Zero-Click Content

One of the best articles I've read in quite some time is this from the amazing Amanda Natividad. You probably know Amanda; she's crushing it for Spark Toro and shares a bunch of amazing social content. "Zero Click Content: The Counter-Intuitive Way to Succeed in a Platform-Native World" is a really, really, really good example of a counter-narrative argument, as Amanda alludes to with this title here - the counter-intuitive way. She describes a familiar experience that we, as marketers, all have, which is that the marketing tactics we've always relied on don't work quite as well as they used to. The hardest thing is getting the click from people, getting them back to our website. Amanda turns that entirely on its head and says, "No, the way to do this is to embrace zero-click content, to deliver value within the native platform itself, and then hope that people will find you through this kind of serendipitous byproduct. You make them feel good; they will find you and buy from you later." That's genius! It takes a truism that we want clicks and turns it on its head in a very credible, defensible way. It explains why we have to change how we operate to get better results. Archetypal thought leadership right from the get-go.

Amanda has done a fantastic job at using and reminding people of, and reiterating, the zero-click content concept. Weeks after initial publication, she sent emails out about zero-click content. They're hosting a Spark Toro office hours webinar about zero-click content. If you talk to Amanda, she probably will talk about zero-click content as well. These are all opportunities to reinforce the idea and actually make it stick and enter the content marketing discourse. She's absolutely fantastic at that.

I also really like the overarching structure of this blog post. We very quickly, very succinctly get into the meat of the thesis, which is that you need to embrace zero-click content. That's great, that is the academic theoretical overview, but Amanda then very quickly gets into another important part: personal experience. How does this academic concept actually hold up in the real world? How have I felt this experience? How do I know that this is true? And by talking about her own marketing efforts and the impact zero-click content has had on them, that's hugely credible. It's very hard to argue against her thesis because she's showing it working in real life.

The one-two-three punch of this article is the actionable advice at the end. It turns the esoteric, academic thing into something that you can go away and use now to improve your marketing. That is obviously the ultimate goal of thought leadership: to make people's lives better and easier and more successful. So fantastic structure, huge fan of how she's done that.

Littered throughout this article are so many influences. These are all well-respected, well-known marketers with their own audience in their own right. Using them as examples adds credibility to Amanda's argument because she's saying, "Hey, this isn't something that just exists in my head. This is a concept that other successful marketers are using to their advantage." But she's then also creating incentives for these people to distribute this content to their audience because she is making them look good, credible, and authoritative. Bringing influencers into the content creation process is another fantastic way to ensure the reach of your article is as big as possible.

Amanda has absolutely crushed it here with "Zero Click Content."