The first goal is to drive significant traffic to your site and build a brand, which means understanding exactly who your target audience is and what they’re searching for online.

It’s often easier to attract the right audience with content that touches on the problem you’re solving rather than targeting the problem itself directly. This kind of content expands your search horizon and brings more visitors to your site and as we’ll see, it can sometimes attract “sub-audiences” that bring the ideal customers along with them.

The second goal is to establish your company as a thought leader at the forefront of your field. That means the content you develop shouldn’t be generic or similar to what already exists.

Looking at companies like TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and Opster offers a clear picture of who the paying customers actually are and how their long-tail content aligns with their broader business strategy.

TripAdvisor produces massive amounts of content about hotels and tourist destinations around the world. The site’s purpose is to attract travelers and give them broad, up-to-date information about hotels, restaurants, car rentals, tours, guides, historical sites, and more.

Visitors don’t pay to access this content. It’s free and open to everyone. But when a user selects a hotel based on TripAdvisor’s recommendations and clicks “Make a reservation,” they’re taken to a third-party site like Expedia or Booking.com. Specifically, they’re sent to whichever site is willing to pay the most for that user at that moment.

In other words, TripAdvisor uses its long-tail content to directly and indirectly sell a product derived from the content it publishes. Its paying customers (the third-party booking sites) are entirely different from its user audience of potential travelers.

Glassdoor’s strategy is a little more sophisticated and I have a personal story to illustrate it.

Many years ago, when I was CEO of ZoomInfo, my Marketing Manager came to me with some bad news. She had been trying to recruit a job candidate who was hesitant to accept our offer. He had reservations because he had read negative reviews about the CEO of ZoomInfo on a site she had never heard of called Glassdoor.

Sure enough, the site had five or six very unflattering reviews about me and the company. The posts were anonymous, but a quick look at the dates told a simple story. Each one had been written within about two weeks of certain individuals being let go from the company. Sweet, anonymous revenge for their dismissals.

I asked the Marketing Manager to call Glassdoor, explain what we had found, and request that the content be removed.

We weren’t entirely surprised when Glassdoor replied that for a modest fee of a few thousand dollars a year, ZoomInfo could gain some control over what users saw on their page. For that fee, we could write a full description of the company, explain why it was a great place to work, and respond to anonymous reviewers.

Since finding and recruiting high-quality employees is a long, difficult, and expensive process, we had little choice but to agree to Glassdoor’s “gentle extortion” and we paid the annual fee. The Marketing Manager also asked every employee to go onto Glassdoor and counter the negative reviews by posting positive ones about the company and about me as CEO.

Overnight, I became one of the most talented CEOs in Boston, with around a hundred glowing reviews that completely buried the negative ones.

What’s interesting is that beyond the fees ZoomInfo paid, Glassdoor also got me and the Marketing Manager to actively strengthen their brand, by sending all our employees to write positive reviews. There’s little doubt that when those same employees eventually go looking for their next job, they’ll turn to Glassdoor to read reviews of companies they’re considering.

This example illustrates the flexibility a smart long-tail strategy can offer. It shows how one target audience can be activated to make another target audience pay, whether that means paying money or simply paying attention to your company.

Take the example of Opster, a small company I was involved in founding. Opster develops software tools for managing and maintaining Elasticsearch, a popular open-source search engine with hundreds of thousands of users across a wide range of industries.

Opster’s target audience is highly technical DevOps professionals who install and maintain Elasticsearch. True to our approach, from the very start of the company, we set out to build a long tail of content to bring those same DevOps people to the Opster website.

The goal was to find a theme from which we could generate several thousand pages of content relevant to this very specific audience: DevOps professionals who work with Elasticsearch every day.

After several weeks of brainstorming, someone casually mentioned that Elasticsearch produces warnings and error messages when the system encounters problems. These messages typically describe the symptoms rather than the root cause, but they’re one of the first things technicians check, and search for on Google.

A quick inspection revealed around 1,200 different types of error messages, and we systematically created a separate content page for each one. Gradually, Google started directing users to the Opster site when they typed, or more accurately, copy-pasted, Elasticsearch error messages into the search bar.

The content quality was basic, since the pages were created mechanically without any deep understanding of each error. But we learned something important. Out of 1,200 error messages, just 70 of them were driving around 80% of the traffic.

From this analysis, we focused our writing efforts on those 70 high-traffic messages and produced genuinely impressive, high-quality content for each one. Achieving the second goal of long-tail content marketing, positioning ourselves as experts in the field.

Opster’s name began to become synonymous with expertise in the installation, management, and maintenance of Elasticsearch systems. Today, about two and a half years after the company’s founding, Opster’s site attracts around 100,000 visitors a month and is the primary source of revenue and new customers for the company.

While TripAdvisor, Glassdoor, and Opster are very different companies, each found its niche, producing tailored content to attract specific audiences and build brand awareness. All three have used a long-tail content strategy effectively to drive traffic, establish themselves as leaders in their fields, and leverage their audiences for greater profits.

Making the most of a long-tail content strategy starts with identifying the problem you want to solve and the target market for its solution. From there, you can develop content that demonstrates your expertise and brings potential customers to your door.