Best practices can help you avoid obvious mistakes — but they can also make your marketing forgettable. In this episode, I explain why the real problem isn’t best practices themselves, but using them without personalization, taste, or audience insight. Drawing on my experience at Fitbit, I’ll show you how audience research leads to stronger content, smarter channel choices, and more compelling marketing — plus a few practical ways to get started without spending much money or time. This episode is an expansion of my blog post, “Best Practices Are Meaningless Without Audience Research.”

Timestamps:

00:00 How best practices turn into beige marketing

01:27 The antidote: audience research

02:01 The Fitbit example and the real B2B challenge

03:43 Good marketers have always done some version of this

05:08 More examples: marketers, skincare, and sports betting

06:36 How to start doing audience research

07:40 How to spot patterns faster

09:38 Best practices only tell you the format

10:05 How audience research improves taste

11:02 Best practices get you on the field. Audience research helps you win.

You can do audience research with all kinds of tools and networks like Google Trends, Exploding Topics, Reddit, and of course, my launch sponsor, SparkToro. You can create an always-free account and get 5 reports per month on sparktoro.com.

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com

Before someone clicks your website, they may already have formed an opinion about your brand from the public record — snippets, Reddit threads, reviews, and AI answers. So today, I’m sharing a 7-step playbook for shaping your brand’s public record. I’ll help you audit what’s visible, identify weak claims versus strong facts, publish more credible proof, make that proof easier to retrieve and cite, and track whether the public story around your brand is getting stronger over time. It’s a practical episode about reputation, visibility, and what marketers can still influence in a world of fragmented discovery.

This episode pairs nicely with the previous week’s “Why Better Attribution Won’t Fix Your Measurement Problem.” You might want to check that one out after this one. :)

Timestamps:

00:00 Why your brand’s public record matters

02:00 The 7-step playbook

02:35 Audit the story the internet is already telling about you

04:00 Treat third-party services as an extension of your brand

05:25 Separate weak claims from strong facts

07:22 Make your content easy to retrieve, cite, and summarize

09:01 Measure whether your public record is getting stronger

Resources:

• Wil Reynolds’s “GEO Experiment: How AI highlighted the 1 bad review we got in 24 years”
• Ross Simmonds’s “Reddit’s Impact on B2B Search” study
• Search Engine Land’s “Why your content doesn’t appear in AI Overviews”
• Alertmouse for brand monitoring
• SparkToro for audience research

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com

A lot of marketers say they want better measurement. Usually, what they really want is cleaner attribution.

In this episode, I argue that those are two different jobs. Attribution tends to reward the channel that captured demand once the buyer was already in motion. SparkToro's latest research proves that influence happens everywhere. So what we really need is better measurement — to help us understand lift: are more people searching for you, remembering you, mentioning you, and showing up ready to buy? If you confuse the two, you’ll keep overvaluing what’s easiest to credit and underestimating what actually drives demand.

Timestamps:

00:00 The real problem: buyers are influenced before the click

01:41 Attribution vs. measurement: two different jobs

04:33 Stop giving the wrong channels all the credit...

05:10 ...because influence happens everywhere!

08:05 Why measurement needs to get broader and simpler

09:30 Why we (accidentally?) end up starving our demand creation channels

10:47 Measurement needs to grow up.

11:24 Next week: influencing the public record

Learn more: zeroclickmarketing.co

Connect with Amanda Natividad (@amandanat): LinkedIn | Substack | Instagram | Threads

This episode was produced in partnership with Share Your Genius
www.shareyourgenius.com