#56: "Become a source worth citing"

SparkToro + Zero Click Marketing's Amanda Natividad tells us how to win the new "traffic-starved" Web

Amanda Natividad is very good at the internet. I mean, her media kit has a section with her viral tweets. I first met her while she was a journalist, before she talked her way into marketing and, more recently, into co-authoring Zero Click Marketing: How to Build Brands and Earn Customers on a Traffic-Starved Web — a perfect use of your professional learning budget.

LLMs are changing everything, but they’re also proving how much the marketing fundamentals matter. That’s an assertion I believe deeply, and so does Amanda.

Amanda built the B2B content program at FitBit and also spent time as a Los Angeles Times test cook. She’s also a frequent guest speaker and lecturer.

How did you get to where you are today?

I never set out to become a marketer. I thought I was going to be a journalist.

I worked in tech news for several years, then had a very classic quarter-life crisis: I went to culinary school, decided I was going to become a food writer, realized I had not actually researched that dream very well, and eventually stumbled into marketing.

My journalism background became my entry point into content marketing. I knew how to manage a CMS, how to recognize a compelling story, how to work with social media, and how to think about what an audience would actually care about. This was more than 12 years ago, when the platforms were far less sophisticated than they are today, so a lot of the work was more instinctive.

Looking back, I can see that I was already practicing what I now advocate for: audience research-led marketing. I was not obsessing over keyword research or reverse-engineering algorithms. I was trying to understand what the audience wanted, what they needed, and what would be useful enough for them to care about.

Now I just have better language for it.

What are some of the surprising things you learned in writing Zero Click Marketing?

One of the most surprising things I learned while writing Zero Click Marketing is how much of good marketing has not changed.

The platforms change. The measurement systems change. The distribution mechanics change. But the fundamentals are still the fundamentals: great products solve real, durable problems. Strong marketing understands the audience. Trust still matters. Timing still matters. Creativity still matters.

I also became more interested in what modern marketers can learn from older forms of marketing. Take billboards. A good billboard had to earn attention quickly, communicate something memorable, and influence behavior without giving people an obvious “click” to track. Marketers still had to measure whether it worked, so they looked at signals like regional lift, store sales, or performance against a benchmark.

In a zero-click world, a lot of influence happens before someone lands on your website, fills out a form, or shows up cleanly in attribution. So we have to get better at measuring lift, movement, and memory—not just clicks.

What do you think PR/comms folks should learn how to do in the age of zero click marketing, LLMs, etc?

I think this is one of the most exciting times to work in PR and communications.

Right now, a lot of the conversation around LLMs is about how to get mentioned, cited, or recommended by AI tools. But the deeper strategy is not “trick the LLM.” It’s to become a source worth citing.

That is where PR and communications people have a real advantage. They already understand credibility, reputation, messaging, narrative, proof, and third-party validation. Those things matter enormously in a zero-click world because people are forming opinions about your brand long before they ever visit your website.

So I think PR and comms folks should get very good at making their companies externally legible. Can people understand what you do? Can they find trustworthy proof? Are credible people talking about you? Are you associated with the right ideas, categories, and conversations? Are your executives and subject-matter experts saying things worth repeating?

The brands that win will not just be the brands with the best SEO strategy. They will be the brands that are consistently understood, trusted, and remembered across the places where people and machines gather information.

What do you wish journalists would ask you about this book, as a former journalist?

I almost wish journalists would ask me, “What are the hacks to win at marketing right now?” because then I could rant about why that is the wrong question.

I understand why people want hacks. Marketing feels chaotic. Platforms keep changing. Algorithms shift. AI is reshaping discovery. Everyone wants the shortcut because the work feels harder than it used to. But hacks don’t last very long. You can chase every tiny Instagram algorithm rumor or every supposed LinkedIn trick, and maybe some of it works for a few days or a few weeks. But that is not durable marketing.

Durable marketing comes from understanding the audience, understanding the problem, and creating something useful, memorable, or trustworthy enough that people actually care. That sounds less sexy than a hack, but it is the work that compounds.

The irony is that in a world obsessed with what is new, the most valuable marketing advantage may be getting really, really good at the things that do not change.