I was at a meeting the other day when a marketing manager kept talking about “zero point marketing”. I’d never heard this term before so, intrigued, I Googled it. I couldn’t find any reference to it on Google. It was a bit like the old days when you used to get a “Googlewhack”, where there was just one result, and often a weak one at that.
I said to the marketing manager “You’ve just made that up!” to which an attending managing director said “I’ve heard of it.”
Bemused and amused, the meeting continued and the term was mentioned again and again.
What is zero point marketing?
I don’t know.
When I performed a search for “zero point marketing” in Google it came up with no definitive answers:
The top five organic results include no ads above them, so nobody is bidding to be found for the subject.
The term “zero point marketing” itself is not in the top three results; the top two have “zero point selling” and the third organic result doesn’t even have the keywords in any order, Google has found a result that is a combination of “zero point” and “marketing” but there is no three-word string.
Organic results four and five show the phrase but it is the name of a business in Las Vegas, not a framework or concept in marketing. There are results for “zero point selling” which is selling not marketing. There is a difference. It’s good when sales and marketing teams work closely together and even integrate, but that still doesn’t explain why there are no results for the concept of “zero point marketing”. Even the video result has “zero point selling” yet again, a term coined by the same business that also has organic positions one and two.
Just as a point of reference, if you Google the marketing framework “Porter’s five forces” you get very clear results, which is exactly what you’d expect for a methodology mentioned in a marketing meeting.
The Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for this query shows scholarly articles, a popular business thinking website at the top of the organic results, a Wikipedia entry and both the “People also search for” and “People also ask” search features.
So, maybe if I wrap that original query in double quotes to get an exact match, maybe that will get the definitive results I need in order to read about and learn about the previously unheard of zero point marketing model?
Well this is frustrating, I want to know all about this marketing concept that both a marketing manager and a managing director have both allegedly heard heard about. Searching specifically for “zero point marketing” is still not yielding great results;
We are still not seeing a marketing model, a marketing framework, a definition; there is no tangible search result for “zero point marketing”.
I still say it’s a made-up term. I wonder what the Google results will show once this article is published, crawled and indexed?
Update: Friday 2nd July 2021
I was concerned that my URL submission to Google had resulted in an immediate and successful crawl queue notification – a message saying “failure to index” was shown. It was a shame to write about all this, for the copy not to appear in the Google SERPs or for the pages to be seen and read if ever someone stumbled across them.
But then 36 hours later, I was curious and Googled the term again… et voila!
And just to see the same search in quote marks for an exact match…
The questions need to be asked:
- If there is such a thing as zero point marketing, then where were the webpages in the Google results? Why were they not indexed?
- If this marketing framework or concept really does exist then how and why am I able to rank on the first page of Google in under 36 hours?
- If ZPM has any merit then how come a blog post querying the existentialism of such an entity can rank not just in the top 10 but at number one for an exact match query?
I think this proves that ZPM existed in the minds and mouths of a select few and now that it has been committed to text I’m starting to take ownership of it.
Which is funny really because I still don’t know what zero point marketing actually is!
FAQs
What is Zero Point Marketing?
Nobody knows.
Where Can I Find Out More About Zero Point Marketing?
I don’t know – this page you’re reading here?
Why Don’t You Make Up an Answer to the Question What Is Zero Point Marketing?
Zero Point Marketing is a fascinating concept, because that’s all it is – a woolly concept and a previously undocumented one at that.