Amanda Natividad is a marketer, writer, and Chief Evangelist at the audience research startup SparkToro. She also helped coin the term “zero click marketing,” and runs the Zero Click Marketing podcast and consultancy.
She co-wrote a book by the same name with SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin. Zero Click Marketing: How to Build Brands and Earn Customers on a Traffic-Starved Web is out this fall.
This is an abridged version of our conversation. Listen to the full episode right here, or find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
To start, who are you, and what do you do?
I don’t know anymore! I’ve been a marketer now for about fifteen years, mostly in regular in-house corporate marketing. I did that at a snack company called NatureBox, and then at Fitbit, where I was on the B2B team and helped grow their B2B marketing function.
In the last six years or so, there’s a small chance you might know me from the internet, where I’ve focused on building a personal brand. I first grew my audience on Twitter, started blogging more, and now I’m mostly on LinkedIn. I say that because it led me to my dream job.
I’m now at SparkToro, where we make audience research software. We help marketers and entrepreneurs find where their audience is actually hanging out online: which social networks they use, which YouTube channels they subscribe to, the keywords they search, even the topics they prompt in AI. And in my work there, I ended up coining this phrase, “zero click content,” and then “zero click marketing,” which is now the name of my forthcoming book. It’s about how you win without the click.
What was your path to your dream job?
It’s funny, because when I think about it in hindsight, it’s almost unbelievable to me. My original background was in journalism. I did the tech news thing for a little while, more of an editor behind the scenes. And I sort of stumbled into marketing, because I originally tried to pivot into food writing.
I went to culinary school. I worked at the LA Times test kitchen. I was going to be a food writer one day. I didn’t do any research into that, by the way. That’s my bad. I didn’t know there are like five food writing jobs in the country, and they were all taken. So I figured I should have a backup plan, and that ended up being content marketing and social media marketing. This was around 2011, 2012, a very different time for blogging, SEO, and social. Things were simpler. You posted something and people would mostly see it.
I was never trained in marketing. So when I did content marketing, I wasn’t thinking through the lens of a keyword research strategy. I was thinking: who’s going to care about this, and why? That was just how I saw the world.
By the time I got to Fitbit, on the B2B side, we had a unique challenge. Awareness wasn’t the issue. People knew what Fitbit was. Education was. So I wasn’t thinking, “We’re marketing to HR directors and heads of benefits, let’s rank for corporate wellness.” Because if you’re an HR director, you’re not searching “what is corporate wellness.” You know what it is — that’s why you’re an HR director. We had to create content people actually want, that answers pain points they’ve been trying to solve, or pain points they didn’t even know they had. That’s not a keyword research problem. That’s an audience research problem.
So when SparkToro came along, I thought, wait, this is new? I assumed software like this existed. I didn’t understand how people did their marketing if not through audience research. So I told myself, I have to work here.
When did you join SparkToro, and how did that happen?
Almost a year after they started, in 2021. They weren’t hiring. But I ended up going to lunch with Rand Fishkin, the co-founder and CEO, because we’d become friends on Twitter, back when it was still Twitter. He said, “I’m going to be in your hometown, do you want to grab lunch?” And I said yes, I’m not busy, then canceled all my plans.
We had a lovely time. By the end, I decided to shoot my shot and pitch him on my dream job. I said, here are the things I think you need, here are the things I’m good at, and do you think there’s a spot for me? And he said, I don’t know. Let me talk to my co-founder.
What did you bring to them early on, and what was working to connect with more customers?
A lot of it was education about the category itself. Audience research was a thing I’d always done, but I didn’t have a name for it. I thought, isn’t that just marketing? So understanding it as audience research, we could say, this is what this is, and now we need to get people on board with a thing they might already be doing.
A lot of what we did at first was continuing to publish content, and then starting our webinar series, SparkToro office hours. That’s performed really well. We can get over a thousand registrants each time. We present on some aspect of marketing strategy, and of course how SparkToro can make that better.
What are some of the ways you deliberately don’t market SparkToro?
It’s still three of us at SparkToro. We hire agencies and consultants when we need to. But what we don’t do is any kind of paid marketing at all. We never have.
Why not?
A big part of it is that we have an unfair advantage in Rand as our founder, with a built-in audience. Our email list is more than 50,000 people, and that’s purely organic, all people who came in through one of our free tools or to read our newsletter. We’re also an untraditional company. We raised an untraditional round, and we’re structured as an LLC where we pay our investors dividends. They’ve already made money on investing in SparkToro. So a lot of it comes down to: let’s be efficient with our time and money, and make smart bets.
If we took $10,000 and spent it on a paid channel, could we get customers? Yes. But could we get so many that it easily justifies the spend? I don’t know. And that’s a very confident I don’t know. If you look at mature companies with much bigger budgets, their return on ad spend is often something like 1.1 or 1.2 — just over break even. In which case, wouldn’t you have gotten those customers anyway?
Given how you’re structured, how do you see growth differently?
