Brands exploiting Long-Tail
Not only have innovations in technology in the past century connected the world through phone calls, email, or forums, new technology as allowed niche and unique goods to be accessible to most people around the world. With the advent of robust search engines, supply and demand for niche markets are now being matched and businesses are exploiting this.
In Nell Patel’s blog post titled “7 Brilliant Examples of Brands Driving Long-Tail Organic Traffic”, Nell unravels the specifics in how these firms are utilizing the complex search engine for the Internet. Nell argues that many relatively new companies such as Amazon and Netflix are utilizing the fact that motivated consumers can specify exactly the good that they want using an Internet search. Patel and other marketers define this specific search as having “long-tail keywords” since they are more specific searches associated with less sales volumes i.e positioned on the long tail (area highlighted in yellow below). On the other hand, Patel defines a more general and likely popular search as containing “head keywords” since these searches are associated with products with a higher volume of sale i.e positioned at the head of the curve (area highlighted in green below).
Patel argues that although focusing on head key words may have a better immediate impact on organic traffic, focusing on long-tail keywords is the long-term approach that will pay out. Clearly Amazon has benefited from this approach considering “Amazon makes 57% of sales from long-tail keywords.” Notably, Patels states that Google reports that “15% of the search queries performed on its site are completely unique – that is, never before seen by Google.” This fact should motivate the idea that online businesses should target niche markets considering their target audience’s intentions are well defined and clear.
Intuitively, this long-tail result is puzzling. One would think that to maximize a company’s profits, they should focus on exposing their products to the largest audience possible and achieving market dominance through this strategy. However, now that the Internet has allowed users to clearly specify their intentions, and has connected businesses across the globe, the market has become incredibly competitive yet very spread. Smart businesses realize that competing head-to-head against every company in the world is not the most effective strategy, and rather these businesses exploit the spread of the market and serve their clearly intended target audience.
From the consumer perspective, this long-tail result seems very promising. Now, since businesses are incentivized to target niche audiences, customers will be able to specify their interests further and thus receive more utility from their goods. From the producer perspective, this long-tail results seems to support even small companies considering these firms do not need to stack up against the biggest international firms with the assumption that they are very aware of their users and provide a great user experience.
Main article: https://neilpatel.com/blog/7-brilliant-examples-of-brands-driving-long-tail-organic-traffic/
Additional article: https://medium.com/@dillon.berjani/how-netflix-is-making-use-of-the-long-tail-theory-to-attract-new-subscribers-e4a96923ab6d