Don't Click Me

The Plaster and Spit Paste Future of the Zero-Click Web (and how to break free)

FWD Edition 103

FWD is our newsletter to highlight changes in the landscape. Here, we're attempting to map the near future of making trust make growth. Today we zoom into an incredibly familiar but misunderstood activity that affects every venture:

The click.

For years, smart CEOs and founders have asked their marketing teams to track down the clicks so we can get other clicks so that those clicks can turn into different clicks, and somehow, the right collection of clicks turns into clients.

When you see it spelled out, you realize how futile it all is. "Chasing clicks" has become a cliche, and yet I see ventures return to it again and again because they simply don't know what else to do. Sadly, most marketers you've ever hired wired their brains to the click factory, and now comes the hardest detox they'll ever face professionally: the unwiring.

In a stunning turn of events, the internet's overlords want to break your addiction to the click. Not for any beneficial reason. They just want you to never leave google.com or facebook.com or tiktok.com or whatever. The digital world, once a series of gateways across a planet's worth of information, is now a few behemoth gated advertising traps run by very powerful pseudo-monopolies. Advertising traps now guarded by generative AI mazes putting even more bot-created layers between your customers and you.

Not exactly the world you want to stake your growth future on. In this week's FWD we dissect the Zero Click world. You'll see firsthand how the "marketing plan" you've likely been sold is not the Fabergé egg, but rather a decoupage craft project of old newspapers and paste. At the end, I lay out the five questions you should be asking your marketing team (or yourself, about your marketing assumptions) today, helping you to re-orient and re-center on what actually will produce long-term trust-made growth... rather than paste one more tactic on another on another:

Seriously to walled gardens

A "walled garden" is the opposite of the promised "Open Web." In the Open Web, everything connects to everything else with free movement from website to website, getting the information, connection, and actions you need wherever you need it, all through the magic of a click.

As I've written about, the Open Web is in the rearview mirror. In its place, thanks to the heavy-handed strategy of the web's biggest players, is the walled garden. Facebook, the Google homepage, TikTok's FYP, the LinkedIn feed, are all walled gardens: web platforms designed to keep you on site, not send you somewhere else. They're built for you to not click. They are closing the web and with the AI overlay, probably permanently.

More than 75% of Google searches end without a click, and this was before Google's AI overlay.

LinkedIn and Facebook's algorithms notoriously deprecate posts with links. Video-first platforms like TikTok and Instagram don't even have links. And still we are posting links to our blogs on social media platforms, inviting people with the tantalizing "click through to read more!"

The web is no longer built to connect; it's built to retain, leveraging even more power to the behemoths in any industry. Once the walled gardens have your eyeballs, they will do everything they can to keep you there and send you as much advertised content as you can stand. "Monetizing attention," it's called.

The walled gardens nearly killed the media business and the news business in the last 10 years. And they're coming for your industry next.

No to tracking

With massive shifts in privacy settings, the deprecation of cookies (tiny bits of code that you used to use to track people's behavior around the web), and the movement of community groups into the encrypted platforms like Discord and Slack, the web fantasy of high volume leadgen is all-but over.

Your agency or marketing team is probably spending a lot of time telling you how this ad or this webpage or this social media platform is directly responsible for XYZ leads. What they aren't telling you is how much information they're missing, how those open rates on that email are probably wrong due to Apple's privacy settings. They're isolating analytics like last-touch clicks and platform-specific costs that not only skew the outcomes but arguably incentivize you to chase good money after bad, simply because someone can manufacture a "results" number with a decimal point in it.

Tracking individual actors across the web and then incentivizing to move further and further down the sales funnel was the hallmark of the Golden Age™️ of digital marketing. Today, that tracking and its accompanying metrics are full of assumptions and creative algebra, forcing marketers to prioritizing "doing marketing" over "building the business"... a trade that doesn't have to be made.

Maybe more is less

The fantasy of the Open Web encouraged companies and their marketers to be in as many places as possible. Facebook page? Yes! TikTok videos? Sure! LinkedIn newsletter? Absolutely! Oh yeah, and a constant stream of content on the website to game Google's algorithm (which, as we've said, doesn't actually send traffic anymore except to the largest brands and sites).

So, digital marketing became a maximalist game. More is more is more is more. More ads. More landing pages. More links. More social posts. More videos. More platforms. More martech. More hacks. Which means more money for your agency, more marketing staff, more activity, which supposedly means more attention, which supposedly means more opportunity, which supposedly means more revenue. which supposedly means more attention, which supposedly means more opportunity which supposedly makes us more money.

All of those supposedly's are failed assumptions. In the new era, your growth tactics, particularly on the web should be specific and targeted, across fewer platforms and with near zero expectation that you are going successfully route people from the platform to your website.

That website you built to collect all the eyeballs that you gathered elsewhere? It probably isn't working, and it's only going to get worse.

The solution? Do as little "marketing" as necessary to grow your business.

Yes to better questions

Stop asking, "how do we get more/better leads?"

"Marketing" as a discipline has been watered down to a collection of competing tactics, each dependent on the now-gone click-culture of the web circa 2017. And businesses have built their growth motions on the assumptions of these tactics. As they've become more and more unreliable, marketing as a growth discipline is sidelined (many orgs opting out of it altogether). The sad side effect? We've undermined the creative thinking required to break through the noise, leaving brands without a voice in the increasing cacophony of attention competition.

Lead-chasing through the old internet click maze is the greatest negative transfer of value from mid-market businesses to Silicon Valley ever conceived. It is a virus keeping businesses from $10M to $200M in the thralls of a long-lost fantasy.

Your organization needs to be on a 3-year plan to rethink and reimagine its assumptions about growth and the role "marketing" plays. Like any good thinking, it starts with better questions.

1. The Inspiration Question: What is the most important decision our clients need to make before they hire us?
2. The Narrative Question: What is the one thing that our clients need to believe about us (it can't be "we're trustworthy") for them to become top 10% clients?
3. The Breakage Question: Where on the client journey are we undermining the promise we make all in the name of "closing more business"?
4. The Delusion Question: What do we believe about our own hype (we're special because...) that simply isn't true?
5. The Distraction Question: Where have we replaced building trust with so-called "marketing" or "sales" activity?

At CultureCraft, we stand in the gap between growth and marketing leaders and executives and founders, breaking the confusion, and unearthing the answers to better questions.

If you allow me to ask you good questions, I guarantee it will be the best hour of your week. (At least that's what the folks I met with last week said... 😊)