Some time ago the term “long tail marketing” got us all thinking if we wanted to market wide or deep.
Marketing wide is easy, and very expensive. Those coke signs on the freeway, an ad that just says Coke® is marketing wide. If you own a small pizza place in Fresno California, why would you put an ad on Facebook to everyone in the US? That is marketing very wide. If you are lucky you will spend $1000 and one person will see your ad in Fresno.
If you spent $50,000 you might find someone who visits Fresno, but they will have forgotten your pizza place by then. The whole point of hiring an agency like us for SEO or digital marketing is to find you your customer, not everyone else’s isn’t it?
Marketing deep for this little pizza shop would be an ad targeting people in a 5 mile radius between 4 and 6 pm and 10pm to midnight. Ads right when people start discussing dinner, and ads when they get a second wind or want a late night snack.
We don’t try and sell the early bum ski line in February as the snow is melting. We sell it in October as the cooler air gets people thinking about ski season. Why do you think the big stores all sell shorts when there is still snow on the ground? We buy shorts in February and March because we hope for sun. When the sun arrives we are less likely to return them for a refund.
You don’t get this with computer generated ads. While the computer programmers are getting better, only humans can understand human psychology. Great marketers are great at understanding people and knowing their limitations. I recently had a discussion with a man in a similar field. He wrote billboards.
In fifteen minutes I learned more about billboards that stick and billboards you know but have no idea what they are. He is one of the most expensive billboard designers in Los Angeles. If you had asked me about billboards a year ago I would have said, “digital is the only way”. Now I know differently. In fact, he changed a little about how I thought about digital.
The human element is critical if you want to market wide or deep. It costs more per ad, but it makes ads that really connect with people. Even the robot generated “audience” needs an ad created by humans. We use other services too like ASR to insure there is a human interaction on our digital side. It forces us to make human updates to our clients websites. If we click “done” and didn’t do it, it keeps bugging us.
Go deep, be human and call today for a free consultation.
