All right, let's do it. So welcome, welcome, welcome, everybody. My name is Tori Kinlick. I am one of the VPs of demand at Refined Labs.
And we have a co-host that you're all familiar with, Sydney, who all allowed to introduce up. But we also have a special guest today, which we are really, really excited about. So yeah, why don't we get into interest here, Sydney, if you wouldn't mind, and then we'll over to you, Amanda. All right, I'll keep my short and sweet, Sydney Waterfall GM here at Refined Labs, and super excited to shout out to Amanda today.
Yeah, and excited to be here. Great to meet you in person-ish, Sydney and Tori. So let's see, what are we gonna cover today? Well, quick intro.
I'm the VP of Marketing over at SparkToro, which is the audience research startup. We provide marketers, founders, consultants, or the audience research tools. So tools that help you better understand your audience. We have a couple of free tools, like for Twitter, where you can do a fake follower audit of yourself.
You might've seen us in the news kind of recently in the past couple months with all this chatter about, the amount of fake followers or accounts on Twitter. We did our own study on that, which kind of gave us a number that was higher than Twitter's purported less than 5%. We also do have something called SparkScore, which helps you measure an accounts overall level of engagement. So we created SparkScore to essentially provide people with a way to better understand how engaging a social account is.
Because you really believe it's not about finding the biggest account or the most influential person as defined by having 200,000 followers, right? We care about actual influence, what's engaging, what are people paying attention to? Those are going to be accounts that are not that big. And then they also have our paid tool, which helps you search audiences by how they self-identify, by the words they talk about, or phrases they talk about frequently online, social accounts they follow, and we help you find the podcast they listen to, YouTube channels they subscribe to, other things they talk about publicly online.
So my long spiel, sorry about that. No, that was very well said. And I'll tell you, I did notice the, you know, a lot of the news coverage and some of the shout outs that SparkScore was getting when you went through and started doing your kind of Twitter audit there, trying to understand the percentage of users that are, in fact bots. And it was really helpful.
I was also considering buying Twitter. It was just outside of my quiz right though. And so yeah, Elon has deeper pockets than I do as it turns out. But we'll see how that all shakes out.
But actually, you know, what kind of hits close to home is, I was, I mean, I still use the Spark Tour to a pretty regularly, but I use it quite a bit when I was doing my interview for RefineLab. So that was, yeah, something that all kind of, I guess a little bit full circle for me here. But for today, you know, Amanda, you had, I think, summarized it well, right? The thing that you and Rand and your tool do best is, is help us all understand our audience a little bit better.
And that's exactly kind of what I wanted to chat through today and talk through this concept, this idea that you've been sharing pretty broadly recently around zero-click content, which is maybe call it a trend, maybe call it a phenomenon, maybe just call it, understanding the behavior of social audiences, whatever the case, it's super relevant, and certainly aligns really well with the way that we see the world here at RefineLab. So yeah, I think that that's probably a great place for us to start is, you know, help us understand what is zero-click content and watch marketers care. Yeah, so this I think, well, this will dovetail nicely into audience research. So zero-click content, this is something that we've seen a lot of entertainers or creators, they've been doing for a long time.
And it's essentially giving all the upfront value of something and leading with that in hopes or in trust that people will eventually click. So what does this really mean, right? So where we are now with marketing or with the world of content is however you want to perceive the tech giants, right? You, there are some very clear and refutable qualities there, right?
So with Google, Google Search is always changing, right? The algorithm always evolves, the user experience is always changing. And where we are right now with this is we are seeing a lot of content on Google that's optimized for the Search Engine results page. And so what I mean by that is, you know, maybe you're Googling something really straightforward, like it has a binary answer, like how to convert ounces to cups.
Cool, you don't need a blog post for that. You don't need to like go to some, maybe you don't have to go to a special website for that, even though there are special websites for this. You might Google it, might Google convert ounces to cups, and you'll see that calculator right at the top of the SERP. That's a pretty cool, pretty great user experience, right?
You get your answer resolved right away, you move on with your day. Same thing with other trivia things, like Paul Rudd's height, right? Maybe you're curious, how tall is he? You just want to know the answer.
You don't need to know like his entire life history. Cool, he's 5'10. But where this can pose a problem for marketers, right, is well, now all the content you're creating is staying on Google. And maybe you're thinking about like, OK, well, maybe I'm not going to create a Paul Rudd, you know, fan site, you could, if you want to, you know, no judgment.
But you might be thinking about like, what are ways I can optimize for the SERP, right? So another example about Sanf and the other thing that I want to see is a funny video. You want to see a quick recipe, a cleaning tip, all things that are zero-click content because you don't have to click on them to gain the value. It's so interesting, right?
