Mastering The Long Tail: A Marketer's Playbook

Chris Anderson’s Wired article this month gave a name to something Amazon, Netflix and Apple’s iTunes Music Store had already been quietly proving: when shelf space stops being physically limited, a huge amount of revenue lives outside the hits. A record store can only stock so many CDs, so it stocks the bestsellers. iTunes has no shelf to fill, so an obscure track from an out-of-print album can sit right next to the number one single and still find its handful of buyers. Multiply that across millions of niche items and the “tail” of demand adds up to a business in its own right. Here’s how to act on it.

Audit what you already carry but never surface

Most businesses with any kind of catalog, products, content, services, are sitting on items nobody actively promotes because they’re not the obvious bestseller. Start by finding them. Look at what customers search for on your own site, what gets requested in support emails and what shows up in low-volume but recurring sales. These are your long tail candidates, and they usually already have a small, loyal audience nobody’s paying attention to.

Let search and recommendation do the surfacing

The physical constraint that used to limit a catalog was shelf space; online, the constraint is discoverability. A niche item that’s useful to someone will sell, but only if that person can find it. Invest in making your on-site search work, and if you have any kind of “customers who liked this also liked” mechanism, use it. Netflix already understood in 2004 that a working recommendation system does the job that a limited number of physical store clerks never could.

Stop optimizing purely for hits

If every marketing decision is judged against “did this move the bestseller,” the long tail will never show up in the numbers, because no single niche item moves much volume on its own. Track cumulative niche revenue separately, as a category, rather than judging each obscure item against your top seller. The tail earns its keep in aggregate, not item by item.

Use low-cost channels to reach niche buyers

Broad advertising is expensive and imprecise for niche demand; a niche audience is small by definition, so you don’t need to reach everyone, you need to reach the right few thousand people cheaply. Targeted email, niche forums and word of mouth within a specific interest community will outperform a broad campaign every time you’re selling something that only a slice of the market wants.

Trust reviews and word of mouth to do targeting for you

A customer who found and loved an obscure item is a better advocate for it than any ad you could write, because they found it by wanting it specifically. Make it easy for those customers to leave a review or tell a friend, and the long tail starts marketing itself to exactly the people who’ll care.

The discipline this requires

None of this works if you’re still measuring success the old way, one hit at a time. The businesses that will benefit most from the long tail over the next few years are the ones willing to change what they count as a win: not one big seller, but thousands of small, steady ones adding up to something bigger than the hits alone.

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Browse more strategy pieces, everything published in 2004 or the Digital Business Marketing Awards.