Episode
225
Platforms are evolving—keeping users engaged on their site, not directing them elsewhere. But how is this shift impacting content strategies?
Zero-click content is reshaping the digital marketing ecosystem. As platforms increasingly prioritize keeping users on their sites, marketers must adapt to these changes in both organic and paid strategies. In a recent conversation with Nathan Adams, a seasoned digital marketing expert with nearly a decade of experience at DKC, we explored the rise of zero-click content, its implications, and actionable strategies for marketers.
Nathan kicked off the discussion by offering a clear definition of zero-click content: “It’s content designed to deliver value directly on the platform where it’s hosted, without requiring users to click through to an external site.” Platforms like Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook aim to provide seamless user experiences that keep people engaged without navigating away.
A prime example is Google’s featured snippets—users often find answers to their questions without clicking a single link. Similarly, LinkedIn promotes longer-form posts that don’t include external links, favoring native content over outbound traffic.
Nathan highlighted a significant shift in how platforms reward content. He noted that about 60% of searches in 2023 were zero-click searches, meaning users found answers without visiting external websites. “This trend,” he explained, “is forcing brands to rethink their organic content strategies. You need to deliver value upfront, whether through in-feed posts, carousels, or native articles.”
For paid advertising, the dynamics are evolving as well. Platforms increasingly favor campaigns that prioritize in-platform engagement. Nathan shared, “Lead generation forms that open directly on LinkedIn or Facebook typically perform 75% to 80% better than those directing users off-site. Keeping users in-app leads to higher conversion rates.”
One of the biggest concerns with zero-click content is maintaining lead quality. Traditionally, marketers relied on their websites to present detailed information before users filled out forms. But with on-platform forms, there’s often less room for pre-conversion education.
Nathan’s recommendation? Experimentation and layered strategies. “You should try both on-platform and off-platform approaches,” he advised. “Start by building awareness with high-quality, native content that positions your brand as a trusted authority. Then, use retargeting to drive deeper engagement.”
He also emphasized the importance of leveraging credible third-party validation: “Amplifying press mentions from trusted outlets can help bridge the trust gap. If you’re featured in Bloomberg or the BBC, run awareness campaigns highlighting that coverage. It’s not just about direct conversions but building long-term brand equity.”
Nathan stressed the value of multi-touchpoint strategies: “Think of it as a journey. In the early stages, focus on informing and educating your audience. Most of your potential customers aren’t ready to buy immediately. Your goal is to be top of mind when they are.”
He recommends starting with:
Nathan’s insights underscored a few essential strategies for thriving in a zero-click world:
As zero-click content continues to gain momentum, marketers must rethink traditional funnels and embrace more holistic, platform-native strategies. Nathan Adams summed it up perfectly: “It’s not about where your content lives; it’s about how well it serves your audience where they are.”
(Transcript is AI generated, we apologize for any errors)
Ben (00:00)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Nathan. Nathan, welcome to the show.
Nathan Adams (00:05)
and great to be on.
Ben (00:06)
Love to have you here. Nathan, I'm excited. This is going to be a fun subject and I have a lot to learn. You have incredible credentials when it comes to this subject and what we're talking about. Nathan, let's catch up on who you are, what you do, what you love. And then we always ask, what do you love about content and marketing? So we'd to kind of get you know, yeah, through some of that material.
Nathan Adams (00:26)
But what don't I love about content and 12 years ago, probably dating myself, probably closer to know, I left school and I had an itch to get involved in US politics. And for about three years post-graduating, I'd done some internships for congressmen and things like that. But I worked in the political campaign space.
I worked on congressional campaigns, state legislative campaigns, and then in DC I managed a city-wide, district-wide, depending on how you look at it, campaign across all eight wards. And a lot of the things that we were doing in politics and political campaigns were trying to actually find voters based on their voter information. The best indicator of future action is previous action.
