Targeted Marketing and the Long Tail
Relationship Marketing and New Media Technologies have given us new opportunity.
With Traditional Marketing, advertising shot gunned messages to everyone who accessed the media. The results were that less than 5% responded and advertisers were pleased with these results.
Traditional Marketing worked best with average products meant for the average consumer. This target market increased the reach and ROI of the Advertising. Today we see national TV advertising focused on Car Insurance, Cell phones and fast food. Products everyone uses.
Relationship marketing and the internet allows us to narrow our focus. We can narrow the target market for our message by using longer keyword phrases.
If we are selling knitting needles, we do not want to reach millions of people. We do want to reach people interested in making clothes, hobbyists, people into crafts, and people into knitting. We can tailor a message just to the people who would buy our product and we can expend our resources efficiently. The ROI on narrowing our focus increases dramatically.
We can also tailor our message to the market in which we are competitive. In the newspapers we could not compete with Radio Shack nor online could we compete with Fed Ex. But by using more words in our keyword phrases we can narrow our market to our specific product and geographical location.
We couldn’t compete with Fed Ex for overnight delivery, but we might if it were just for one city. We couldn’t compete with Radio Shack or Best Buy for electronics, but we might if it were just for one item for which we had exceptional expertise or another major advantage.
The long tail of adding keywords allows us to find the perfect target market and niche that we hopefully could dominate.
A long tail example would be instead of just “Fulfillment” we might say “Midwest Product Fulfillment’ or “Vitamin Fulfillment Chicago.”
