then um and most every other Thursday we also have free tools at sparktoro.com tools we have a fake follower audit a

19:35trending topic uh trending topics for Twitter and Spark score which gauges overall engagement of a Twitter account and then we also have our paid tool at sparktoro.com where you can do more audience research and get great data this is a sample of it here um overview of people whose profiles include marketing director you'll see they're the top words they use in their bios demographics podcasts they listen to YouTube channels they subscribe to social accounts they follow and then if you want to learn more from me I'm on Twitter most active there um I also have a twice monthly-ish newsletter at amandanat.com and then I also teach a Content marketing course at

20:19Maven content marketing 201 thank you and any questions yes indeed thank you for that Amanda the questions questions are coming in I wanted to kick you off with one of my own I was trying to think through you know I I put out with startups for the rest of us my podcast I put out an episode every week we put out a kind of a I won't say it's hot take but some you know like our uh YouTube video we did last week was like B2B versus b2c which is more profitable so I I took a side you know something you could say it's a hot take right and we tweet them and we

20:54put a clip and we um you know do the stuff you you would think but I haven't done them more hot take uh aspect you're saying right where you you brought up the example of the 40-hour week 40 hour work week and then the podcast packing it up um is that is that is that like just coming into popularity or is that something that a lot of people are already doing and have you seen it work more than you know the one instance that we saw here I feel like I've been seeing it more over the past maybe one to two years um and I think the best the people who

21:27are most successful at it are the ones who are able to tie it back to a longer form piece right like I think people who are just posting hot takes um just the hot take part with no no defensibility to it that might perform well in the short term like it might get some reactions you know retweets all that stuff but I think pretty quickly you'll you'll see that that person maybe that account kind of starts to unravel if they're not backing it up over time so I think the most successful people are doing it when they have more to say on the topic and they present it

22:05and even if people don't listen to it or don't read it or don't watch the thing they'll at least feel like well I don't agree with that but I'm not going to watch that either whatever exactly yeah yeah versus you know quote tweeting it and saying like what a clown I hate this take what a terrible thing to say right right okay um we have questions coming in from folks in the audience Ivan asks what tool do you use to rewrite and repurpose your blog posts yeah so usually I mean I use Google Docs um that's my main tool of choice um if I distill something into a thread

22:44I use an app called typefully typefully.com um which helps you um write your thread sort of in a blog post format it's just easier to to work with um yeah those are the my main tools great I was just eyeballing typically I don't do a lot of threads but I'm considering doing it and so I had heard that thankfully yeah is a good way to do it I will say there's a newer tool that I've been playing with called Lex have you heard of this it's the new gpt3 uh writing app um so one of the interesting things is the way you use the gpt3 to generate help

23:21you generate ideas you can do headline ideas but I actually use it now for the minimalist writing editor so for me it's a little bit more of a Google Docs replacement with the optional like oh there's some AI stuff here but that's a nice tool to check out I'll have to check that out it works with Twitter threads uh no this is just real quick it's just straight writing yeah Lex dot app nice um all right next question is from Matt so you can repurpose existing blog posts into new content but if you're starting from scratch do you still make the blog post or do you just focus on the new

23:59zero click content great question I think you could you can do either or you can start with the blog or you can start with zero click content I don't really think there's a wrong answer uh my take is whatever you do start the blog like get your home base set up so that you can you can point people to it if you need to um I kind of did them both at the same time ish so like I said at my personal site I have a Blog super Bare Bones blog there but it's more like if anyone Googles me or goes to my website there's stuff there that's like here's who I am

24:38quick bio whatever um and then I mostly I mostly started writing on Twitter I guess the other maybe maybe a good kind of extreme example of this would be Soho Bloom I think for for two years I believe sahil only wrote on Twitter didn't have a personal site only wrote threads grew grew a following I probably have like zero to maybe 200 000 in one year um so very much doubled down on this sort of zero click content grew the following there and then I think a couple years later finally had his personal site set up started a sub stack started a podcast um so you could do it that way too

25:24very nice Ben asks do you have a framework for what good content means hmm this is good um one of my favorite resources for this is one of rand's blog post one of rans fishkin's blog post and it's called who will amplify this and why so it's a it's a very it's a very long post completely worth reading I reread it myself once or twice a year but one one in one section ran gets into what makes something amplification worthy why do people engage with certain types of content why do they amplify it and so he has I think nine eight or nine categories of this which would include

