Update, October 2026: I wrote this in May, before there was anything to measure. What happened next is at the end of the post. The numbers are in the Clicks & Swagger case study.
I ran a keyword research on Semrush for "marketing music." The results came back essentially empty. No meaningful search volume. No established category. No competitors to benchmark against.
Most marketers would stop there and call it a bad idea.
I kept going, and here's why that was the right call, and also the harder one.
The project
Clicks & Swagger is an AI-generated music project that turns digital marketing pain points into genre-diverse songs. Bounce rates. Vanity metrics. GDPR chaos. Algorithm changes. Things every marketer has felt deeply and complained about endlessly, but never heard in a song.
I built it because I wanted to see if a niche creative concept could find an audience without a built-in market. The constraint was intentional: $300/year, a bi-weekly release cadence through DistroKid, one LinkedIn post per release. Minimum viable distribution.
It's also a live experiment in content strategy. And like most honest experiments, it's already producing results I didn't expect.
The brand category is uncontested, which means almost no one types it into Google, but the pain points the songs are built on have real, rankable search demand.
What the Semrush data actually told me
The category keywords came back empty. "Marketing parody song": no measured search volume. "Funny marketing song": same. "Marketing music": effectively zero.
But the adjacent keywords told a different story.
The "attribution" family alone ("attribution definition," "attribution meaning," "what is attribution," "define attribution") adds up to over 30,000 searches per month combined, with keyword difficulty low enough that a site with Authority Score 2 can realistically compete. "Marketing humor" sits at 70 searches/month with a KDI of 31. "Marketing jokes" at 320/month. "Marketing memes" at 880/month.
None of those people are searching for a song. But they're searching for exactly the territory Clicks & Swagger lives in.
That's the actual insight: the strategy stops being "rank for what we are" and becomes "rank for what our audience is already looking for, and let the format surprise them."
Concretely: a glossary page built around the attribution keyword cluster. A blog post targeting "marketing humor" as the primary term, with memes, jokes, and songs as natural H2 sections. Internal links from song pages to glossary terms and back. Not overnight, but compounding, which is the only kind of growth worth building at $300/year.
The real distribution channel
YouTube is the primary bet. Search-driven behavior, compounding over time, and marketers actively looking for content on the exact topics I'm writing songs about.
LinkedIn is the warm channel. My existing network is marketers. One post per release isn't scaling to a new audience, but it's keeping the project visible to people who already trust my judgment professionally. Some of them will share it. A few already have.
TikTok was on the list briefly. I crossed it off. The organic creator adoption model that makes TikTok work doesn't fit a niche brand with no existing following. It would require a volume of content and energy I'm not willing to spend on a project at this stage.
The honest summary: I'm building a catalog and waiting for the compounding to kick in. That's a slow strategy, and I know it.
Why I'm documenting this now, before there are results
Because the strategy is the interesting part.
By the time I have streams and YouTube views worth citing, the decisions will look obvious in hindsight. The interesting moment is now: when the keyword data says the category doesn't exist, the distribution is minimal, and the thesis is still unproven.
If this works, the case study is: we built an audience in a category with no search demand by targeting adjacent pain points and letting the format do the surprising. If it doesn't, the lesson is still worth publishing.
Either way, I'd rather document it honestly as it happens than reconstruct it cleanly once I know how it ends.
What this has to do with client work
Every B2B brand I've worked with has faced a version of this problem. A product or service that solves a real problem, in a category people don't know to search for yet. The instinct is usually to wait until the market catches up, or to spend money on ads to force awareness.
The third option, which is what I'm testing with Clicks & Swagger, is to build content at the intersection of what you do and what your audience is already searching for, and let the format make you memorable.
It's cheaper, slower, and harder to explain to a CFO. It also compounds.
What happened next (October 2026)
The pages got built
Both content bets from the plan are live. The marketing humor post went up in May, with memes, jokes and parody songs as its sections and links into the song catalog. The glossary now covers 15 marketing terms, most of them tied to the songs that mention them, plus an attribution entry built on the keyword family that started all this.
The cadence got faster, not slower
The plan said one release every two weeks. By 29 September, 37 songs were out on all major streaming platforms, released between 13 February and 27 September 2026. Now there's a new song every week, plus community-voted songs on the 14th and 28th of each month, picked from the vote leaderboard.
The channels didn't go to plan
YouTube needs Shorts. It was supposed to be the primary bet, and it hasn't paid off yet: without Shorts, song uploads don't get found, and doing Shorts properly takes dedication and time. The channel is still running, and it has been a good place to learn what video actually demands.
LinkedIn is the one moving. The "warm channel" has grown to 25 followers and counting. Small, but it's growing, and it might yet be the channel that carries the project.
TikTok, which I crossed off in May, got a try later. It hasn't done much, which is roughly what I expected for a niche brand with no existing following.
Search started to work, slowly
The quiet win came from the boring part. After a round of SEO fixes and cleanup on the site, small but real traffic started arriving from Google and Bing. Small is the honest word, but it's the compounding I was betting on in May, showing up for the first time.
What I'd take into client work
The channel I called the primary bet hasn't carried the project yet. The warm channel and the unglamorous work of making the site readable to search engines are what moved first. Plans like this are worth testing, not defending. The full numbers are in the Clicks & Swagger case study.
Clicks & Swagger releases a new song every week, plus community-voted songs on the 14th and 28th of each month, on all major streaming platforms. You can follow along at clicksandswagger.com.