10 Long Tail Strategies That Work
Chris Anderson named the long tail in Wired in October 2004. Ten concrete ways businesses put the idea to work in catalog, content and ad strategy that year.
Chris Anderson’s Wired article coining the term “the long tail” would not run until October 2004, but the pattern it described (a huge number of niche products or pieces of content, each selling in small volume, together outselling the handful of mainstream hits) was already visible in how several businesses operated well before the article gave it a name. Here are ten concrete ways companies were applying that logic in 2004.
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Stock a catalog no physical store could hold. Amazon’s core advantage was never matching a bookstore’s shelf for shelf. It was carrying titles no physical retailer could justify stocking, since an online catalog carries no shelf-space cost, and selling enough of those niche titles in aggregate to matter.
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Rent from an unlimited back catalog. Netflix, running its mail-order DVD subscription since 1999, could offer thousands of older and niche films that a video rental store’s limited shelf space would never carry, turning films with modest individual demand into a meaningful share of total rentals.
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Sell digital tracks instead of full albums. The iTunes Music Store, launched in April 2003, let a listener buy a single obscure track instead of requiring a label to press and ship a physical album for a niche artist, making previously uneconomical catalog depth suddenly profitable.
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Bid on narrow, low-competition keywords. Inside Google AdWords, advertisers were learning that dozens of specific, low-volume keyword phrases often cost less per click and converted better than a handful of broad, expensive ones, the advertising equivalent of the long tail applied to search intent.
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Let a marketplace aggregate collectors and niche buyers. eBay’s business was built almost entirely on items too specialized for any single retailer to stock, from discontinued parts to regional collectibles, aggregating enough scattered niche demand across the country to make each listing worth someone’s time.
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Publish for a narrow topic instead of a broad audience. Blogs focused on a specific hobby, industry or niche interest could build small but loyal readerships that a general-interest publication had no reason to serve, and advertising or affiliate revenue against that narrow audience could still add up.
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Print on demand instead of in bulk. Services like Lulu, founded in 2002, let authors publish books in tiny print runs, sometimes a single copy at a time, removing the minimum print quantity that had kept niche and self-published titles out of the market entirely.
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Syndicate small publishers into a shared ad network. Google’s AdSense program, launched in 2003, let small, specialized websites carry relevant advertising they could never have sold directly, aggregating thousands of low-traffic niche sites into a network advertisers could reach at scale.
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Recommend based on niche affinity, not just bestseller lists. Recommendation systems that suggested items based on what similar buyers had chosen, rather than simply promoting the same top sellers to everyone, helped surface niche products to the smaller audience interested in them.
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Segment email and offers by narrow interest. Rather than sending one broad promotional email to an entire list, businesses that split subscribers into narrower interest groups and tailored offers accordingly saw stronger response than a single generic blast, the same logic applied to an owned audience instead of a public catalog.
The common thread
None of these ten approaches required abandoning the mainstream hits that still drove the bulk of any single sale. What they had in common was refusing to treat niche demand as not worth serving just because any one niche was small. Once the cost of stocking, publishing or targeting something narrow dropped close to zero, thanks to digital catalogs, on-demand printing and self-serve advertising, the aggregate value of serving thousands of small audiences well started to rival, and in some businesses exceed, the value of chasing the next big hit.
Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2004 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.