Because I think that, you know, the question that pops up is like, is this more about the preferences of the audience that people that are using these platforms or conducting the searches? Or is this more of a byproduct of the algorithms? And you did mention a couple of the different platforms. And I think that there is maybe some newer offerings that allow more of those external links happening.
But it's almost like these, you know, these platforms, that are allowing the external links are doing it against their will. You know, they're doing it begrudgingly. I think we've got a friend of our show here, Nick Bennett. He's got a great following on LinkedIn.
And I know he's been doing some testing that I've noticed a couple of his posts recently around. I guess LinkedIn now allows you to add an external link in an image on your post. And so what's been really interesting is kind of seeing Nick run through some of these experiments and only to find that his reach is being stifled when he does include those links. So even when it is something that is being offered by the platform, it doesn't exactly mean that they're encouraging you to use it.
And so I wonder, maybe it's not so binary. It's not one of the other of audience preference versus, you know, the preference of the platforms. And it is very likely a combination of both. But with all that said, I think right now for marketers, the question becomes, what do I do with all this?
How am I supposed to act knowing that, you know, whether it's the preference of my audience or the platform that I'm publishing my content on, it's becoming harder and harder to get people to engage with the content and click off site when that's something that so much of the relative success of the content was kind of predicated on before. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, right? Like maybe 10 years ago, and maybe five years ago in marketing, right?
So I think that's basically post on your Twitter account, like, you know, new blog post is up, you know, we explore eight ways to get more out of your content. And that would have worked like five years ago. Now, if you see that kind of tweet, let's like eight ways do this or five ways do that. You're kind of like, yeah, yeah, I get it.
You have your list of goal. I don't care. And then you scroll. The funny thing is like, what's here?
Let's counterintuitive about zero-click content. The idea of giving that value up front is what runs counter to everything that you were taught as a marketer, right? You were taught like, no, no, no, you're supposed to just tease it and then people are going to go, oh, I want to know those eight tips to do more of my content. I want to know what they are.
I'm going to click. But in this world now where everything, like all the platforms have become so saturated, this kind of content everywhere. And even just using that example headline, it's like anybody could write that, right? Like that could become literally anyone.
So why would it come from you? And a way you can, your unique differentiator there could be giving that up front value. And let's just stick with this example of like, listicle. What you could do is one, you could take one item on that list and flesh that out into a Twitter thread, a LinkedIn post, a Facebook post, right?
Or maybe in about 100 or so words and say, give one of those pieces of advice. Eight ways to get more of your content. Here's the first tip. Turn all of your blog posts into a YouTube video.
And to do that, you need to make sure you have an engaging YouTube headline. Got to make sure your thumbnail has great teaser text. No more than make sure that teaser text on your thumbnail has no more than four words. Otherwise people won't see it.
Use highly emotive photos for that thumbnail. Make sure you optimize your video description for SEO. Quick ways to do that use high volume terms that people are searching for. Boom, boom, boom.
That's one tip. Really. That's all fleshed out from one part of your list. But there's still more value in that theoretical blog post rather than seven more tips.
But anybody reading that is going, oh, shoot, that's really good advice for YouTube. Like I didn't know I should stick with like four phrases on that thumbnail. Maybe I should click in and read more of this article. And so that's the counterintuitive thing, right?
You give away that value, but then people actually do click because we're like, wait, I want more from you. Other ways to do this would be in this eight tip blog post. Maybe you give away like six of those tips, right? That's like more than half of the content.
Maybe you're going to list off like repurpose into YouTube, have engaging thumbnails, repurpose into TikTok. Make sure it's 60 seconds. Repurpose into Instagram post, a multi post Instagram post linked to that in your story, like separate little tips. So it's all going to be different advice within each one or thorough advice at each one.
But maybe you as a person scrolling, we'll see. Hey, they give away like six tips and these were all pretty, these are mostly pretty novel to me. Like, I'm going to say this post for later. I'm going to check it out.
So ways to tap into that high value, the highest value part of your content and giving that away will ultimately make people trust you. They'll at least remember you. And then over time, you cut the trust that people will click convert, subscribe to your list, whatever it is that you are. What ever it is that you are trying to do.
Absolutely. The mindset shift there is like the key. You got to shift your mindset to thinking like that, thinking about what's more valuable to my audience, to my network, you know, whatever you're optimizing for. But I will say, I've seen companies do this and there's a compounding effect.
