All signs point to OPEN being on a trajectory to replicate the tremendous success of Cervélo—with the site, the blog, and social networking leading the way forward. And that’s no coincidence. As Vroomen would tell you, the ideas you’ll read about in this book work.
“This is the future for companies like us,” Vroomen says. “You can be very small and occupy a niche and still sell your products all over the world. It’s amazing, when we go into a new country, the amount of name recognition we have. The Internet gives you opportunities you never had before. And it’s not rocket science. It’s pretty easy to figure out.”
The Long Tail of Marketing
The theory of the long tail as popularized by Chris Anderson in his book of the same name is that our culture and economy are increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of major hits (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an era without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
Some of today’s most successful Internet businesses leverage the long tail to reach underserved customers and satisfy demand for products not found in traditional physical stores. Examples include Amazon, which makes available at the click of a mouse hundreds of thousands of books and other products not stocked in local chain stores; Spotify and other services that legally bring niche music not found in record stores to people who crave artists outside the mainstream; and Netflix, which exploited the long tail of demand for movie rentals beyond the blockbuster hits found at the local DVD rental shop. The business implications of the long tail are profound and illustrate that there’s much money to be made by creating and distributing at the long end of the tail. Yes, big hits are still important. But as these businesses have shown, there’s a huge market beyond the latest Batman movie, U2, Taylor Swift, and Top Gear.
So, what about marketing? While Anderson’s book focuses on product availability and selling models on the web, the concepts apply equally well to marketing. There’s no doubt that there is a long-tail market for web content created by organizations of all kinds—corporations, nonprofits, churches, schools, individuals, rock bands—and used for directly reaching buyers—those who buy, donate, join, apply. As consumers search the Internet for answers to their problems, as they browse blogs and chat rooms and websites for ideas, they are searching for what organizations like yours have to offer. Unlike in the days of the old rules of interruption marketing with a mainstream message, today’s consumers are looking for just the right product or service to satisfy their unique desires at the precise moment they are online. People are looking for what you have to offer right now.
Marketers must shift their thinking away from the short head of the demand curve—mainstream marketing to the masses—and toward the long tail—a strategy of targeting vast numbers of underserved audiences via the web.
As marketers understand the web as a place to reach millions of micromarkets with precise messages just at the point of consumption, the way they create web content changes dramatically. Instead of a one-size-fits-all website with a mass-market message, we need to create just-right content—each aimed at a narrow target constituency. As marketing case studies, the examples of Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify are also fascinating. The techniques pioneered by the leaders of long-tail retail for reaching customers with niche interests are examples of marketing genius.
Tell Me Something I Don’t Know, Please
Amazon.com has been optimized for browsing. At a broad level, there are just two ways that people interact with web content: They search and they browse. Most organizations optimize sites for searching, which helps people answer their questions but doesn’t encourage them to browse. But people also want a site to tell them something they didn’t think to ask. The marketers at Amazon understand that when people browse the site, they may have a general idea of what they want (in my case, perhaps a book for my daughter about surfing) but not the particular title. So if I start with a search on Amazon for the phrase “surfing for beginners,” I get 99 titles in the search results. With this list as a starting point, I shift into browse mode, which is where Amazon excels. Each title has a customer ranking where I instantly see how other customers rated the book. I see reader-generated reviews, together with reviews from other media. I can see “Customers who bought this item also bought” lists and also rankings of “What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?” I can poke around the contents of the book itself. After I purchase the perfect book for my daughter (The Girl’s Guide to Surfing), I might get an email from Amazon weeks or months later, suggesting, based on this purchase, another book that I might find useful. This is brilliant stuff.
The site is designed to work for a major and often-ignored audience: people who do their own research and consider a decision over a period of time before making a commitment. Smart marketers, like the folks at Amazon and Cervélo, unlike those at the Big Three automakers we saw in Chapter 1, know that the most effective web strategies anticipate needs and provide content to meet them, even before people know to ask.
Marketing on the web is not about generic banner ads designed to trick people with neon color or wacky movement. It is about understanding the keywords and phrases that our buyers are using, and creating the content that they seek.
Bricks-and-Mortar News
The new rules are just as important for public relations. In fact, I think that online content in all of its forms is causing a convergence of marketing and PR that does not really exist offline. When your buyer is on the web browsing for something, content is content in all of its manifestations. And in an interconnected web world, content drives action.
I often hear people claim that online content such as blogs, photos, and infographics doesn’t work as a marketing strategy for traditional bricks-and-mortar industries. But I’ve always disagreed. Great content brands an organization as a trusted resource and calls people to action—to buy, subscribe, apply, or donate. And great content means that interested people return again and again. As a result, the organization succeeds, achieving goals such as adding revenue, building traffic, gaining donations, or generating sales leads.
For instance, The Concrete Network5 provides information about residential concrete products and services and helps buyers and sellers connect with each other. The company targets consumers and builders who might want to plan and build a concrete patio, pool deck, or driveway—this audience makes up the business-to-consumer (B2C) component of The Concrete Network—as well as the concrete contractors who make up the business-to-business (B2B) component. The Concrete Network’s Find a Contractor6 service links homeowners and builders who need a project done with contractors who specialize in several dozen different services located in hundreds of metropolitan areas in the United States, Canada, and Australia. The company’s web content drives business for The Concrete Network. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, web content sells concrete!