Zero-Click Marketing with Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin [00:00:00]:
Coca Cola built great models for this in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and you can use that same logic today in the digital universe.

Announcer [00:00:09]:
Influential and thought provoking minds in marketing, sales, and business. The Business of Marketing podcast.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:18]:
Welcome again to the Business of Marketing. I’m a lead judge. You know, when I can, I like to cut to the chase and get directly to the value that you want to hear? So today’s guest almost needs no introduction, but I will say he’s the founder of SparkToro, he’s a master of audience research, a previous cofounder of Moz, and one of the best people to follow if you’re interested in learning how to find out where your audience hangs out. So, welcome to the show, Rand Fishkin.

Rand Fishkin [00:00:45]:
Oh, thanks for having me, Lee. Good to be here.

A. Lee Judge [00:00:47]:
Good to have you here again. So, let’s get into it, Rand. Just yesterday, I was talking with a client and I used the phrase that you’ve popularized, zero click marketing. So tell me, you know, as an inbound content marketing agency, this is really important to us. So for the listeners not familiar with that idea, lay it out for us so we can discuss it.

Rand Fishkin [00:01:12]:
Yeah. Sure. So, in the in the world of digital marketing for basically the first quarter century that existed, you know, 1996 to about 2021, almost all of the focus was on driving traffic. So essentially, you know, you bought digital ads to drive traffic to your website. You bought pay per click ads to drive traffic to your website. You would do content marketing and SEO and every other form of inbound marketing, email, social media marketing, press and PR, all designed to drive traffic to your website, and then from your website to specific landing pages where people would convert and buy from you. And this worked pretty darn well for a long time until all of the major platforms essentially individually realized that sending traffic out to other people was hurting their bottom lines and their growth potential. And so Google started keeping more searches for themselves answering them right in the results, sending people who are searching for local stuff to Google Maps, sending people who are searching for hotels to Google hotels, sending people who are searching for flights to Google flights, sending people who are looking for dictionary definitions to Google definitions, Google weather, Google everything.

Rand Fishkin [00:02:27]:
The same thing happened on LinkedIn, on Reddit, on Facebook, on Medium, on You name the network, every single one of them prioritizes keeping traffic for themselves rather than sending it out. And simultaneous with that, those platforms started becoming the Internet’s everything. We stopped going to hundreds of websites every month, and most of us spent most of our online activity around five or 10 different platforms that were in our rotations. So this all combines to mean traffic is harder to get than ever, there’s more competition for it than ever, the platforms don’t wanna send it to you, and something I think many marketers probably never realized or didn’t think about as much as they should have, which is influence doesn’t have to mean clicks. In the offline world, for the first, you know, hundred years of the of the twentieth century, right, marketing meant you would try and influence people on a billboard, with a radio ad, with a TV ad, with a guerrilla marketing campaign, with a flyer on the street. None of those things send any traffic to a website, but they all influenced people to potentially buy a product or a service. That’s that’s essentially what zero click marketing recognizes in the digital world. Zero click marketing is saying, wait, we don’t need to get someone to come to our website to influence what they think about our brand, their behavior, or their propensity to buy from us.

Rand Fishkin [00:04:02]:
So let’s invest in doing marketing in the places where our audience pays attention rather than trying to drive everything to a click and a visit.

A. Lee Judge [00:04:12]:
So Rand, a few weeks ago, we were both at b two b Marketing Pros Conference and you said something on stage that I really related to. You mentioned when you were previously talking about clicks and attribution and I literally had a talk called Click to Close and it’s embarrassing to think about what I professed years ago compared to what’s real now. So, do you think marketers are, have caught up to the fact that clicks and attribution are, are almost gone now, are very difficult to measure?

Rand Fishkin [00:04:42]:
I think marketers have. I think the problem is more execs,

A. Lee Judge [00:04:49]:
clients,

Rand Fishkin [00:04:51]:
you know, other teams, the CFO, the the people who assign budget. Those folks, unfortunately, are still trapped in the world of like the first twenty years of the Internet where they think that they should be able to perfectly track and attribute every sale. And so if a sale shows that it came from Google, well, let’s put more budget to Google. Let’s do more SEO. Not, hey, wait a minute. Was that a search for our brand name? If so, Google deserves no credit for that. Google is just a navigational device. They might as well have typed it into the browser URL.