So what we were doing was we were looking at people based on what primaries they voted in, if they cared about things like unions, gun ownership, to build an overall voter profile, and then how we best turn those people out to the polls. And we used a platform in that election called Nation Builder. And after the election, Nation Builder reached out and said, we'd love to take some of the things that you were doing in that political campaign.
and expanded out to organizations, nonprofits, campaigns all over the US. And I jumped at the opportunity. So I hopped on a plane, I flew out to Los Angeles, stayed in a pretty low value in for my first few weeks in downtown LA. Would not recommend the America's best value out there, but I started basically working in smaller campaigns and started understanding how smaller campaigns
nonprofits and associations organize their own people. And we're taking these things like voter files and integrating them into emerging democracies, small campaigns that had never even considered that, areas that never had a voter file in the first place, parts of Brazil and Mexico where Google Maps isn't necessarily 100%. So we need to figure out ways to reach those voters, reach those people and have a conversation and track how that conversation went. And after about
You know, a year there I've shipped out to DC, helped them open up their DC branch. And then I joined a firm called DKC, which is where I work today for the past almost nine years. And DKC is a traditional communications firm that at the time was building an entire arm around how we actually reach people outside of just political campaigns, but on the communication side. So how do we actually make sure our clients are seeing the content?
that our PR team is actually getting out there? How do we make sure their audiences are actually seeing that? How do we amplify that content? How do we take some of the things, because we had a team largely built in political organizing, how do we take some of the strategies that we implemented in politics and turn it around to consumer packaged goods, for example, to sports ticketing? And over the past nine years, I've helped build the media buying arm and the digital marketing arm of the firm.
from first starting out with a couple hundred bucks on Facebook ads and learning the ropes to now running everything from building an affiliate marketing division, running CTV, digital out of home, SEO. We have an internal survey research division and have gotten to work with thousands now of just great organizations and learn from them consistently as you do an agency life. So that's my route here.
Ben (03:48)
I love it, I love it. Nathan, before we hopped on the podcast, you were also mentioning you have some pretty cool accolades when it comes to like your specific involvement with LinkedIn. What does that look like specifically?
Nathan Adams (03:59)
Yeah, LinkedIn's an amazing platform because LinkedIn gives you the professional data that you don't necessarily get 100 % accuracy with across other organizations. So what we get to do is we started off running LinkedIn advertising in its infancy. In the early days of LinkedIn, working with EDOs, with economic development organizations, trying to figure out ways to get people in.
neighboring states to actually build demand to say, I want to bring my business to this specific state and help them in the early stages. And they helped me become a better marketer. And over the years, continued to communicate, continued to go to their events. And they started opening this insider program. And last year I became one of their certified marketing experts, which was amazing. There's only about 10 or 12 of us in the entire United States, about 50 or so.
per class, so about 100 overall worldwide. And we'll be flying out next month to go do a little bit of a training for their third class, which will mean that that 10 will probably go to like 15 or 20. But for now, I'm in that 10 %-ish, which is quite nice. It'll be five soon, but we won't say too much about that.
Ben (05:06)
I love it. Well, Nathan, we're going to talk about a fun subject. It's super timely as well. There is this momentum around this concept of zero click content. And, you know, these ideas that platforms just don't want to relinquish users. They don't want to send them elsewhere. And we often think about its impact on, you know, this content and the marketing that we're doing.
kind of the organic reach, but it's also impacting paid advertising. So from your perspective and all of your expertise, what are you seeing with this movement and how is it impacting maybe both things, the organic and the paid advertising fronts? What are you seeing?
Nathan Adams (05:47)
Definitely. And we'll start off with a big, holistic, 30,000-foot view of zero-click content marketing. Because I think that's important, because it's a term similar to marketing that means a lot of different things. If I tell you marketing, go, OK, well, which type of marketing? When we talk about zero-click content marketing, it can be everything from search engines, not necessarily wanting to give up clicks and keeping people on their searches.
to a platform like LinkedIn, where the longer form content is actually going to perform better with the algorithm than if they have a URL and they take you off site. But overall, your big picture is it's basically creating longer form or shorter form content that is meant for on-platform consumption. So it's not necessarily, here's a URL, go click it and leave Facebook. It's how we keep people on the platform. And we're seeing it increase more and more.