Our churn is relatively high, and that’s somewhat by design. Our plans start at around $50 a month, which is pretty cost-efficient if you’re looking for data. And we inherently believe that if you’re a marketer working on a new project and you need to research an audience, you should be able to pay $50, get what you needed, and cancel. That’s a fair and valid transaction.
So we have a lot of people who say, “Love your tool, I’m done with my project, I’ll come back in the fall.” That’s the spirit of how things should be. You shouldn’t be locked into something you have to pay for all the time. Granted, it’s now on us to keep innovating and give people reasons to come back. But that’s our job.
You’ve also been building your own personal brand, in a really loud space, alongside SparkToro. How have you managed that?
It comes from having strong values and a mission, and a differentiated point of view. If you tell yourself, “I want to be a thought leader known for marketing, I want to be known as the best marketer.” That’s very broad. If your lane is everything, you’re missing out on a lot. But my lane is organic marketing. That’s inclusive of content, PR, sometimes events, and social. That’s my sweet spot.
The way I go about it, I try to focus on what I can do that’s different, that’s uniquely me, that I have the experience and interest in talking about. And that already disqualifies me from a lot of things. A couple years ago, everyone was writing about why Apple or Nike does the best marketing. They’re great brands. But no one cares what I think about Nike’s marketing, and Nike doesn’t care either. I didn’t work on those teams, so I don’t know how it actually worked. I have no interest in playing armchair expert for something I have no proof of.
Having worked in-house, people would be surprised how often even the right decisions get made accidentally. People say a brand has a masterclass in content because of all these keywords and webinars. And I happen to know someone who worked at one brand like that, and they said, that’s not how we did it. We didn’t know what we were doing, so we just thought we were supposed to make everything. So we did.
How have you been marketing the book and the whole zero click marketing idea?
I’ve been talking about zero click marketing for about four years now. Rand and I co-wrote the book together over the past year and a half to two years. Toward the end of last year, we were so close to finishing the manuscript, and I was already thinking, okay, 2026 is the year of zero click.
So a few months ago, I launched my own podcast, the Zero Click Marketing Podcast. People with books often have podcasts because it makes sense as an ecosystem. I wanted to talk more about zero click marketing in a way I got to own and control, and I wanted to start building a distribution arm, a media footprint so we can better market the book.
We launched pre-orders a few weeks ago, and the book comes out in the fall. Right now you can pre-order directly through our publisher, and you get pre-order bonuses: a seat at a special webinar series Rand and I are running, SparkToro credit, a discount on Alertmouse. Closer to launch, we’ll go live on Amazon and other retailers. We’re creating these different things that feed into each other and give people reasons to come back and get value. And it’s still in line with our core values: making things accessible and reasonable, and making sure people get a lot of value.
You’ve got a lot going on. What does a normal week actually look like for you?
My week is very varied. This week, Monday was a heavy production and planning day. I wrote a lot, shot a couple of videos, did a podcast interview. Yesterday I didn’t do a whole lot; I had to prepare for a presentation, so I worked on a deck all day.
So some days I do a ton of volume, and other days it’s depth over volume. And then sometimes on Fridays, because I’m so tired from earlier in the week, I end up making sourdough bread, making a cocktail at 4 p.m., and hanging out playing Pokémon with my kid.
What are the other ways you disconnect from work?
Honestly, making bread has been more therapeutic than I ever would have thought. It started because I bought a ridiculous-looking butterbell. It’s a little porcelain thing, and mine looks like a mushroom. You store butter in it with a water seal, so you have soft, spreadable butter on the counter all the time.
A girlfriend saw it and said, well, now you need to start baking bread. Don’t worry, I’m going to dehydrate my starter and ship it to you. So she dehydrated her three-year-old starter and mailed it to me from Florida. When I got it, I thought, my gosh, she went through all this trouble. I have to make bread now.
So I revived the starter. At first I didn’t want to, but I actually love it. We always have fresh bread. And what’s so cathartic is the tactile feedback of squishing dough in your hands.
I’ve already called three of my neighbors and said, “Hey, do you want some bread?” And they’re like, “What? Why?” And I say, “Check your porch, I left it there.”
How do you define success, personally and professionally?
There are ways in which I dream so small. Success to me looks like having enough money to pay all my bills and send my kids to the extracurriculars they want to do, like the ninja class my older kid wants. I want to be able to pay for that and not blink an eye. I want to buy whatever groceries I want, get the beautiful grass-fed cut of steak and cook it at home. And I want to feel in control of my schedule and my time. So I want to be comfortable, eat well, and own my time. That’s really what it comes down to.
For the business, it’s: are things growing, are customers happy, are we a healthy business? And a healthy business doesn’t just mean raw growth. It’s also whether the people we get are getting value out of what we do. The people who are staying — are they staying because they’re happy, or because they forgot to cancel? Those are the things I really care about.
Listen to the full conversation with Amanda wherever you get your podcasts.
Amanda’s Website: amandanat.com
Pre-order the book: zeroclickmarketing.co/book
Amanda’s LinkedIn: Amanda’s LinkedIn