You've read "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson -- or at least heard the gist of it: the Web has proven to be a boon for niche offerings, where narrow, specific matches between small groups of buyers and sellers add up in aggregate to huge business. It's no longer about "one big hit", but rather a multitude of mini-hits taken as a whole. Witness Amazon.com and eBay.
The logic is simple but compelling. Create something unique for a very specific audience, rather than something generic designed by committee for the masses. Produce it inexpensively, but still with high quality. The micromarket for which it is focused is far more likely to love it, because it speaks directly to them with authenticity.
Do that dozens or hundreds or thousands of times under one master umbrella, and you've got something with far more depth and resiliency than a single mass market production.
So that works for music, books, and YouTube videos. Consider this: it can also work for your company's online marketing.
Instead of investing all your efforts into producing a single big web site where all respondents to your search engine and e-mail marketing are directed, imagine diversifying with a plethora of laser-targeted mini-sites -- path-based "landing experiences" for these different respondents that engage them based on the individual keyword or e-mail that they clicked on. And if the first page of your landing path offers them a segmentation choice, the second page can really hit the nail on the head for that exact group of prospects.
Only a small number of prospects will reach that specific page. But, boy, you sure will be talking their language, as if you're all about solving their particular problem. Because that specific path will be. And if you can have dozens or hundreds of those paths all being compelling to their own niche audiences, the grand sum of all of them will far outperform one-size-fits-all web marketing.
Yes, you need a systematic way of managing all this to make it practical, but that's what software and business processes are all about. Full disclosure: we build just those sort of systems, but you don't have to buy anything from us to figure out ways to leverage the Long Tail in your web marketing.
-Scott Brinker
