Increasing signups by 30%, with "zero-click" content
You might know Rand Fishkin as the CEO & Co-Founder of Moz, the popular SEO software. In those days, he would publicly decry so-called "vanity metrics" like impressions, views, and followers, because they couldn't be properly tied to the lagging metric of signups or revenue.
Not anymore.
As the CEO & Co-Founder of SparkToro, he faces a different challenge, and his views on those "vanity metrics" have changed. Now he's using "zero-click" content on social, to drive product signups. And he only relies on those leading metrics.
So why the massive change in strategy?
First, he found there are zero relevant searches around audience research software. And the "Wizard of Moz" would know.
He's also not VC-backed anymore, so he's free to grow the company his way, without a "growth at all costs" mindset. In the past, he needed numbers to prove everything. Now, he and the team are free to do marketing the way they want.
And finally, the landscape has changed. A lot.
In the past, you could publish organic social content or drive organic traffic, and get relevant data about your audience. Not anymore. The big tech platforms have reserved most of that data for paying advertisers only.
So Rand and his team decided to go all-in on delivering valuable content on social, that followers can consume right within the feed.
Rand attributes this change to the 30% user signup growth they saw from June-August 2022.
Focused on profit.
First, it's important to know that the SparkToro team doesn't track loads of metrics. In fact, they mainly focus on three big ones: MRR, annual profit, and monthly costs.
They aren't VC-backed (for more on that, see Rand's book "Lost and Founder"), so they aren't worried about raising their next round or focused on an IPO and don’t optimize towards metrics that other VC-backed companies might.
Instead, profit is the primary incentive.
This allows them to invest in the channels they want, the way they want, and focus on doing what's best for the long term.
Vanity metrics, or leading indicators?
This means having patience for long strategies to work. And this is where "vanity metrics" come in.
For years, marketers have said that metrics like:
- visit
- video views
- impressions
- follower count
- size of newsletter list
... are vanity metrics.
In other words, they're fluffy, easily manipulated metrics that don't drive actual conversions or revenue.
Rand disagrees. In fact, he's fully embraced these metrics.
He feels big tech networks that own distribution (Google, Facebook, etc.) have realized they can extract more advertising dollars if they make it hard (or impossible) to track organic behavior. They don’t give the data to organic brand accounts - only to paying advertisers.
They've removed things like referral or keyword data under the guise of privacy, but then turned around and given it to paying advertisers. Due to cookie tracking losses & increased multi-device use, marketers can’t see visitors' behavior as accurately as they could before.
So instead of fighting a losing battle, the SparkToro team is investing in creating content people love on the platforms they spend time on. In this case, “vanity metrics” serve as helpful early indicators that people are consuming their content.
The thought goes like this:
If they're consuming > and the content is good > it will have an impact on their target audience and drive results. Even if that can't be perfectly measured.
This willingness to invest in what some would call organic demand generation helps them keep their customer acquisition cost (CAC) extremely low. It’s essentially the cost of their salaries, along with any additional costs of creating the actual content.
Enter, "Zero-Click" content.
At the moment, Rand estimates that Social makes up 20-30% of their marketing. And their entire strategy with social is to deploy zero-click content (shoutout to the originator of the phrase, Amanda Natividad) comes in.
The idea is simple:
Show up where your target audience is paying attention. Then deliver them valuable content, natively in the feed, without asking them to leave.
Done consistently over time, you'll build awareness, trust, and generate demand for your product or service. For SparkToro, this might be a video explaining a topic or breaking down a longer-form article.
For their audience, it requires nothing except that they stay on the platform they already want to be on.
And as you might guess, the social platform's algorithms love this. They don't want users to leave and seem to penalize or limit the reach of content that takes users away from the platform.
But they love content that draws attention, boosts engagement, and drives retention.
How they find topics.
First, they pick out topics that people have "professional, emotional reactions about", and then they make zero-click content about it.
For example, Rand might come across a series of posts where marketers are upset that Facebook is taking away data from organic pages, or that Google is hiding keyword referral data.
Then he or Amanda will tackle these topics in a lengthy video, a robust Twitter thread, a series of visuals shared on LinkedIn... you get the idea.
They'll give away all the value natively within the feed: sharing the full video, or breaking down a long article so you could get the gist right there in the LinkedIn post.
They never ask users to leave the platform to get the insights, and they never link out to other resources. They just show up, consistently, delivering truly helpful insights that emotionally resonate with their audience.
The idea is, if 100 (or 10,000) people consume a given video or post, even if there’s no link, they’ll eventually Google “sparktoro”, visit directly, or share it with a friend. And as a result, SparkToro will gain new signups and revenue.
These behaviors and results are impossible to fully measure, but Rand knows they're effective.
In fact, after implementing this strategy they saw signups increase by 30% from June-August 2022. Besides that, SparkToro's company page on LinkedIn has been getting an incredible amount of love.
