When it comes to creating a marketing plan, much depends on what your business has to offer and the approach best suited to reach specific goals.
Many businesses choose to specialize in one or two main products or services, but is this the best strategy?
A digital transformation is happening, and long tail marketing could be the right approach for your business to make sure it lasts and stays competitive.
What Exactly is Long Tail Marketing?
If you mix the well-liked items with the less beloved ones, you’re likely to see a significant hike in earnings.
It’s not about getting rid of your most popular products, it’s about adding products that aren’t as popular to different areas.
The aim of this strategy is to eventually make a profit from all the products, not just the ones that are in high demand. The theory is that over time, the profit from the lower demand products will add up to be comparable to the profit from the higher demand items.
Long Tail Marketing vs Long Tail Keyword Strategy
A long tail keyword strategy can be compared to long tail marketing.
Both of these approaches can help businesses rank higher in search engine algorithms.
A long tail marketing strategy will help you appeal to a wider range of customers.
The longer the tail is, the greater the diversity of consumers that can be reached.
If you don’t have a loyalty program, you’re missing out on potential revenue from different groups of customers.
Why long-tail keywords are super-awesome
Long tail keywords have many special qualities. Here are three favorites:
They’re less competitive
It’s difficult to rank on Google, and it’s getting harder for newbies. One of the major ranking factors is time; if you’re just starting out, your competitors have had years to build up their reputation. So if you’re trying to rank for popular keywords, you may have a lot of competition. Instead, try optimizing for long-tail keywords, which will have less competition.
The user intent is clearer
Taking a “laptops” example, what does the person searching really want to find? There are many possibilities:
- Pictures of…
- Types of…
- To find the nearest…
- To read about…
- Latest news…
- Expert reviews…
- Places to buy…
- Recommendations on…
With long-tail keywords, the intent is much clearer. You can be sure that people who are searching for “good laptops for video editing” are actually looking for good laptops for video editing. By targeting long-tail keywords, you can create content that meets a specific demand, and you know that you’ll be able to attract traffic with a specific intent. In this case, an “Ultimate Guide to Laptops for Video Editing” would be perfect. If you can leverage this intent, you’re likely to rank well.
They convert better
According to research, long tail keywords are 66% more profitable than head keywords. This is because when customers are searching for something specific, they are more likely to purchase from you. For example, if you have an article with 5 laptops that are better alternatives to MacBook pros, you are likely to rank for this long tail keyword. If you can provide customers with a great alternative to a MacBook Pro, they are more likely to buy it. When someone knows exactly what they are looking to buy, they will search for it using a long tail string. For example, they might search for “Cheap + Brand + Model + Color + Location”. If you can appear in Google for these types of searches, your visitors are ready to buy. This is why it is so important to optimize your site as a whole, not just the main pages.
How to Improve Long-Tail Marketing Strategies
1. Optimize Your Website with Popular Keywords and Long Tail Keyword Phrases
One way to improve your website’s SEO and inbound marketing strategy is to incorporate a large number of keywords, including both popular keywords and less common long-tail keyword phrases.
If your website contains a lot of popular keywords, it will probably attract a lot of visitors. However, some of those visitors may not find what they’re looking for on your site and will leave without making a purchase.
Long tail keywords that are more precise may result in less website traffic, but the leads will be of higher quality.
People who are already looking for a specific product are more likely to buy it. Long tail keywords are usually 4-5 words long, and they show what the person wants. There is less competition for these keywords.
The company may be targeting the popular keyword of “running shoes” while also targeting a more specific keyword phrase of “best trail running shoes.”
After conducting keyword research, a marketing campaign is created and implemented in order to improve the website’s search engine rankings and drive more traffic to the site.
2. Maintain a Strong Content Marketing Strategy
The key to reaching potential customers and ranking higher in search engine algorithms is still content. The more content you have, the more visitors you will attract. Therefore, it is important to create and maintain a strong content marketing strategy.
If you want to be successful in marketing, you should utilize long tail marketing as part of your content strategy. Keep SEO in mind when creating content, and make sure that your content is high-quality and designed to rank well based on keywords and key phrases.
Share your content on social media, in guest blogs, and in any other places where you can be seen by lots of people.
3. Use Social Media to Drive Higher Traffic to Your Website
To increase traffic to your website in addition to content creation and sharing, use social media platforms to post content that will be of interest and meet the needs of your buyer personas.
If you want more engagement with your followers, post valuable content often and use various interactive content. Make it easy for followers to comment on and share your posts or tweets.