Once you start dabbling in this, kind of learning what your audience likes and resonates with. And then they have that trust with you that every, maybe it's paid, maybe it's organic, maybe it's a personal brand share, everything that they see from you or your brand. They're like, it's going to be at least probably pretty quality content and I'm going to learn something. And so the next time I see something that intrigues me, I'm going to click.
And then once you do get that click, you're likely going to see more engagement, more time on site, maybe some more of those types of metrics that you would typically measure from website click behavior. But the companies that are doing this well, like after like two to three months of consistency, I'm seeing huge compounding effects in some of their Google ads data and some other data measurement. But definitely one of the hit on that because I think it's a roller coaster, you know. It is.
And I think the part that's particularly interesting that you just hit on Sydney is Amanda, I think, is talking a lot about organic content. Like I know, I mean, you're definitely what we would call a content creator, right? You spend a lot of time and you're very talented at it as well, you know, trying to run these unexperiments so that you can understand the best approaches. With that said, though, there's also, I think, an application to all this to pay media and advertisements.
The same approach that you're talking through here with zero click content, zero click organic content, Amanda, you know, this is the same exact advice that we're often giving our clients at Refine Labs when they're creating ads. Now, certainly there's limitations when, you know, it's paid media. You know, you do want to continue offering value. You know, you don't want to be cryptic or clickbaity or anything like that.
But, you know, it is, I think, pretty interesting to see that much of these same approaches that we're seeing become really, really impactful, really beneficial and provide a lot of lift from an organic perspective. The same can be said from the paid side. So, Sydney, you have anything to add on that as far as, you know, kind of some of the trends that maybe you've been seeing across our client base around companies that are really leaning into this strategy and, you know, and how they're kind of making use of this advice, this approach when you're thinking about it. And how do you advise this approach when building out their paid media strategies?
Sure. One thing that point out is, it's the same mindset that you should have, whether no matter how you're distributing the content, and you might need to tailor content for different distribution channels, right? Like, you know, YouTube, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, right? You're going to need to tailor that.
So, it's effective on those platforms, but you should honestly be thinking about paid the same way. The difference is you have a little bit more upfront costs that you're going to pay to guarantee delivery, right? So, whenever like, add budgets get involved, if like people just like, tense up and they're like, I need to get the leads, I need to get the measurement. But I would say that the mindset is the same.
One thing specifically that, you know, we like to test and recommend is to have that mindset, figure out what message you want to deliver, and then we can tailor add delivery similar to how you would tailor your organic delivery. And objectives is one thing when you start looking at paid. So I saw a question here just jump in the chat from David. Yes, what are some objectives you hear from clients about zero-click content?
We can get into that. The main objective or objection I hear is how are we going to measure this, right? How are we going to notice this working? But I think that goes, doesn't matter if it's paid or not, if you're just investing in your getting on to the strategy.
So, a couple of things that we typically see, but I'd love Amanda's perspective on this too. I'm sure you guys get this question a lot or in your office hours. We are looking for engagement. So, let's start with in-platform.
If it's an ad or even if it's a personal post, I post on my profile all the time. I'm looking for engagement, right? So are people resonating with this? Are people commenting on this?
You know, paid platforms, you can look at engagement rate. Those are some of the key signals. If it's paid, you might want to look at what objectives you're using to distribute and pay for that paid distribution of content. And then when we do get the click, like we still look at click-through rate, when I do get the click, what is that post click behavior on this type of zero-click content on distribution versus an old traditional gated e-book or SEO kind of fluff blog post?
One of our clients kind of transitioned to this, zero fluff content they've been distributing for quite some time. And we're seeing like overall site engagement, site engagement on a specific page, time on page, like skyrocket. So the quality of the traffic is much better and traffic numbers, they're not so worried about. They're worried about the quality of the traffic.
They're engaging with that. If they're clicking around on other pages. Those are the type of metrics that we've seen. And then we've seen in tandem with all of these things going up, we're seeing demo requests going up and the conversion rate on those pages going up from some of these zero-click content type pillar pages.
So I think those are some nice two cents for that question right now, but I'm sure you might get some questions similar. So what's your take on that? A couple of different takes. Maybe I'll try to break this out as a top line recommendation, the way that I have communicated this and throughout my past experience in running content teams in terms of communicating success or tracking success of this in the short term has been what I call no one likes this term, but I like it.
It's also anyway is a content or operational sustainability. So we'll just stick with this for now on content stuff. Is the content you're creating or even the co-marketing partnerships that you're doing or the creator slash influencer partnerships you're doing? Is it sustaining other parts of your business?
So in the case of like, let's just say like a more classic content blog SEO content creation, right? Can that blog post also become something else? Can it become a series of social media posts? Should if it can't, then you're doing the wrong strategy, right?