Rand Fishkin [00:05:30]:
Unfortunately, that logic and thinking is not there yet. It doesn’t exist yet. And it’s super frustrating I think for a lot of marketers who might listen to, you know, Amanda and I talk about zero click marketing, might hear you on stage and on your podcast talking about it and go yeah, that’s a nice idea, but until my client boss team buys into it, I don’t get to have the luxury of doing the right kind of marketing. My only my only corollary to that is it’s your job. It’s our job as marketers to convince the people that we work with of the reality of the world in which we work. That is part of our obligation. And so, yes, it’s fair to say, hey, my boss doesn’t yet understand or believe in zero click marketing. They don’t understand that attribution can’t be perfectly measured.

Rand Fishkin [00:06:21]:
They don’t understand that I can use these other signals to create correlation, but not causation between influence and sales. Well, if they don’t understand, it’s on you to explain it to them, to get them to buy in. That’s part of our job. That’s part of anyone’s job, right, is to

A. Lee Judge [00:06:41]:
Yeah.

Rand Fishkin [00:06:42]:
Let their boss and team know how the world works.

A. Lee Judge [00:06:45]:
And I can tell you that right now, every day, because being that we’re a content marketing agency and we’re primarily inbound, we’re always trying to explain to our clients or pry from their fingers this need to put a link on everything. Like, every social post has to have a link. And once we get into explaining, like you said, to marketers that that’s not the way to go anymore, not to mention it’s squashing your reach because no plat like I said earlier, no platform wants to send you away. The marketer might get that. The next question is, okay, we hear you, Lee, but how do we measure it? How do how do I prove my job as a marketer if I can’t show my CMO that I got tons of clicks on this social?

Rand Fishkin [00:07:33]:
But you can. But you can. Okay. Totally can. So it’s so here’s, I have this post which I invite anyone to read called how to build a hard to reach or hard to measure marketing dashboard. So if you search

A. Lee Judge [00:07:44]:
for Full of.

Rand Fishkin [00:07:44]:
Hard to measure marketing SparkToro or hard to measure SparkToro, you will find this post. And essentially what it is is it’s a it’s a big big old Excel style spreadsheet that at the very top has the top of funnel metrics. Those are things like, your social followers, the number of impressions that you got per platform on each of the platforms on the on the social sharing or or views that you got of your YouTube video or minutes watched of your LinkedIn videos. Right? It’s essentially what what we historically, derisively called vanity metrics.

A. Lee Judge [00:08:19]:
Yeah.

Rand Fishkin [00:08:19]:
But those vanity metrics will tell you how many people and how much reach and engagement you’re having across these zero click platforms. And then the next step in that spreadsheet is looking at, essentially middle of funnel which is people coming to your website. So it’s visits Mhmm. Searches for your brand, new followers, And the growth of those things is indicative of the impressions and engagement that you’re earning one step up. So lots of people are watching my video. Lots of people are learning about my brand. Lots of people are, seeing my posts. Well, then they’re gonna follow me more.

Rand Fishkin [00:08:58]:
They’re gonna search for me more. They’re gonna visit my site more. Those visits won’t come directly from links, but they will come. Right? People will type it into the browser or they’ll search for it in Google. They’ll come to you. The other thing that’s part of that that middle step is conversion rate. So if you are creating a positive brand impression and people are liking you, trusting you, knowing you more, your conversion rate should be going up over time. Which means you can take a look at, you know, if you have some sort of thing like, your funnel includes a step of email subscription, and then verification, and then a trial of your product, and then, you know, someone buys something, or they sign up for an email list and then they buy something and, you know, get it delivered to their house, you should be able to see that metric rising as well.

Rand Fishkin [00:09:46]:
So instead of showing someone, you know, your CMO or your your CEO, instead of showing them, hey. Here’s how many conversions we got, and here’s each channel that we attribute them to, you’re instead saying here’s how much participation and engagement we got on each channel, and here’s how much lift and conversion rate, lift we saw over time from those. Can I prove to you absolutely that when we did more on LinkedIn, we got more sales? No. I can’t. Can I say that they’re strongly correlated? Yes. I absolutely can. You can calculate a correlation coefficient if you want. You know, you can use Pearson’s or whatever, in Excel if you really feel like getting fancy.

Rand Fishkin [00:10:27]:
But my argument is that that works exactly the same way that advertising and marketing worked for a hundred years. Coca Cola built great models for this in the nineteen forties and nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, and you can use that same logic today in the digital universe.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:46]:
Yes.

Rand Fishkin [00:10:46]:
I am gonna argue that if you can get that buy in using those metrics, you’re gonna have a great time.

