By “Zero-Click Marketing sounds good and all, but how do I get executive buy-in?”
I hear that question a lot. I think it signals a fundamental misunderstanding of what zero-click marketing is.
When I first wrote about Zero-Click Content back in July 2022 (whoa, happy 2-year anniversary, I guess?), it came as a reaction to our platform-native world. I pointed out that most of our social networks suppresses links. I pointed to Rand’s 2020 research that two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click. And so I brought forth the solution of Zero-Click Content: native-to-platform content that provides instant, standalone value without additional required context. The insight can stand on its own, and the reader/consumer doesn’t need to click on anything in order to understand it.
Since then, many have adopted the tactic, focusing on giving standalone value with their social media content. More broadly, podcasters edit their shows into shorter, standalone clips. Writers house all their content in their email newsletters, not so much their blog. Some creators successfully grow YouTube channels just with YouTube Shorts — the zero-click content of YouTube. The platforms continue to suppress our posts with links, and today, ~60% of Google searches end without a click. The past two years have shown the internet has really become a Zero-Click Marketing world.
But since that foundational zero-click piece, I’ve realized I was unclear about a key tactic. In my quest to persuade you to create content that doesn’t require clicking, I might’ve given you the impression that you should never post links. This has raised the question: “So… you want us to stop posting links?”
No. It’s not that. It’s that we need to recognize that the platforms are pushing users away from clicks, which means we can no longer depend on earning that click. We need to optimize for impressions and make it as easy as possible for readers/consumers to convert in order to push our marketing forward. That means we need to spoon-feed them reasons to choose us, search for us, and hell, quickly find that link in bio. It doesn’t mean “never link,” it means we need to think bigger and more strategically than just dropping links in our social media posts.
What’s the latest information in clicks, algorithms, and referrals, and how did they push us to this point?
Remember: those social networks are still throttling our posts with links. And in our 2024 zero-click search study, we’ve found that ~60% of Google searches end without a click. Of those searches that do have a click, nearly 30% of them go to a Google-owned entity. (Hmm… should we all try to grow that YouTube channel that’s collecting dust? Probably.)
At any rate, people aren’t exactly hanging out on Google anyway. When we looked at referral traffic and where web users are spending their time, we found most people are hanging out on social media. Then news sites. Then productivity sites like Gmail, Microsoft Office, AWS, Github, and tools like ChatGPT. Then ecommerce sites like eBay, Amazon, and Etsy. Finally, Google/search comes in 5th place.
Google is still sending the lion’s share of traffic… but even when they — or most of the platforms, for that matter — do, we can’t even see that traffic because of the flaws in attribution.
Platforms like TikTok, WhatsApp, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Discord, and Mastodon are fully hiding referral strings, which means any referral traffic you get from them show up your analytics tool as “direct.” This is called “Dark Traffic,” specifically, Dark Social. And varying percentages of almost every social network’s referral traffic falls under it.
All this signals why clawing at attribution and counting on the platforms to send you traffic is an uphill battle. What’s the point in spending half your day digging into those faulty attribution metrics if it comes at the expense of losing time and energy creating marketing campaigns that matter?
Maybe correlation is the old new attribution.
Yeah, I said it. Chasing down attribution is a waste of time. If you’re running Google and Meta ads, each of those platforms is going to try to claim outsized credit. If you’re running digital ads but also have engaging social accounts and a widely shared blog, you’re never going to get true attribution to your organic content — and chances are, you’ll wind up giving more kudos to the advertising activities because, after all, ThAt’S ROI yOu CaN SeE. Sure, if the only marketing you’re doing is running Instagram ads for your DTC brand, then by all means, give Meta credit where it’s due. But if you also happen to have a killer organic Instagram strategy, you better believe that’s powering a bunch of word of mouth and referrals that you simply cannot track.
Here’s another thing I’ll need to be extra clear on: I’m not suggesting you don’t look at return on investment on your marketing efforts. I’m saying we need to track success with our eyes wide open. Remember, attribution is dying.
Apple’s privacy changes, particularly the implementation of App Tracking Transparency (ATT) in iOS 14.5, had a major impact on attribution, to the tune of ~$10 billion lost for Meta in 2022. Let’s not forget anti-tracking and privacy laws in California, Canada, New York, and the EU, and those pesky cookie permissions and do-not-track protocols.
Even without all that, about one-third to half of all internet users use an ad blocker on one or more of their devices. Those ad blockers don’t just block ads, they block all of marketers’ tracking.
So now what? If we can’t count on pristine, grade-A attribution, we can learn from our out-of-home (OOH) advertising friends. (AdQuick and OneScreen, where you at?) Anyone who’s successfully run a billboard campaign knows you don’t just buy roadside placements and hope for the best. You look at standard metrics like site traffic, app downloads, store visits, same-store–sales-adjusted-for-seasonality and even branded search lift. What great marketers and OOH marketers have in common is this: they know that marketing is a long game. You don’t throw up a billboard for 3 weeks then call it a failure when you don’t bring in extra revenue, just like you don’t call your social media manager a failure when their engaging content doesn’t convert a customer within a week.
We should all keep a pulse on key performance indicators that a cross-departmental team can agree upon. And we would be wise to consider building correlation models that indicate increased lift, leads, and revenue over time.
Stop pushing numbers on that spreadsheet and get to work shooting that tutorial video that will help your users, writing that blog post you know your audience is going to share, or preparing for that podcast where you have meaningful conversations with your customers.
Zero-Click Marketing is art and science.
Create marketing campaigns that people will actually care about — you know, optimize for those impressions so that people will actually see and be moved by your marketing. This is the art of speaking to people where they are, in ways that resonate, with messages they care about that have the impact you want.
Guide your decisions by the science of understanding people and the platforms on which they spend time. It’s uncovering audience behaviors, preferences, demographics, sources of influence, behavior, etc. and then investing wisely in the right places with the right content, using lift-based measurement to judge impact and choose where to double-down and where to pull back. It’s developing an understanding of algorithms and machine learning that rule our platforms.
You can use several hacks in hopes of circumventing the algorithmic punishments: Put your link in the comments of your LinkedIn post. Use a fancy linktree in your Instagram or TikTok bio. Add an additional threaded post to your original Threads or Twitter/X post that contains the link.
You can also mix and match your posting strategy. Accrue some goodwill with the platform itself with, say, 4, of your standalone, native-to-platform posts. And then burn some of that algorithmic capital with a 5th post that does contain the link.
I encourage you to do all these things as long as you don’t lose the bigger picture. These are all just optimizations to make sure that the machines are serving up the amazing stuff that you created for people. Zero-Click Marketing only really works when you have something valuable to offer. And it’s a mix of both art and science.