Can a couple of blog posts be repurposed into some kind of email course, like an email drip campaign? That's one. Yeah, it requires extra work, right? But it's doing more with the content that you already have created.
If you're paying freelance writer, 700 bucks per blog post, and they write three great blog posts for you that are under a similar theme. And if you then repurpose that into an email drip campaign that you can also use as a lead magnet, that's taking that $2,100 and turning into something else that's sustainable for your business. Can that become a video? Whatever.
Other stuff. So content doing kind of powering other parts of your business. Maybe you have a more thought leadership type of blog post, like one that is about your point of view and industry that can also become a webinar or a conference session. Maybe you submit it as a speaking proposal for a different conference sustainability, right?
When I think about sustainability on the sort of paid side, one thing I would encourage people to do, and I don't know if this is applicable for this audience, but I hope so, is looking at influencer marketing a little bit differently. So I think traditionally an influencer marketing, you find an influencer, give them a bunch of money, you get a big product, you say, Hey, say this cool thing that my product, people buy it. The influencer says it on their channels, right? Social media or their podcast, whatever it is.
And then you track the conversion, right? Maybe based on like vanity URL discount codes, whatever that is, right? Seeing this as a creator marketing partnership. And so yes, you are paying to tap into their audience, but you are also paying for the content creation.
So yes, I'm sure you'll have guidelines for how this influencer or this creator should talk about your brand. Like please hit on these points. Here's our value package or mission, right? And then I think anyone who's done some sort of creator marketing knows that the best way to do it is to give the creator some of guardrails or some ingredients in their recipes, so to speak.
And then letting them run with it, right? Letting them infuse their own brand and their point of view to their audience because that's what's going to resonate with their audience. And as a result, you kind of reap the benefits or the success of that. But from that, then you're going to get some interesting angles for how to position your product, right?
Then you might say, like, huh, like I never saw this as, I don't know, this is B2B audience, right? So like I never saw our product as like the Calendly of, I don't know what the analogy was going. Sorry, but I never saw it that way. Like that's interesting.
I'm not going to put that in our Facebook ads, but that could be interesting for quick position. And we can try testing that on a landing page and some of the copy there. So using it for that, that makes your paid efforts more sustainable. Maybe I'll pause there because that's kind of a lot.
I think that was great. We are getting a lot of questions right now just about how do you prove that the strategy is working, right? We're all talking about leaning into this strategy, this tactic where, you know, we're creating content with the expectation that there will not be attributable data that is going to come from this. It is effectively going to be an uphill battle to validate that your strategy is working.
So I think, you know, the common questions that we get, you know, similar to the one that that Sydney just sent your way, Amanda is exactly that. You know, how can we prove the efficiency of what we're doing here? And so, yeah, I think when it comes to the paid side of things, it's kind of ironic. If you were creating content in a way that, again, the expectations that there's zero clicks on it, when you do get those clicks, they're that much more valuable.
You can kind of put that much more stock, much more worth into an engagement metric like that. So I don't think that, you know, we're suggesting here that you shouldn't continue monitoring these metrics. In fact, you know, they might be that much more helpful for pivoting your strategy, validating your strategy, if you are getting really good engagement on your posts on your ads. To take that a step further, one of my favorite metrics to look at for paid media is total social actions, right?
So the combination of not just the clicks, but also the shares and the comments. To me, you know, that kind of aggregated view is a great single data point to help you understand which of your ads that you're running within your, you know, your collective campaign or your ad set is the one that is generating exactly what we're talking about here. That's most important. And that's, that's engagement.
I think, you know, there's a lot of value that can come from just looking at the comments on your posts on your ads, right? Are they coming from people that you would consider an ICP fit? Are they asking, you know, further qualification questions that would either maybe spark new ideas for content, perhaps even, you know, kind of give your sales team a couple different things to think about, you know, because you're effectively almost like kind of capturing market research just by way of distributing your content to a targeted audience. So, yeah, I think that, you know, a lot of the same metrics that really anyone out there, especially, you know, those of us that were fine labs are talking about consistently, they're the same metrics that are going to apply here as well.
The main difference is, you know, that you're really just kind of leaning into this, this approach, this, this tactic where you're creating the content and trying to deliver as much value as possible in feed and you're not expecting anything in return. You're not expecting that people are going to click through your website, you know, download your content, convert on your pages at the positive, right? And you need to think of this much more in terms of the long term value that's going to come from it, even if, you know, you are being asked by your colleagues or the higher up set your company to provide some type of, you know, short term leading indicator metrics. This is absolutely much more of a long term play, but you know, I think the, maybe the qualitative insights that come from just seeing the people that are engaging with your posts and what they're saying, how they're saying it, you know, that might be where the most value can be measured in the short term.