In search engines in particular, about 60 % of searches as of last year are now no-click searches. People are actually going, they're Googling a question, and they're getting their answer without having to click on a different URL. And we're seeing it across the board. And in paid advertising, it becomes interesting. And I know you have a background in demand generation. The platforms are more and more incentivizing campaigns that are
lead generation versus conversion off site when we're running things like B2B marketing. So what that means is I can give you an actual form through an ad on a website. Or I can give you a form that keeps you specifically on that channel. And you can fill out that form on that channel. And then a platform like LinkedIn even allows you to view the document you wanted to download in the first place if you're running demand generation on that channel without ever having to leave the actual app or leave that website.
And what we see is incredibly stronger returns and results when you keep people on platform versus going off site to the neighborhood of 75%, 80 % more efficient, keeping people on site, keeping people within their own feed, receiving ads, receiving content, receiving specific asks in the B2B space versus sending people off site to a forum and saying, fill this out.
even optimized around conversions, does not perform well traditionally. I've seen a couple of exemptions, a couple of times it doesn't work out, but in the thousands of times we've done this, it almost always performs better when you keep them on plaque.
Ben (08:11)
that is a, an incredible summary of zero click content and the motivators. Obviously if I'm a platform and I've spent all this time and money and effort getting a user onto my actual site, I don't want to be the mechanism to just drive them somewhere else. Like it, it makes sense. Like anyone with business sense would say, yeah, I get that. I get why they want to do that. How do you ensure quality?
That's been one of the biggest things for me as I've seen in my past. When you're driving traffic to your website, there's a lot of information that the user can take in before they fill out a form versus on platform is usually less information that they fill out and less that they can consume. But how are you ensuring quality? Do you see a difference on those platforms? What are your recommendations? Like should people play around with bulls? Should they do the on platform?
What does that landscape look like now and like what should people actually focus on?
Nathan Adams (09:03)
you 100 % should experiment. Just because something has worked for me and my clients doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work for you and yours. And that's important to say because I can come to you and I can say, here's what I have seen be the most effective for me. And I guarantee you can find a marketer that has the exact opposite experience that I have because they've worked on entirely different verticals of clients. I've worked on many, but there's gonna be, you know,
certain verticals within the startup space that honestly I've never touched. But the thing that we've seen work really well is you can't specifically start with the direct ask. You can't expect people to go to your website, view all of your content. You need to have it there. You need people to know. You need the social proof that says you are a legitimate organization if you are not a household name. And you can do that through a couple of different ways. One of the best ways we've seen is through amplification of positive press.
So we actually start with name brand household PR outlets. And when they publish stories, it's one of the benefits of being at a PR firm is we have the integration directly with the actual PR. But when we get those stories, we can put a targeted paid ad spend behind them and we run awareness based campaigns. Now, oftentimes in those awareness based campaigns, they are going to link off site. However, what your key is, going to be to make sure your number one thing that you want people to remember.
Hey, we are in Bloomberg, we are on the BBC. We want people to know the first or second sentence at the very least of that takeaway. So we're actually taking a little bit of the brand and we're taking the key takeaway of the article. We're amplifying that content to our audiences and then we're following up. And oftentimes marketers, talk of funnels of engagement. And my favorite is the journey. It's a...
customer or consumer journey. That's how I view it. And in the early stages, you don't skip automatically to the direct ask. You need to inform. You need to build awareness. You need to help the audience grow and understand that, 90 % to 95 % of the people that you're trying to communicate with are not necessarily in market at that given time. But you need to be top of mind when they are. And you're going to actually help them grow. You're going to educate them.
You're going to make sure that they are aware that you are the person to reach out to or your company is the company to reach out to when they need that specific item or when they need to communicate about a potential sales need. So it's not just a communication of direct outreach, give me your contact information, don't worry about anything else, here's a white paper and we're gonna call you the end. You need to grow, you need to have executives on your leadership team in front of them saying, look at all this great content.
It's a 360 campaign. It's why you have mixed media approaches in these types of organizations.