To create a successful social media marketing campaign, you need to identify the best ways to increase your overall presence on your chosen platform and attract more of your target audience.
4. Influence the Decision-Making Process with Social Proof and Testimonials
One way to improve your digital marketing strategy is to use social proof and testimonials. These can help influence the decision-making process of website visitors and potential customers.
Make sure to add positive reviews from your current customers to your product or service marketing pages, in a review section. This will help compile customer sentiment and feedback that can be useful for marketing purposes.
When creating content, be sure to include long-tail keywords that are more likely to be noticed by search engine algorithms.
Also, try to use social proof as much as possible, such as recommendations by customers and influencers, rankings on review sites, and shares on social media.
Testimonials and social proof can help persuade website visitors to convert to paying customers. This is especially effective when the customer is already interested in your product and is close to making a purchase.
Using long-tail keywords to produce a content strategy
Simply put, base your content on long-tail keyword research.
Next time you’re trying to think of something interesting to write about on your blog:
- Enter your topic into answerthepublic.com. This (gift of a) platform will offer up a ton of queries that people search for around the topic.
- Then add the list to Google AdWords to generate a list of search volumes.
- Export and add a filter, then order by the number of searches. Voila.
- Make the table look pretty and share with senior stakeholders. They’ll think you’re a creative genius.
If you are a specialist, independent electronics retailer, you may have trouble ranking higher than national chains for the generic keyword “laptops”. However, as a specialist in high-end laptops, you are in a good position to give advice on the best specifications for niche requirements.
This kind of insight can help not only your content marketing but your entire website strategy. You could go one step further and dedicate a portion of your websites main navigation to it, i.e.:
- com/students
- com/students/engineering
- com/students/music-editing
- com/students/photoshop-editing
If you want to be certain that your content will be popular, base it on long-tail queries that are backed up by search data.
What are the traffic potentials for targeting long-tail keywords?
Google AdWords data is less robust for niche keywords.
In other words, AdWords is not the only keyword tool, but it is a go-to, and most other tools rely heavily on AdWords data. AdWords is not built for content marketing or long-tail query research, but it is free and easy to get search volumes out of the platform. AdWords, used in conjunction with a content ideas tool like answerthepublic.com, can be powerful. There is a strong difference between monthly search volumes and impressions for some niche terms.
Pages that are optimized for one keyword can also be optimized for many other keywords. For example, if you optimize a page for the term “laptops with dedicated graphics,” you could also optimize it for a much larger pool of other keywords.
Although AdWords data may not be entirely accurate for less common terms, the total search volume and traffic is likely much higher than what AdWords indicates.
Google has a machine-learning system called “RankBrain” that greatly improves its understanding of synonyms. This system is reportedly the third most influential aspect of the overall algorithm, which means that you don’t have to be as keyword-prescriptive as you used to.
The titles make no reference to “powerful” factors, which become more important in mobile spaces as people increasingly use voice-search. Voice-search queries are usually more conversational and natural sounding than written queries, and often contain more detailed information. Google’s machine-learning and understanding of language allow it to present better results for virtually any query imaginable, which could potentially result in a lot more traffic for search-optimized content.
Long Tail Marketing Examples
Amazon
Amazon is one of the top e-commerce platforms in the world. They sell millions of products and are almost always the first thing that comes up on a search engine.
This high-level success can be attributed to Amazon’s usage of long tail product descriptions, which targets higher-quality traffic and results in more sales.
The online retailer uses various tactics to sell products, one of which is recommendations of other products. This is known as “personalization.”
Netflix
Netflix is a video-based platform that has a lot to offer.
Though hits may be what potential subscribers notice at first, long tail marketing is working behind the scenes.
Netflix has a lot of popular movies and shows, but it also has a lot of movies and shows that aren’t as popular, which might be appealing to people with specific interests.
eBay
eBay has a lot of great content on its website that makes it a good place for both buyers and sellers.
eBay’s focus has expanded from electronics to now include a wide range of products.
Using keywords, especially long tail keywords, makes eBay more visible in search results for potential customers, resulting in more traffic to the site and more sales.
Takeaways
By using long-tail keyword research to impact your content marketing strategy, you can:
- Meet the search demands of researching customers
- Drive targeted traffic
- Drive traffic that’s more valuable and likely to covert
- Feel comfortable knowing the numbers of searches are potentially greater than AdWords data suggests
- Have the potential to appear for a large number of similar keywords
- Extend even further due to Google’s understanding of synonyms