A. Lee Judge [00:10:53]:
So, Ram, we talked about, you know, the lift, and that’s how we try to explain that to our clients that you know what things you’re doing are working, and the lift to your brain is what matters the most. So let’s start with what works and if it’s actually within your brand. But when they come down to really measuring it, they’re gonna, obviously, because of how they’ve been doing it, look at things like Google Analytics, and and we know, this is within our company of one, that when we see Lyft, and we see Lyft in our Google Analytics, often they’re brand searches, and we know they’re probably, they can be coming from anything. It can be coming from, from chat gbt, from a click from LinkedIn, we don’t know where it’s coming at, and they often get grouped into that. So explain, especially for those looking to figure out what Chatubit or Claude is bringing to them, explain what you’re gonna see in your analytics that you may not realize in what you’re seeing.

Rand Fishkin [00:11:49]:
Yeah. Sure. So, there’s a great study, I think, done using similar web data last year, and, folks looked at essentially the the click stream pattern of ChatGibt, and Perplexity and, several of the other you know, Gemini, a few of the other major LLM tools, and looked at the percentage of traffic that they refer, and those numbers are lower than any social network. So we’re talking about you know, less than 1%, less than 0.5%. I think ChatGPT was 0.2% of all traffic that that is on that, on chatgbt.com or openai.com goes to another website. You’re not gonna get traffic from them. But that doesn’t mean that people aren’t using them. Right? They do get millions hundreds of millions of visits, and people ask questions that could lead to your brand, especially in b two b.

Rand Fishkin [00:12:46]:
But the only thing you’re going to see is more Google searches for your brand. Because if it recommends, you know, whatever, SparkToro for your audience research tool, well, then people are gonna search for SparkToro. Because ChatGPT does not include by default the URL when they when they recommend something, the citations. And even when they do, people don’t click them. So my my advice would be, if you think your audience is likely using LLMs to do research in your sector, the only right move, the only thing you can do is look at your branded search and direct traffic, and your referrals from Google because that is gonna be how people tend to reach you. And you just gotta be careful. You gotta be careful not to assume that because you’re getting traffic from Google, Google is the one that is creating that demand.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:40]:
So set your baselines now because when things rise, you may not know why it’s rising, but if you have a baseline, you know that something’s changing it.

Rand Fishkin [00:13:48]:
I mean, you probably wanna set your baseline in 2022.

A. Lee Judge [00:13:52]:
Yeah. Yeah. That’s what you should have done. Yeah. So you mentioned SparkToro. So before we go, I wanna make sure now I’ll tell you, I’ve been following the company for a while and did a test a few years back also. I’m really interested in it, and I think for for the it’s a little bit complicated to understand exactly what SparkToro does and how it gets that information. So give us an idea of, one, the main purpose of SparkToro, and then, two, how is it what’s the wizardry behind figuring out, who your audience is, and how do we pull these things together to make sense? Because we’re so stuck on this old Google Analytics, and Analytics from each platform, you have a new way of looking at things that I really support, and so tell us about it, you know, what it does and how it comes about.

Rand Fishkin [00:14:39]:
Sure. Sure. Yeah. Thankfully, Lee, the explanations are incredibly simple.

A. Lee Judge [00:14:44]:
Good.

Rand Fishkin [00:14:45]:
So SparkToro, the the main purpose is to give you the behaviors and demographics of any describable online audience. So if you wanna know what social networks are popular with, directors of engineering in Canada, SparkToro can tell you that. If you wanna know what YouTube channels are most watched by interior designers in The US, SparkToro can tell you that. If you wanna know, people who search for tennis rackets in The UK, what, podcasts do they listen to, SparkToro can tell you that. Right? So behaviors and demographics of a describable online audience. And the way that that data comes about is essentially we, we get it from three sources. One is social networks. LinkedIn powers our demographics.

Rand Fishkin [00:15:35]:
We also get data from Instagram and Twitter and Facebook and Reddit and YouTube and all these other places. Blue Sky and, Threads are starting to get in there too. Then that is combined with data from search, so essentially you know what are keywords that people search for and what are all the sites that appear in Google for those rankings and what get the clicks. And last and and probably most centrally, clickstream data which is like a panel of tens of millions of users. We use Daedos which is a, a great clickstream data company. They were actually recently acquired by SEMrush. And the, data that Daedos has comes from, you know, millions of people around the world and everything that they click on and visit in in a stream. So we can essentially say, oh, people who visited this website also visited this website.

Rand Fishkin [00:16:24]:
People who visited this YouTube channel also visited that YouTube channel. People who searched for this thing also went to these places. And that that could be anywhere in their journey. Right? And we just, magically I said magically, but it’s just a bunch of code and math to put all these three sources together and deliver, you know, people who do x also do y. That’s what Smarturo is showing you.