Ben (11:50)
I love it. So I love how you talked about at the very beginning, you're going to do awareness. You're going to try to get them to associate your name with something bigger, reputable, or a legitimate business, or someone that you should respect and trust. How do you moving further in that journey or further down the funnel? What are the different types of initiatives that we should start to focus on when it comes to paid advertising?
to help them at those different stages. And especially with this concept of how do we keep them on the platform to adhere to the zero click, you know, kind of content and movement as well.
Nathan Adams (12:27)
It's a great question. Each different stage is going to have different forms of targeting. It's going to have different forms of content. One of my favorite examples of this is we do a lot of work with sporting and convention events around the United States. And oftentimes when we do these types of campaigns, we'll have ads that are very specifically, hey, you've left something in your cart. You have an abandoned cart campaign. Now, if I give you an abandoned cart campaign,
and that's going to Betty in Minneapolis for an event in New York City, your odds of actually having a positive return on your outspend or any kind of ROI are zero. They're probably .001, depending on your event. So you need to align your overall strategy with the audiences you're communicating with. And that can be hard these days. That can be hard when platforms like Meta shifted over towards advantage plus targeting.
that give you far less control over the people who are viewing your ads unless you switch over to your original sets. And then you tend to have not as strong results, varying data, but not necessarily strong. So what we recommend doing is starting with broad introductory content when you're talking about the early stages of your journey. So who are you? Why should people care about you? Why are you the actual expert in this field? What are some positive pieces of media?
that people can consume to understand, hey, this is an organization that is again, a legitimate organization. People are talking about them, press or communicating and saying, this is something that you should be aware of. Here's a great story about their founders. And then once people are engaging with that content, once they're actually consuming that content, you don't turn that off. It's not one step and then a second step and then a third step. And I understand this is a podcast and I'm speaking with my hand, so I apologize there. But what this is, is you start
expanding and growing your ad campaign to new steps. So your first step is awareness. You actually have to have an initial consideration before you get into an evaluation. And in that initial consideration, you say, broad audience, find out who's engaging, find out who's viewing your content, find out if you're looking at B2B or possibly even ABM, what companies are engaging with your content, what are they actually consuming, are they watching your videos, are they clicking a like on your posts?
And then we start getting into the evaluation phase before we get closer to the actual moment of decision. And that's where we start to say, OK, this is where we need a very direct ask, again, that ideally keeps you on platform. Now, you want to experiment, but you don't want that ask to take you off platform or keep you or the more direct ask if those people aren't necessarily already aware of you. You're going to wind up shooting yourself in the foot. And then the key thing here.
that most organizations I work with largely overlook is what happens once the individuals have actually completed their purchase. What happens once they've made the decision. Because oftentimes us as marketers, we look at the ROI and we go, look at the ROI. There's nothing after the ROI. We're done. Our job is finished, finito. And in reality, there is an post purchase moment and audience you need to continue communicating with.
And then your content shifts. And your content shifts in a really interesting way because you're no longer selling them. You're telling them about ways that your organization is on the cutting edge, about new product offerings, about potential upsells for folks that are already using you, about case studies, about really well-known organizations or companies or great stories that have really maximized your product. And then you have basically three different pieces of content that are all forms of content.
throughout your entire journey as a consumer.
Ben (16:06)
I love it. I think it's just a great call out for anyone listening to this episode. Zero Click is a movement that's really hitting hard on a lot of platforms. And it's not just your organic stuff. It is your paid advertising. There are opportunities to keep your paid audience on the platform and they will reward you for that. And there's some great opportunities to do that. I love it.
Nathan, I'm sure there are plenty of people that have questions and would love to reach out and talk to you. How and where can they find you online?
Nathan Adams (16:34)
Not a problem. You know, my email is nathan underscore adams at dkcnews.com. My LinkedIn is forward slash nathanadams815. People think that I, you know, there's a lot of Nathan Adamses out there. And in reality, I'm just a big fan of the television show Lost and Flight 815 was a fairly big moment when I was a young, young, man.
those are probably the two best ways professionally. Again, Nathan Adams, 815 on LinkedIn. If you have any questions, always happy to talk.
Ben (17:05)
Love it. And then again, Nathan, thank you so much for your time and insights today. Really appreciate it.
Nathan Adams (17:10)
Ben, thank you for yours. Really appreciate