26:05like you know fear shock and awe belief reinforcing I think any of those things um are indicative of good content now you can have belief reinforcing content that's poorly written sure that's possible but I think a lot of it starts with having a strong idea that people want to engage with that's amplification worthy and then from there hopefully ideally it's well written and I think there are a lot of number of guides that you can read or resources you can tap into um Kayleen Moore um freelance writer has a lot of great resources for writing well uh Julian Shapiro has a long form guide um on writing well so all of these are

26:49great resources excellent a grant in the chat just posted a link to that ran fishkin blog post you just mentioned so um will asks how do you measure the social how do you measure social media Roi um so I guess this will depend on your business um you can look at the typical metrics like Impressions engagements follower account I think some people will say those are vanity metrics I would disagree in that if you're posting on social media you have what else will you look at if not those things so they're not really vanity metrics um that's one but I would also look at referral traffic and see how referral traffic

27:32over time increases um which the cow again the counter-intuitive thing about zero click content is that the more you're giving value up front without the click here click here click here um but occasionally doing that the more you're going to see better results because people over time are going to be like oh wow Rob writes great content like I'm just gonna follow him follow along and then kind of cherry pick like okay Rob has a podcast and occasionally posts links um I can't listen to every single one but it's interesting to me and then they're gonna follow along like oh that's a really interesting Insight I'm

28:08gonna check out this podcast for later right so over time you're going to see people develop interest they might not click on a hundred percent of your links who does that right but they'll click on them on more of them compared to when if you just were to say like hey I learned this cool thing check out my podcast um so that so looking at referral traffic over time and then if you can set up some goals in Google analytics you can also see if people are converting on your page that's one way to look at it too and then I guess the last thing I'll say is

28:41I have had an easier time tying Roi to LinkedIn specifically compared to Twitter um for me I've for me personally as a personal brand or personal Creator um I have been able to see success from Twitter um like I get leads for my course that I teach but on LinkedIn it's easier for me to tie Roi to myself and to my brand sparktoro um so that's where it's easier to drive webinar signups which that's a great way to get a return on your investment um and if and last thing is if you're a service based business and you're posting Standalone insights on LinkedIn all you really need right are a head

29:24full of decent quality leads per month and if you get if you're like an agency right service based business if you get like two new clients in a month from just from LinkedIn that's incredible Roi yep our last question for you Amanda is from Kevin he asks for a B2B business with a highly Technical and relatively low number of customers what are some key factors to focus on in regard to zero click content oh that's a good question um highly tactical relatively low number of customers I would I wouldn't be afraid then to get super Niche with what you're posting and just get really into the details like if

30:09there's a topic within a topic within a topic like zero in on the narrowest aspect and get super technical I think that's a great way to build Affinity with this Core group of customers um they'll quickly see like oh wow they really know what they're talking about they're not just posting stuff that's like come to my webinar um kind of fluffy yeah right but like if you get really Technical and then and then kind of end it with hey we're going to talk more about this super technical stuff hopefully you'll be smarter than I am and not say those exact words um come to our webinar we're going to go in

30:45full detail on this topic and so showing how technical you are how into the weeds you are on your top of funnel channels will I think have a great chance at engaging your most loyal customers or the most technical people in your audience I think that's a good way to think about it too because if you think about it like my my business microconf and tinyseed really is essentially be the founder B2B and it's highly Technical and there's a relatively low number of customers you know there are tens of thousands hundreds of thousands they're not 10 million folks trying to do this and that is something that that

31:16we do a lot I view it as having some top of funnel content that's really ins there's inspiration and it's you know be an entrepreneur that type of stuff but when I dig in and I'm like you know your LTV to CAC ratio and you should be thinking about churn and that negative churn is this Anonymous pretty dang technical right and it can be boring for people but those are the ones that as you said maybe the the deepest fans you know or the people who really want to learn and who are really shipping um I think I think gravitate towards because it is different that a lot of

31:43the zero click content that you see media I I love your example because you're also you're also giving a really good really good two examples of One content that can be more appealing to a broad audience like the entrepreneurship um that side of things which can be pretty broadly applicable so you can try doubling down on that kind of content but sprinkling in the technical like LTV Keck stuff that shows hey I'm not just gonna be some rah-rah investor guy I have a lot more to say on the ins and outs of running a business right and with that I'd love to thank you for showing up thanks for taking the time to

32:21speak to our audience it was a great talk thank you so much for having me Rob thanks everyone

32:42thank you