Nowadays, online retailers tend to generate more revenue than businesses having just a physical presence. Why? The unlimited storage space of online stores counts for something, and the recommendation feature that’s present in various online stores helps in driving lots of sales.
If you’re quite observant, you’d agree that products like books, music, and video benefit a great deal more from this approach – and even though a small fraction of these products are sold, the cumulative sales that come from selling to a large market is overwhelming – and that pretty much defines long tail marketing.
Google and eBay show where long tail marketing is at play. These platforms generate significant revenue by dealing with lots of customers.
Think of it this way…
The number of people who walk into a brick-and-mortar shop to purchase a niche product like a book on how to raise Caucasian dogs will be far lesser than the number of eyeballs that visit Amazon for the same niche product.
In this guide, you’d discover what long tail marketing is, and how to use the strategy for your online business.
But first, what is long tail marketing?
Long tail marketing involves targeting massive niche markets with your product or service offering. As a business owner who competes with other industry leaders, long tail marketing will help you cut through the fierce competition in the marketplace. The idea is to direct your marketing energy to multiple niche markets with less demand.
Yes, that sounds counter-intuitive. After all, each market with low demand is not juicy. However, the cumulative demand from these low-demand marketplaces is worth considering. For instance, if you’ve been on Amazon, and have noticed recommended products, then that’s long tail marketing at play.
But why is long tail marketing important?
Here are two reasons why you should consider long tail marketing.
Long tail marketing is an ideal fit for online platforms like Netflix and Amazon. Why? Managing their inventory is somewhat easy as compared to physical brick-and-mortar shops. Let’s say you’re into book sales, managing a brick-and-mortar bookstore is hard work.
You’d have to devote lots of time to managing the bookshelf, and your storage space will be dedicated to storing popular books that meet demand. Less popular books will have to compete for the limited space available – and you’d have to exert lots of energy and resources into maintaining the shelf spaces.
Maintaining a bookshelf requires lots of sorting, stocking, and some cost. However, such work could be eliminated by using online retailers like Amazon and Netflix.
With Amazon and Netflix, items are stored in centralized warehouses. But the products are displayed on unlimited sales floors found on the internet. The result? There is a much less shelf maintenance cost.
Web maintenance has its cost, but it’s much cheaper compared to the work that goes into maintaining shelves and physically stocking and sorting.
Moving on, sellers of digital products are in for some good times. Since there is no need for physical warehouse space, digital products like Amazon’s Kindle books and iTunes can be sold for a much reduced cost.
Aside from internet commerce, long tail marketing can be seen in microfinance businesses that offer small loans to a large group of people across the globe.
Now you know when to use long tail marketing, you’ve got to understand various long-tail marketing strategies.
Here are the 5 long tail marketing strategies for online businesses.
Keywords with less search volume, competition and more words are known as long-tail keywords. They are usually minimum 3-4 words and specify user intent. However, the combined traffic from such keywords will add substantially to the traffic of your website.
Long-tail keywords typically contain modifiers, generic keywords, and other related terms. Optimizing your website on long-tail keywords and keywords will pretty much help you rank well on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
Finding long-tail keywords is easy – all you’ve got to do is use tools like PPC Keyword Planner or the Google Keywords Planner. Later in this blog you will find how you can analyze your PPC campaigns for long-tail keywords.
You’ve probably heard “content is king”. Well, that’s true if you want to be favored by the search engine gods and also expand your reach in the marketplace. The more great content you produce, the more likely you’d attract more visitors to your website.
You’ve got to create and maintain a superb content marketing strategy. One way of doing that is by taking advantage of long-tail marketing. Furthermore, you’ve got to keep a close eye on your SEO. Why? Because SEO is a vital piece of high-quality content.
Finally, you’ve got to share your content across various channels like social media, guest blogs, and other platforms that offer great exposure.
Creating great content is good, but you can get the most out of it by sharing it on various social media platforms. This way, you get to drive more traffic to your business in no time. One way of sharing content is by coming up with tweets and posts that draw attention and also meet the wants, interests, and needs of your customer persona.
By consistently publishing valuable content, you’ll most likely boost your user engagement in various channels. It also makes it easy for your followers to share and comment on your tweets or posts.
All in all, you’ve got to come up with a tangible social media strategy that would help you boost your overall online presence and draw more eyeballs to your brand.
Testimonials and social proof are one of the most reliable ways of converting visitors into loyal paying customers. By incorporating testimonials and social proof into your digital marketing strategy, you’d be pretty sure of influencing the decision-making process of eyeballs that land on your website.
Get a compilation of positive testimonials from previous customers, and insert them into the service or product marketing pages on your website. This way, new customers would see what previous customers have to say about your business. And if the overall review is positive, then you’re pretty sure of winning a good fraction of those eyeballs that land on your website.
If you want to be more favored by search engine algorithms, then the testimonials from previous customers have to include long tail keywords. Furthermore, if you’ve got recommendations from previous customers or influencers or rankings on review sites, then you’ve got to push them to the forefront of your social proof.
That’s not all…
Shares on social media may prove helpful! You’ve got to do all you can to solidify your authenticity in the marketplace.
Regardless of where your visitors are on the buyer’s journey, social proof and testimonials have a way of boosting your chances of converting them into loyal paying customers.