Yeah, I agree with that. I think I'll also add that I feel like I should say more around the, you know, KPIs and stuff. So when I talk about with zero click content, how you're optimizing for the content to get seen, or you're creating, you're creating content that is so valuable value as defined by maybe novelty, maybe it's entertainment, whatever it is high, it's high value. When you are giving away that value, that's essentially optimizing for impressions.
And by that, that means it's optimizing to get seen. And what I think is sort of funny is that people think that's at odds with traditional marketing goal or with the important marketing goals, where like, people are like, how am I going to get my CEO to care about impressions? I kind of say that like, so you have to make the case that you want your content to get seen to your CEO. Like, is that how inept your CEO is that they don't understand that content that you pay for needs to get looked at by people.
So that's one, that's where I say like impressions do matter. They just, they do, right? And that's where some of the old old school like brand metrics matter, the impressions, you could also look at sentiment, right? Like if people are talking more positively about your product or company, that is, that's one that's very meaningful to PR teams.
You could look at share a voice, right? The total, what I really, really liked it, Tory said about total social actions. And those are all measurable things, right? You can look at, you can look at the number of likes, comments, new followers, the growing of your audience.
And then from there, you can, what you can also do is you can run analyses of these new followers. You can use a tool like follower wonk to understand your followers, your audience better. You can, of course, as your audience grows and your reps, your traffic grows. You can also run analyses of yourself, or you know, yourself meeting your brand on Spark Toro and find other similar accounts that you can do co-marketing with other podcasts that people who engage with their social account also listen to.
And then you can go like, oh cool, I'll pitch myself to join that podcast or I'll sponsor it. Those all open doors to those other really, can also be paid, but also really valuable long-term marketing opportunities. And the other thing I'll say is that, you know, when you're optimizing your content for impressions, so optimizing your content for people to look at it, to consume it, then it makes it likelier that will click. Right.
So the other thing is people say, like, oh, I don't know how to get my CEO to buy in on this. I also challenge that with, so does your CEO like it when you post links that get one like and that one like is from you? Like, is that what your CEO likes? Like, I'm really going to push that and be like, no one wants that.
Like, when you, when you become a social account and this is any platform that is known for, go to our blog, join our email list, join our webinar, go to our blog again. Then you're training your audience to know that they go to your, they have to manually remember to go to your social account and look at things, which nobody's going to do. Right. I don't do that for my favorite creators on social media.
I follow them and then I hope that I see them in my feet because the whole point of following them, because after that, you're kind of beholden to the algorithms that will, regardless of whether someone follows you, will still choose whether or not to serve up your content to other people. So you can like drive all the people to, you can do all these paid campaigns if you want to acquire followers on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter, but it doesn't mean that those followers are going to see all their content. So you still have to optimize your content to get seen so that the algorithm knows to serve it up to them. And then once you're able to do that, then you can add the links, right?
Every now and then you can just do, Hey, I'm an artist tomorrow. Make sure you sign up because after you sort of build up this algorithm capital, right, with all these high engagement posts, you can burn a little bit of that capital by dropping a link and just being like, Hey, can you like, join our email list, like get more cool inside, like this, join the 10, 10,000 other people who get this email every week. And then people will start seeing some of that. I might also help if I go hit on a couple of quick wins for putting links into posts.
So that was one tactic, right? Optimizing for these engagement streaks. So you're zero, click content, zero, click content, link post, right? Then you get to burn the algorithm capital.
You can also just try to create some very high engagement one off tweets or LinkedIn posts, right? Here's where I think hot takes can be useful, but I prefer the spiky point of view. This is this is a concept by West KO from Maven, the spiky point of view. So this is more than a hot take.
What is a hot take really? It's a half hash emotional thing. I mean, it's like a rant that started in your head that you didn't complete, right? Like, I hate when people are late to meeting.
That's so annoying, right? Maybe you'll tweet that, right? Maybe you won't. But that would be an example of a hot take, right?
Maybe it's not something you really feel strongly just bothered you in the moment. But what you really want is a spiky point of view, which is a defensible hot take, right? It's maybe you're not actually mad when people are late to meetings. What actually bothers you is that people are disrespectful to your time.
And it's okay sometimes people are late because sometimes life happens. They're not really mad at that, right? So maybe the actual spiky point of view is people who don't respect your time suck. Like maybe that's what I'd be willing to defend.
