Is Zero-Click Marketing the Future?

0:28All right, we're going to talk about if zero click marketing is future. this. So one thing I want to know, it's really funny having a fever when it's 109 degrees outside. But your fever is lower than it still. Otherwise you'd be dead. Lower than the temperature outside. Yes. All right. So I'm going to share my screen over here and then we can, we can talk through this. I get to talk more because Neil's low energy. So that's cool. So this is written by Rand Fishkin, July 28th, 2023. This is more of a recap on this concept of zero click marketing. And so at the highlight over here, he says, look, you know, remember back in the day when Facebook posts click through rates were 10%, that meant a full 15%.

1:04Neil's nodding his head because he spent a lot of money buying likes for his page and his organic engagement was great until it wasn't. And then today, 1.5 % is considered a miracle and 0.15 % is still a multiple of the median engagement rate, nevermind CTR. So the whole point here is that if your platform like LinkedIn or Facebook or Snap or Instagram or threads or X, whatever it is exactly, you're incentivized to keep people on the platform because longer people are on the platform, they're reading more content there. You're going to be able to serve more ads, which means you make more money.

1:34So you're naturally incentivized to do that, right? And so back in the day, Facebook was good about sending organic traffic to like, I don't know if you remember those sites, like those clickbait sites, like Upworthy, not Upworthy. What was it called? Do you know what I'm talking about? Upworthy is one of them. BuzzFeed is another one. Yeah. Okay. Upworthy did really well from social. It grew super fast until their algorithms changed and then they got crushed. Exactly. So they took that away once the Facebooks of the world realized that, hey, maybe we should take the engagement for ourselves. And so I want you to take a look at this table over here.

2:04Those of you that can't see it, I'm going to describe it in a second and then we can talk through what this actually means. So it says zero click content on major web platforms. So it shows the platforms like Google, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn. right? And then it shows kind of allows out clicks in content, meaning that you can link to the outside, right? But it also has another column here that says, algo prioritizes native content. And it says yes, exclusively no, right? And so here's what I want to say to you. So on Instagram, for example, if you're posting native content, the algorithm is going to prioritize your content, right?

2:36Same thing with Twitter, same thing with YouTube, same thing with LinkedIn, it's really the big platforms right now, right? And it says creators benefit from a zero click approach, meaning that they really don't want you to link out because it's going to get people to click off the platform. So you can see for the vast majority of these, besides Pinterest or Quora, basically everything else, if you're posting natively to the platform without linking out, you are going to get the benefit there. And so the argument from Rand Fishkin here, so he has a company called SparkToro, he founded a company called Moz.

3:04But his whole argument here is that the future of marketing is zero click, mean that you're just going to have to learn to post natively to these platforms and get people to get really interested about who you are outside and get them to naturally Google. So really what that means is your marketing is just going to have to get better and better. Yeah. And then the way I see it with marketing is, is even if you get zero clicks, that's okay. You can use it for brand building. Like there's just so much brand building that you can get from simple things like, you know, just being there whenever there's zero clicks and people just end up coming back to you.

3:37And then eventually they end up buying from you because they're familiar with your guys's name and brand out there. I'm going to show you one more thing here. We're going to pivot away from low energy Neil. Google search CTR and zero click searches 2020. You can see the number of zero click searches. This number is probably higher now, to be honest. 65 % went to zero click. 1.59 % went to paid CTR and then organic CTR is 33%, right? I can see the paid inching up a little more and organic coming down a little bit and a zero click going up a little more. Right. And so again, like the Charlie Munger quote is show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome.

4:13And it's very clear what's happening here. Right. And so that means like from a more practical standpoint, when you're writing on X, for example, so I had to tweet, I wrote out the other day, like, it's got to be native to that platform. If you're going to write a thread, it's got to be native. You're going to write on LinkedIn. It's got to be native to the platform. Maybe you're using carousels. Right. My point of saying all this is that each platform has its own way of playing the game. If you're playing the game on YouTube, which we might talk about in the next couple episodes, the game that we're playing now is, oh, we got to be really smart about the, not just the headline, but also the thumbnail.

4:44And that's how we're going to get a much higher click-through rate. So that's how one of our recent videos got like a 7.2 % click-through rate. Another one's 5 % or so. Whereas when we weren't being intentional about it, our click-through rate was maybe like one or 2%. And it's no wonder our videos were sucking, right? It wasn't because we sucked. It's because we weren't playing the game. And so the key thing to understand that the game that's happening on most of these channels, the big ones, is that they are prioritizing creators that are producing zero-click content. That's all it is at the end of the day.

5:13Anything else, Neil? Oh, make sure you rate-review this podcast. Please give us five stars. Maybe it'll make me feel better and not be as sick. And really appreciate it. We'll see you tomorrow.