A. Lee Judge [00:16:48]:
So tell me this. Let’s figure out how to get actionable for the listeners. Let’s say I’ll use my scenario. Let’s say you have, you tell me that CMOs who follow Rand Fishkin on YouTube also listen to the Business of Marketing podcast. So I know these two things. Question is, how do you know that those are CMOs? And then two, what action do I take when I learn this information?

Rand Fishkin [00:17:15]:
So SparkToro doesn’t show you peep data about people who follow a particular person on YouTube. That is not one of the search vectors that you can use unfortunately. But you could, for example, say I want, CMOs in The United States who also are b two b. Right? Like, I want I want people who have the words b two b and c m o in their bio, and I want them to be US. And that data, we basically just pull from LinkedIn. So we look at only the LinkedIn profiles that include b two b and CMO and United States. Tada. Alright.

Rand Fishkin [00:17:52]:
Now we have, you know, whatever, 22,000 of them. Great. Let’s analyze their behaviors and then we look at websites that they visit and keywords that they search for and YouTube channels that they, follow and subscribe to and podcasts they listen to and all all that kind of stuff. Right? And that’s just that’s just combining social data, search data, and click stream data.

A. Lee Judge [00:18:11]:
So do I then go after being on those podcasts or how do I action that? If I know that these CMOs go these places, how do I get there, and what do I do?

Rand Fishkin [00:18:23]:
We at SparkToro don’t wanna be prescriptive about what you should do with that data. Like, it we believe that you are smarter than us when it comes to what your marketing tactics and strategy should be. We’re not trying to tell you how to do your job. So if you come to SparkToro and you are trying to solve the problem of which podcast should we sponsor, yeah, SparkToro’s flipping great for that. But if you come to SparkToro and your goal is, I wanna build a data driven persona to understand my audience more deeply so that I can develop a strategy for them. Great. Podcast doesn’t have to be on your tactics list. Neither does outreach to websites.

Rand Fishkin [00:19:04]:
PR might not be on your list. Maybe you’re gonna exclusively focus on buying ads, and you’re just using SparkToro to get general data and an understanding of your audience so that you can make better targeted ads and write the copy and try some experiments. Great. Like, fine. We we are not prescriptive about, hey. You should only do these things with our data. Our data is there to answer hard questions that marketers have that come up all the time and and give you those give you those answers, but not tell you which thing you absolutely need to do. I think that this is a little frustrating because many marketers are stuck in the sort of like SEO tool world, and SEO tools are very much like fix these things on your pages, get links from these websites, you know, target these keywords with content.

Rand Fishkin [00:19:49]:
And that that’s not what we’re doing. We’re saying, we can tell you all of this information about what your audience does on the web. Now it’s up to you to decide which strategies and tactics to pursue.

A. Lee Judge [00:20:01]:
Can you tell me something like, okay, this persona that you’ve identified, these CMOs, they are more likely to listen to podcasts than they are to read blog articles or maybe watch you subscribe to YouTube channels. Can you tell me something like that?

Rand Fishkin [00:20:17]:
Yeah. Yeah. So in the network section, we’ll we’ll tell you for example, like, are CMOs more likely to use Google than other, you know, American Internet users? Are they more likely to use Bing? Are they more likely to use ChatGPT? Are they less likely to use Perplexity? Are they more likely to be on YouTube? Are they less likely to be on Reddit? All that kind of data is in there as well. So so you can get that, like, channel sense. I will say this, you know, if we’re talking about something like YouTube or Google, ninety nine percent of Americans use them. So

A. Lee Judge [00:20:53]:
Yeah. We know those things.

Rand Fishkin [00:20:53]:
Right? Difficult to find an audience that doesn’t use those. The the real question is, is that relevant for what you’re doing? Right? If you are, you know, a b to b targeting b to b CMOs, it might be the case that a lot of that audience is on TikTok, for example. Is that a place that’s relevant to your marketing activities? I I don’t know. I’m not I’m not sure that I would go and, you know, do a big investment in TikTok. And this is why I’m saying, right, like, you know better than we do whether a channel or a tactic is right for your business. What we can tell you is, hey. Look. Your, you know, your audience is moving to large language model tools or no.

Rand Fishkin [00:21:36]:
Your audience is not. Will Reynolds, a friend of mine, you know, from Sierra Interactive runs an agency, and he was looking at a a decking client of theirs. Right? And they were like, hey. We think that they might be move their audience might be moving to ChatGPT and asking them for, like, you know, decking supplies and materials. And we were like, I don’t know. Here’s people who visit that website. And their behavior suggests that they actually use ChatGPT and Perplexity and Gemini and all these other LLM tools less than the average American. I did this recently for a retirement community.

