By You’ve heard of zero click marketing — and yes, you definitely heard it here first. We’re talking about creating standalone value in the platforms where people hang out, instead of dropping teasers and links in hopes that people will be compelled to click over to your site. It’s marketing where people already are and speaking to them in a way that meets them where they are. You’re driving awareness, building affinity, and engaging with your community. And you’re not dependent on those referral clicks.
I’ll explain.
In this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard, I’ll peel back the curtain and tell you why: why we have to invest in zero click marketing, and where this zero click strategy fits in the new world of AI tools and large language models.
Transcript:
Rand, Amanda, you guys are always talking about zero click marketing. Why is this such a trend? Look, we’re trying to help because we believe that zero click marketing is the way things have to go, and we’re not the first adopters of this. People have been doing this, creators and influencers and brands have been doing this for a decade plus.
We’re kinda late to the game. We have to invest in zero click marketing because the world has given us no choice. First off, Google is now answering almost two-thirds of all queries without a click, and our recent research with Datos showed us that many of the 40% that are left that do send traffic, those are for branded terms and navigational terms, meaning someone already knows where they wanna go. If you’re waiting to get traffic from Google, most of the time you’ve already lost.
Google is going to answer that query, and if you play their game and give them content that they can put in the instant answer, the AI overview, right, that might influence people even if it doesn’t draw the click.
Second, the social networks where people are spending the majority of their time online and in apps. Nowadays Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, Reddit—I don’t care which one we’re talking about—TikTok. They all have this effect of either completely removing links.
Right? So TikTok and Instagram, for example, no links allowed whatsoever. YouTube is kind of its own beast. I’ll talk about that separately.
But, Threads, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, right, where a lot of people historically would go to post their content and draw traffic from the audiences that they built there, their followings, doesn’t work. It’s not working anymore. It’s like a tenth or a fiftieth or a hundredth of what it was five, ten, fifteen years ago. And that is because the algorithms of these systems are set up to disincentivize and punish content with links.
When Elon bought Twitter for example, he open sourced, right, open sourced the, the ranking system, and you could see right in the code that there is a penalty for any post that includes a link.
And this is true across all these networks. In our testing, we get about 10 times the reach — 10x — when we have zero click content, meaning a post that contains no link versus one that does. I’d rather influence 10 times as many people than I would draw traffic from a small percentage.
Three, publications, newsletters, podcasts, mainstream media, niche media, sources of industry influencing in small sectors, I don’t care which one we’re talking about, every single one of them is far more likely to say yes to a pitch that does not contain a request for a link. I think this is because over the last twenty five years SEOs and and link builders have sort of spammed the Internet so badly, we all get so many requests for links in our inboxes that we’re just done with it, and so it doesn’t work anymore. This is it’s essentially you know, Andrew Chen’s law of shitty click through rates. Like, it’s lost its ability to work and therefore, you can stand out by not asking for links. Instead, talking about coverage, talking about your product, talking about your brand, talking about your research, talking about your content, and trying to get these publications and sources of influence to feature those.
Fourth and finally, large language models and AI tools, which I know a ton of people are very excited about in marketing world, and it feels like the universe is maybe trending in this direction. We’ll see. But whether they are or not, links don’t matter to LLMs. That’s not what they’re looking at.
It is not like Google in 1997 with PageRank and them caring so much about where the link graph pointed. Large language models (LLMs) are using content itself. Right? Words that appear frequently near other words.
If your brand shows up near the words and phrases that people use to describe you and that the large language model interprets as being about your brand and product, guess what? You’re gonna be on that list. And if you don’t, you will not show up in those places. We we’ve got a whole, 5-minute whiteboard about showing up in in AI and LLMs, so I’ll point you over there.
But broadly speaking, these tools send almost no traffic. I believe it’s, for ChatGPT, it’s like 0.2%. For Perplexity, it’s under 2%. We’re talking incredibly small amounts of their traffic that they actually refer out to other places.
The answer happens right in the model.
Okay.
I believe that this is not an apocalypse for digital marketers.
These are important things that we need to consider, and we need to, as a result, invest in zero click kinds of marketing and change our entire thought process around what we’re doing online with digital marketing. But influence has always been better than traffic. Traffic was always a vanity metric. I love my friend Wil Reynolds who posted this video about showing how their traffic, Seer’s traffic, his company’s traffic had dropped 40%, and it seemed like the end of the world, but sales were up 20% because traffic is not the same as conversions. Traffic is not the same as customers. Traffic isn’t even the same as fans.
I think what we’re trying to do is create influence and fans and customers and conversion, not just focus on how many visitors did we get to the website.
Alrighty friends, see you again next week for another edition of five minute whiteboard.