“The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More“ is a book written by Christ Anderson… and was first described in an article in Wired magazine, written by him as well. One of the facts of internet is that there is opportunity for everyone, but the sheer size of cyberspace scares some people who would be ideal entrepreneurs.
There’s a two-edged sword so to speak… the accessibility of the internet calls out to millions of people who want to run their own businesses, but its enormous size and complexity can make it seem only ideal for people with lots of money to invest in elaborate websites and expensive marketing strategies.
Our intention here is to show you how to break the unmanageable market down into a niche market so that internet marketing is targeted and economical… the article, “The Long Tail”, is used as a frame of reference.
The article, in turn, was turned into the aforementioned book that has great advice for every internet marketer – big and small.
Law of Attraction marketing says to give customers want they want in the way or products or services and back it up with outstanding customer service. But you have to back up and start at the beginning. Who is the customer?
Here is where small entrepreneurs often set themselves up for failure.
If you say that your customers are “the whole internet” or “everyone” then you don’t understand marketing. The customers you want to attract should be narrowly defined and rest assured you will still have millions to potentially serve. So what’s this about the Long Tail? Here it is in a nutshell…
The long tail is a business strategy that allows companies to realize significant profits by selling low volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers, instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The term was first coined in 2004 by researcher Chris Anderson.
The theory of the Long Tail is that our culture and economy is increasingly shifting away from a focus on a relatively small number of “hits” (mainstream products and markets) at the head of the demand curve and toward a huge number of niches in the tail. As the costs of production and distribution fall, especially online, there is now less need to lump products and consumers into one-size-fits-all containers. In an ear without the constraints of physical shelf space and other bottlenecks of distribution, narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare.
What the heck does this mean to the internet business person on a shoestring budget? It means opportunity! The keywords are “niches” and “narrowly targeted.”
In practical terms, this means you don’t have to compete with the giant marketers making 80% of the revenue selling 20% of the products. You can go to the lower ends of the chart and find a niche market. The Long Tail says that 98 percent of the products will be purchased.
In other words, you can define a small niche market to target and then concentrate on it. In the Law of Attraction, what you focus on is what you realize. Focus on a carefully defined customer profile and then sell to that market.
In The Long Tail one of the main messages is that there is a huge underserved market filled with customers looking for books printed in 1898, or Big Band era music, or John Wayne movies, or cookbooks printed by church groups, or collectible salt and pepper shakers, or anything else you can think of.
If you think about, eBay is a forerunner of the concept of internet niche marketing. When you list something for sale on the site you must choose a narrowly defined category like…
music = CDs = pre-1965 recordings = Motown = female singers = blues and so on.
The Long Tail theory says that the best marketing strategy is to target the underserved customers and not the mainstream market. Instead of going head-to-head with giants like Amazon, Radio Shack or iTunes, you can describe a market that is not being served well or even at all.
Decide what you want to sell, define the niche market, and then create perfect, just-right content to attract the narrowly defined customer.
To define an underserved market you should first do some research. Go ahead and Google the broad product or service category.
For example, Google “fitness” and be prepared to get millions of pages of websites.
Now begin to break down fitness into smaller categories. How about, “fit over 50 years old” and then “fit women over 50 years old” and then “fit women over 50 years old who can’t go to a gym” and then “fit women over 50 years old who can’t go to a gym and need personal training” and so on. As you narrow your market the customer profile becomes clearer and clearer.
There is a big difference between offering personal training services to everyone and offering in-home personal training services to women over 50 who need flexible scheduling.
One of the concepts “The Long Tail” talks about is the fact that customers can now connect with each other.
Before mass internet marketing, brick-and-mortar customers didn’t really interact. Now they can exchange information, ideas, comments, criticisms, product reviews and much more. This is creating active small online communities that help each other find what they are looking for. This creates the ideal opportunities for marketing through forums, chat rooms, social media and more. Think “Facebook Groups”… the small internet marketing entrepreneur has a world of opportunity.
If you can think of it then there is a market waiting to buy it. That is what Law of Attraction marketing is all about!