Moving on, here are some examples of long tail marketing.
As already mentioned online companies like Netflix and Amazon typically use the long tail marketing strategy. But it’s not limited to these companies, you can use it for your content strategy.
As a business owner, when planning your target keyword list, you’ve got to come up with long tail keywords that have small monthly search volume, and also those with high monthly search volume. A mix of these long tail keywords will drive up your monthly web traffic.
Here are how some brands use long tail marketing.
If you take a close look at the video-based platform, you’d see long tail marketing in action. Yes, Netflix draws in new customers by using popular hits as their bait. However, when the customer signs up for the platform, they’d see less popular movies that are quite appealing.
Using AI-powered tools, Netflix makes a recommendation based on the user’s online behavior and activity. This way, each user is drawn to the long tail content available on the platform. This will, in turn, breed loyal paying subscribers.
Amazon is arguably the giant of e-commerce, and they consistently rank high on search engine result pages. Well, their success, to a large extent, is tied to their use of long tail product descriptions. Using the strategy, they get to target high-quality traffic, thereby leading to a boost in their sales.
Another strategy that Amazon maximizes is the product recommendation strategy. Most times, visitors have no relationship with the recommended product. But by shining the spotlight on such a product, the visitor will likely learn more about the product. The product recommendation strategy can be seen as the “People Also Buy” headings. You see, it’s a unique personalization strategy that gets people hooked on the new product – after all, other people are buying it.
Furthermore, Amazon’s product review comes with long descriptions. This way, they are easily noticed by Google’s algorithm. In the long run, Amazon will most likely sell high amounts of low-demand products compared to more popular products.
eBay has a vast amount of great content that creates a conducive environment for both sellers and buyers. The initial product offering by eBay was electronics, but things have changed. Nowadays, eBay offers a wide range of products on its website. One way eBay boosts its visibility in the marketplace is by using keywords and long tail key phrases. Increased visibility, to a large extent, translates to higher traffic and more sales.
From the discussion above, you’ve seen three examples of long tail marketing, and how you can apply it in your business.
But if you desire more success in long tail marketing, then you’ve got to consider using the PPC Signal tool.
As a business owner, one of your primary goals is to make more sales. Keywords are the backbone of any PPC campaign. Speaking of making more sales, you’ve got to run successful PPC campaigns. Managing one campaign is good, but it’s not enough. To generate more results, you’ve got to run multiple campaigns – and that comes with a price. Either you are focusing on long-tail marketing or any product or service with high in demand, you need to keep a sharp eye on your campaign performance.
Managing multiple PPC campaigns is not easy. You’d need help – and that’s where the PPC Signal tool comes into play. With the PPC Signal tool, you get to easily manage and track your campaign data, and possibly optimize your PPC campaign for better sales and conversions.
From the filter section of the PPC Signal tool, you get to filter results based on various parameters like keywords.
Using the filter option, you get to filter out the worst and best performing keywords. There’s also an option of filtering out results using different metrics.
For instance, if you want to check your campaign conversions, you’ve got to identify the conversions icon under the metrics option and click on it. This way, results will be automatically generated on your screen.
Furthermore, there is an option of exploring your signal and getting more details by clicking on the Explore icon.
After clicking on the Explore option, you’d see a graphical data representation of your campaign. From the graphical data representation, you’d see details that showcase how your conversions are moving.
There’s also an option of checking the tabular representation of the data. This way, you get to see other campaign metrics that are affecting your campaign conversions.
From the signals above, you can easily track your conversion performance. Also, you can see that your conversions are moving down – and pretty much identify other factors that are affecting your conversion. Further analysis helps you to take data-driven actions that would generate better results. In the long run, you’d be able to make quick decisions, and stop wasting resources and time on things that don’t add to your campaign.
Thorough data analysis helps in the generation of actionable insights that pretty much help you take the right actions for a successful long tail marketing.
A long tail business strategy is a way of generating significant revenue by selling low volumes of rare items to a large number of customers. It’s in direct contrast to selling a large volume of popular products.
Netflix’s strategy is largely dependent on the long tail theory. That is, product offerings with low sales volume (or low market demand) constitute market share that surpasses (or rival) best selling movies (or recent blockbusters). However, the movie distribution channels of these lower market demand movies have to be large enough.
Two notable examples of long tail marketing are Amazon and Netflix. Using long tail marketing, these tech giants have sold lots of products that do not have widespread attention.
Using long tail keywords, you get to easily attract high-quality traffic to your website. This will, in turn, lead to higher conversion rates. The long tail keyword becomes increasingly important as the customer evolves in their journey.
Long tail marketing is one of the most reliable strategies that would get you the most results. For the strategy to work, you’ve got to use it the right way.
Using long tail marketing, you can easily generate more exposure for your product or service offering. More exposure translates to more eyeballs and sales – and that’s good for business.
If you’ve used other marketing strategies, and have not recorded some sort of success, then opting for long tail marketing will be a good call.
By creating high-quality content with the right mix of long tail keywords, you get to drive quality leads to your website. Also, you can keep track of your performance using the PPC Signal tool.
Now you know what long tail marketing is, what kind of product will you be promoting using the strategy?
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