It's shitting when people do that to you, right? And then maybe that's your hot, your spiky point of view tweet. And then that's what people are going to engage with. People are going to be like, I hate it when people are disrespectful.
Yeah, I agree. Like, disrespectful people suck. I don't like them either. They'll retweet it.
They'll like it. It gets a little bit of traction, right? Then you can go ahead and add your link post. If you add something like, I actually talked more about this on Refine Labs Show.
Learn more about this. Sign up here and get the recording. That would be a pretty quick win, right? You get your high engagement tweet, boom, add the link after it gets some engagement.
And this applies to, I think, both social platforms, right? You could do this with like quick, like one minute videos. You could do this with stories or polls, things like that. I love that breakdown, the hot take.
I see a lot of those types of posts. I will say in the blog post that you published on about this topic, I dropped in the chat. There is a lot of good examples that you walk through of like, this is what that looks like. Here's the tweet, here's the post, here's the comment, here's the nugget.
Here's the link. Here's when you would drop that in. There's a couple questions in here of like, what does it look like? Which I think you just outlined here.
I thought we could answer a couple more questions. We're getting a lot more in the chat right now. Towards the end of the event, we'll tackle this one. It's a little earlier if it's from Jordan.
He or she, or they say, for paid ads, would you optimize towards engagement or impressions? I know you touched on that a little bit of like impressions, looking at engagements from a paid perspective. What's really interesting is we do have some data on campaign objectives when you're running ads. You would think that the website traffic objective or traffic landing page views would get the highest clicker rate in our data.
It actually doesn't. These objectives dictate how ads are going to be placed. There's a lot of nuances there, but people just assume that if I do a website traffic, I'm going to get more traffic to the website. We actually see that engagement and brand awareness type conversions and objectives get higher click-through rate in our data than other objectives.
For example, website traffic, which is very interesting because you wouldn't necessarily think that unless you ran the data. I would always encourage you to test this out. If you have this strategy and some content, we always go with engagement and reach focused bidding objectives and campaign objectives first. But then you can test this and figure out what works best with what types of content with your audience.
That's one that I would say there. Anything that you want to add from your experience running these engagement versus impressions? Following on that, the other thing I thought was interesting about some of our collective data that we take a look at across our client base and their ad performance is not just the campaign objectives, but the creative type that is being utilized. The actual content itself that's getting the most click-through rate and the one that we've seen perform the best is video.
Again, leading back to the original point here where you're trying to create content that is going to deliver the most value possible in feed. I think video is probably the most concise and impactful way to do that on social platforms. We're still seeing that those posts, those video posts are the ones that are people are clicking through the most. Although it might seem counterintuitive that this entire strategy, this entire mindset about delivering the value in feed, expecting nothing in return including clicks is in fact generating more clicks.
I think it's particularly interesting, especially for those companies out there that are kind of on the fence about something like this or just like the idea but are a little bit hesitant around what type of pushback they might see. One of the other questions that we got is, do you see this approach being done in any sales led organizations with any level of success because the pushback would very likely be huge because there's few leads coming through. My response to that would be if you're using social channels as a way to collect leads, the angst of the sales scene there is probably misdirected. If they're comfortable calling on leads that are really just a person downloading a piece of content, imagine opening up their eyes and showing them, hey, we're going to just totally ditch this strategy.
If you're really optimized for distributing our message and feed, and by way of that, you can expect that there's going to be higher volume of inbound traffic to your site, ICP specific traffic to your site, and more people that are going to be raising their hands and talking to sales. And so, yes, it's probably a little bit of a in some fashion one step back in order to take a huge leap forward. But what it really boils down to is that you're optimizing your entire strategy for the preference of your audience and for what we're all kind of talking about here, which is the buyer behavior of people on social channels. We go because we want that value, that dopamine hit that comes immediately, not from going on seeing something you like and clicking through, but rather it's much more transactional.
And so, when we see our clients really kind of give up a lot of that lead collection approach that happens, that so many business to business companies and marketers are still using today. Maybe there's a little bit of a drop off in lead volume, but there's a huge increase in lead quality that comes from optimizing for people that are going to raise their hands so that they want to talk to sales. You're going to see downstream impacts in the relatively short term period here where the leads are going to convert better, they're going to travel through the pipeline faster, one of the metrics that, again, an aggregated data point that we like to point to to just prove out the overall success of a strategy which again does try to deliver the value and feed and not ask something in return is sales velocity. Right.
