Information is king

Information not fluff
In today’s markets the strategies which centre on being informative and educational work better than just delivering predictable fluff. This is particularly true in the B2B sectors and becoming more common place in the B2C sectors too. Increasingly people are using the Web for selection, if not the actual purchase. There is still a divide, both in the UK and the US, where the male is more likely to investigate and buy on the Web, whereas females will investigate on the Web but still enjoy the whole shopping experience. The key message is content rich websites are what people want not just advertising fluff; information is the new currency of business, the new doorway to sales!

The Long Tail of marketing
This theory first written about by Chris Anderson in his book, The Long Tail, is very interesting and very important for any marketers and particularly relevant to this book. His ideas are about the Web’s economic shift away from the mainstream markets toward a multitude of smaller niche products and services.

In essence the theory is that as a global culture and economy, we are increasingly shifting away from the mainstream products towards a much larger volume of niches. He describes this as the small number of mainstream at the head of the demand curve and the many smaller niches at the tail of the curve. He states that as the cost of production and distribution fall, particularly online, there is less need to group products and consumers into the one size fits all containers. Without any constraints of space and other similar bottlenecks of distribution, the narrowly targeted goods and services can be as economically attractive as mainstream fare. I can highly recommend the book and the blog www.thelongtail.com.

If you look around you can see some of the most successful internet businesses leverage this, so called, long tail to reach under-served customers and satisfy demand for products not found in traditional stores, for example, Amazon. So, like many others, I subscribe to the belief that today’s marketers must shift their thinking from the traditional ‘short head’ of mainstream marketing to the masses to a strategy of targeting the under-served using the Web and all the new technologies that have sprung up over the last few years (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ipatter and many more).