Rand Fishkin [00:22:07]:
You know, someone who’s looking at retirement community marketing and they’re like, gosh. You know, are people who are visiting these retirement communities and helping their parents or grandparents or whatever look for, you know, where they want to stay, are they using LLMs? And I was like, nope. Not at all. You know, it’s like one of the one of the least

A. Lee Judge [00:22:24]:
used That’s action.

Rand Fishkin [00:22:25]:
Vectors for LLMs in The United States right now. So, you know, that and that’s the complete inverse of most b to b folks. Right? Like, you know, software, CTOs, people who are into, you know, trying to figure out whatever accounting software or video software or, they’re looking at, you know, big purchases for their companies. Those people are using LLMs a lot.

A. Lee Judge [00:22:50]:
I was thinking of lots of actionable things as you mentioned it. As the putting on my marketer hat, I’m like, you know what? As you said, you can’t prescribe it, but I could see how I would use it. Like, you know, do we launch this podcast or do we launch this YouTube channel or do we, you know, talk with this particular influencer? I could see how we understand we’d have some understand better understanding from your data. It’s probably you mentioned

Rand Fishkin [00:23:13]:
And I think that basically, right, SparkToro can can can answer all of these questions, like which channels and networks are popular with my audience? Of those channels, which specific accounts or, podcasts or channels or, you know, creators are popular with my audience on that one network? And then what are they talking about and consuming? What are they interested in? What content do they care about? What keywords are they searching for? And what demographics do they have? Like, are we, you know, are we talking more to women or men? Are we talking to older demographics or younger? Are we talking to college educated? What kind of degrees do they have? What kind of words do they have in their job title and role? Where in The United States you know, where geographically do they live? So all of that data is in there as well. And, absolutely, it can be used in a ton of different ways, for all sorts of marketing and understanding and persona crafting and specific tactic questions.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:10]:
Yeah. Specifically, the content marketing part. I love to mention about what they’re talking about

Rand Fishkin [00:24:14]:
And the content section is dope, man. It really is.

A. Lee Judge [00:24:18]:
But I I can’t wait to check it out again some more and dig into it deeper. It’s funny you mentioned Will Reynolds. He’ll be on an episode either right before or right after this one because we’ve already spoken. So so good. Yeah. So before we go, Rand, tell everybody what’s on your mind right now and where we can contact you and about SparkToro Toro, whatever else is going on. Floor is yours.

Rand Fishkin [00:24:39]:
Oh, sure. Yeah. So let’s see. My email is Rand@SparkToro.com. Happy to answer any questions about, that company or zero click marketing in general. And Amanda and I do post quite a bit on, LinkedIn, so I recommend checking us out there. I’m also moving most of my social activity to blue sky, so you can find me there rather than Twitter or threads these days. Seems like most of marketing community is kinda moving to blue sky, which is pretty cool.

Rand Fishkin [00:25:08]:
Great to have that that kinda water cooler back for us all. And if you want to check out the SparkToro blog, I do recommend that. We only publish maybe once a week or so, but a lot of times you’ll find those, like, you know, short little five minute videos that that show how to do something or an opinion piece by Amanda or I about what’s going on in digital marketing world. And we try to be very human about it. Like, we’re not you know, it is not like, hey. Here’s a bunch of tactics and a list of bullet points, and we’re not that kind of boring blog. We’re we’re kinda like the old school, you know, infotainment opinion blog.

A. Lee Judge [00:25:46]:
That’s viable. I’m sure that that’s what drives FCO. SEO is new, opinionated, clean, non non non AI generated, fresh ideas and opinions. Right?

Rand Fishkin [00:25:59]:
Exact exactly, man. Like, I am so tired of targeting SEO keywords. I I never wanna do that again in my life. This is so boring. It’s so I don’t know. It feels very, you know, 02/2010. And I think that I think that the the new way to stand out on the web is to get fans, not just clicks.

A. Lee Judge [00:26:19]:
Yeah.

Rand Fishkin [00:26:19]:
And that’s that’s what we’re trying to do.

A. Lee Judge [00:26:21]:
Absolutely. Well, Ran, thanks again for joining us again on the business of marketing. And to the listeners, if you’re listening to the podcast and want to also see Ran and I, video of the podcast and others are also available in the podcast section of contentmonster.com. Ran, thanks, talk to you soon.

Announcer [00:26:43]:
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