So sales velocity calculated by looking at, you know, those high intent opportunity creation, the volume of those opportunities created in period, the deal size, the average deal size, the win rate, and the sales cycle, all of those things are going to increase. We've seen it happen across our entire client base when companies really lean into this approach. And so I think it's, as Sydney said, it, you know, really well before she articulated it perfectly. The first thing you have to change is the mindset, you need to get away from this, you know, thinking that it's a value exchange of I give you my content, you give me your information and then I'm going to pass you along to sales.
And instead really kind of try to think through how you're turning this into a long term relationship, continuing to make deposits deposits deposits and then, you know, perhaps you, you kind of make that that withdrawal, whether that comes by way of inviting someone to an event or, you know, like, like Amanda was saying before, you know, maybe you do offer some type of post that might get cycled a little bit because it has that external link or that hard to call to action. But if you spend enough time building up that equity, it will kind of pay itself back in the longer term. So kind of a long winded answer there. But as you can tell, something that I'm pretty passionate about because this is a conversation we have quite a bit with our client base.
We've got someone that wants to come up on live here so. Hi. So I love this. This is so fun, like hearing from just new ways of doing digital marketing.
So I am at a startup. I started here three months ago. So just hit 90 days. I love this idea of zero click content.
I guess I'm trying to figure out how do I scale this so right now I'm currently looking at patients. Facebook is our highest conversion channel because I'm using, I'll call it old school KPIs. I'm qualifying them with a survey. I guess how do you share zero click content?
How do you get it in front of your audience? Because right next year I'm looking to scale new cities. How do I find new people? When you say this is for patients, are these existing patients or people who you want to become patients of your business?
People who fit a certain criteria. They've had a stroke, any specific kind of stroke. And they're not currently patients of your business or they are patients of your business. They are not.
Okay. Yeah, it's an exciting time. It's fine. So we've got Facebook, we've got Instagram, we're doing retargeting, we've got digital display.
Facebook, I don't think it's too surprising that that's the most successful channel. We have a very expensive channel with her media that I want to pull, but it's only been two months. So I'm trying to be patient. So just trying to figure out how, because I'm getting, I've got the asteroids right.
I've got a report back to stakeholders. What's successful? And I've generated and I'm looking at a real whiteboard. 770 leads and 400 are survey qualified in the last two months.
Like those are the KPIs I'm using right now. It is, but like this whole idea of zero click content is just how do I apply this? I guess for next year. Yeah.
So I think what I would be thinking about are, I guess it's hard for me to start here because my brain goes to like, okay, a stroke patient, what are the stages of having a stroke at what point you go to the doctor? You know, like, that's kind of like where my head's going, even though I don't know. I don't think about having a stroke. So no, that's good.
But like what I would be thinking about then is maybe thinking about that breakdown of what is that journey like for a stroke patient? Like what are some other early signs of being at risk of stroke? If you've had one, what are the things you have to do right away when you get discharged in the hospital? What do you have to do?
Maybe like a month afterwards? What does ongoing or like, what is your yearly checkup look like? So I would start there thinking about what that journey actually is and then seeing what kind of content slash like content meaning like actual like blog post, right? We'll just say blog posts, whether or not there's a blog because blog post to me is just like long form content.
So blog post plan for you for something like that. Yeah. Cool. I would also think a lot about templates and tools.
I say that because templates and tools tend to be very valuable assets that you can eventually gate over time. Like if you want to use them as lead magnets, you can. I like finding out a combination of giving them away for free, like totally free where it's like click here to get your template and it's straight up a link to the blog post with a template embedded in it or something like that where they don't actually get any information to do some of that and then other versions of that that would require like an email address, maybe figuring out a sort of like medium value template and high value template. So it could be things like maybe a patient checklist for like things to ask your doctor for your next appointment or like you could even just go to the lifestyle route, right?
Like here are the physical activity thresholds that are usually reasonable for people who are recovering from a stroke could be things like a thousand steps in a day. If that makes sense for that health journey, then that's wonderful. Right. So maybe it becomes things like that where people get inherent value from, oh, I didn't know I as a recovering patient.
Like I didn't know that I had to do this. Like that's that's really valuable to me. Maybe the other thing I'm thinking about is you're talking about scaling the southern markets. Maybe then I would think about like, what, how do the patient needs differ from market to market if they do it all?
Or that's or that's maybe an issue of changing the geography of the paint side. Like it could just be that. So. Thank you.
I'll add to that, Heather. I think two things came to mind as a as Amanda was talking. So I think that when you're ideating around all these these different types of content that can be created, you know, obviously getting them created and putting them out there in the market. Certainly our point of view at Refine Labs is to not to not get them and to, you know, to give them away for free.
