We can sum up the secret of creating a prosperous long tail into two sentences:
- Providing all products: This is easy to say, and copyright and legal restrictions have always been the biggest obstacle to growth in the long tail market.
- Help me find him: through the filter and user scoring, the recommendation technology can push the demand to a long tail.
Cost reduction
Rule 1: Centralize or distribute inventories
The advantages of a large centralized warehouse in the mail order business have achieved the first improvement in efficiency.
Virtual Inventory, that is, products are placed in the partner's warehouse, and the presentation and sale on the website make Amazon's cost almost zero, bringing diversity to the next level.
Digital inventory is the lowest cost inventory.
Rule 2: engage customers in Production
Coproduction has created self-service models for eBay, wiki, Myspace, and Google. If an enterprise needs to hire people to do things, users are happy to do things for free, called crowdsourcing ".
The energy of customers is infinite and can be extended along with the long tail.
Small market considerations
Rule 3: a channel of transmission is not suitable for all people
If you only pay attention to one type of customers, you may lose other customers.
The best long tail market should be across time and space, and people will not guess what kind of products people need. The main advantage of iTunes is its rich variety and convenient download methods.
Multi-channel communication is the only way to reach the largest potential market.
Rule 4: a product is not suitable for everyone
Micro-segmentation: splitting and mixing into a winning strategy, or splitting a content into different components, so that everyone can consume it in their favorite way, or mix it with other content to create a new content.
A product is suitable for one person and multiple products are suitable for multiple people.
Rule 5: a price is not suitable for everyone
Whether it is music or any other product, as long as the marginal production and sales costs are close to zero, the variable price is a natural model, and the most popular products can sell at a higher price, less popular products can be sold at a low price.
EBay has two forms: auction and buy now. The former has lower prices, more troubles, more uncertainty, and the latter has higher prices.
Get rid of control
Rule 6: Share information
Sharing more information with customers helps customers make choices, rather than making the selection process more messy.
If it can be converted into recommendation information, information about the consumption method can become a powerful marketing tool. The sources of recommendation information can win the trust of consumers by commenting on the detailed specifications of users.
Rule 7: consider "and", not "or"
For the shelves of a mall, a single location can only accommodate one product, but in a market with unlimited capacity, supplying all the products is always the right choice.
The richer the storage capacity and distribution channels, the less you need to distinguish their usage methods. The easier it is than making decisions or making decisions.
Rule 8: Let the market do things for you
In a scarce market, you must guess what is selling well.
In the fengrao market, you only need to keep the products there and let the market filter them.
The pre-filter and post-filter are the differences between prediction and evaluation. The latter is always more accurate than the former.
The biggest advantage of the online market is the evaluation capability of group intelligence.
Rule 9: understand the power of free
One feature that cannot be ignored in the digital market is the free possibility. Because the cost is almost zero, the price can also be zero.
Free value-added mode: first, use the free service to attract a large number of users, and then persuade some of them to upgrade to paying advanced users for higher quality and performance. Because of the low cost of digital services and the low cost of free services, a small number of users can make up for all costs as long as they become paying users.