And over time, as you continue sharing these pieces, you know, out through social, if you're seeing some of these posts that are getting higher engagement rates than others, you can put some budget behind that and boost one of those posts. Like you don't have to go recreate it. You can boost the posts along with that, you know, that kind of social equity that comes with all of the likes and comments and all that. And actually, we've seen some some pretty interesting results as far as boosted posts having really high performance.
And so that's one way that you can begin distributing that content to a larger audience, hitting more people than those that are already following you or coming across that content that you shared. So that's one way to kind of amplify it a little bit. But the other thing that I would challenge you to think about, especially as you're planning a little bit further ahead, is, you know, looking at the content that you're generating the number of conversions that's coming from that content is a great first step. But I think you also want to do what you can to try to track that all the way to revenue.
And so are these conversions that are coming from your Facebook content, your Facebook campaigns, are they converting into revenue for your company? And if the answer is no, or some of it, that's a quick way to be able to find areas where you can free up some budget and do some more experimentation around, you know, different content distribution methods or even different channels. Well, that's probably going to be a good starting point for you is really, you know, of course, trying to find a different content that's going to be, you know, what's going to drive this entire flywheel is finding the right content that's going to resonate with people. But then it's about distributing it to a larger audience and trying to get, you know, your name and your value out there to more and more people.
And if you can do that in an ungated fashion, fantastic. If you need to have some type of gate or lead magnet on there, you know, I think so be it, you know, maybe just consider testing the two different approaches against one another and, you know, see if you can find out if one of those cohorts is converting into revenue at a better rate than others. So yeah, I think that that's probably my addition to everything that Amanda had offered you there. And we are so early in our journey.
I'm currently UHT testing our Salesforce instance that goes live next month. And I just signed a deal with Marketo for Marcan. So this all comes in line. So again, validation for I'm on the right track for that piece.
Thank you. That's awesome. That's congrats. Yeah, it's a fun exciting time.
Not too bad for 90 days. Not too bad at all. All right. So it looks like we are coming up close to the end of the hour here.
And so one thing I do want to kind of make a quick plug for here because it wouldn't be a refined labs event if we didn't mention self reported attribution at least once right I think that everyone's been waiting with us. So I'm just going to talk about adding how did you hear about us on your on your intake form on your demo request form on whatever your your primary contact sales form is on your site or even the conversion point for those those B2C listeners out there but just directly asking people those people that are raising their hands and have the highest intent to buy to talk to sales high propensity to make a purchase whatever forms you're using to capture those people just adding that simple field in there. How did you hear about this can be really telling as you're leaning into this strategy which is going to provide you with less attribution data. So you know that I think is a must with a strategy like this if you are going to be looking for any way to validate it or to kind of prove it out to you know members of the board or your C level team.
But yeah, like I said I didn't think it would be a fun time to mention that at least once. But with that I think that we're just about a time here so Amanda I want to just bring you on one more time real quick and maybe you could just you know tell people how they can find you and hear a little bit more about what you're doing and see some of their you know the experiments that you're running for Yeah, you can learn more from what I'm doing over on my Twitter at amandanat but mostly at spark Toro we also have this audience research newsletter that goes out every other week. It goes out tomorrow so if you I don't know any Google audience research newsletter spark Toro hits there and just check us out sparktorro.com we have free accounts. So if you want to try our paid tool but for free we have free accounts so you get some value out of that so check us out.
Their content is amazing. Yes. Yeah, we have no like affiliation with them at all but like I'm subscribed I read it to me went to the queue at office hours last week so definitely recommend subscribing to their content if you're. A marketer just want to learn more about the topic.
And that's actually how I got in touch with Amanda is I replied to her newsletter and so maybe that's one more takeaway for everyone here is make sure that people that reply to your your email newsletters where I expect you're going to be delivering value make sure that those replies go to a real person and not just some empty mailbox because that again is just one way to validate that your your contents resonating people like what you're saying or have questions and so yeah I think I just want more way to prove out the strategy so Amanda Sydney Todd thank you all this has been an awesome event I've got about 50 more questions myself that I want to try to figure out how to make sure maybe create some content around sounds like I need to get on Twitter as well and start experimenting with some Twitter threads here but this is a really great event so thank you all for joining today and for everyone that was here and listening thanks and hope you enjoyed it as much as we enjoyed recording. Yeah this is great and if you as soon as it be a follow up email from us two attendees. If there is we can we should zero click that you want to collaborate offline on like another insight we can add to that email so you will get value from the email about having to click. That'll be fun to do so make sure you keep an eye on I just decided you're doing a follow up email sorry we're doing a follow up email that you're here first alright.
Keep an eye on it because we're gonna have some extra bonus content there. Awesome. Alright thanks everyone.