The title of this article might seem like a contradiction. How do you market a product that isn’t defined and doesn’t even exist yet? What would you even say?

The answer is actually quite simple.

People search for information and solutions in many places: Google, articles, websites, experts, studies, Facebook and LinkedIn groups, and influencers on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube. Your goal is to reach those people at the moment they’re looking to solve a problem.

Branding a new product is a slow, difficult process. You need to reach a lot of people, multiple times, and explain what you do. All while competing for attention in a world where people are already bombarded with marketing messages they’ve learned to tune out.

Creating a Brand

Generating interest in your product means starting your marketing immediately after founding the company and ideally even before. The goal of the branding process is not to sell a product or service that doesn’t yet exist, but to accomplish two other things.

The first goal is to drive potential customers to your website, or build brand recognition through other means. This is the heart of the marketing process, and companies invest enormous sums to achieve it. A quick glance at ads in a newspaper or on Google shows just how much effort and money goes into capturing attention. A company may have a great product or service, but if no one has heard of it, it won’t have customers, no matter what it sells.

The second goal is to position the company as a thought leader, an expert at the forefront of thinking about the problem and finding solutions for it. You need to lay the groundwork for when you have something to show or sell, by building an audience that is interested, willing to listen, and willing to take your company seriously.

Building a Marketing Plan

The million-dollar question is how to achieve two such difficult goals without pouring money into ongoing, expensive advertising across multiple channels.

The answer has several components, the first and most important of which is time.

It takes a long time to work through the details and overcome the challenges of launching a new business. Understanding the market, becoming experts in the problem you’re solving, preparing research and marketing materials, distributing them across multiple channels, and getting Google to surface your content at the top of search results. All of this takes time, and plenty of it.

It’s a learning process full of trial and error that simply takes time, which is the main reason it’s so important to make it the first thing a company works on. As the saying goes, time is money, and the longer you wait, the more you’ll end up spending on marketing.

Another key component of effective branding is becoming a true expert in the problem you’re solving. That means intensive research, digging into everything available on the topic and identifying people who can help, including other players in the industry who might be able to promote the company in one way or another.

Another crucial component of a solid marketing plan is building databases with information on details or cases related to the problem you’re solving. These databases become the foundation for creating large volumes of content tailored to rank well in Google search results.

The Value of the Long Tail

The simplest way to understand the importance of databases is to look at the marketing strategies of successful companies like LinkedIn, TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Zillow, ZoomInfo, CrunchBase, Glassdoor, Indeed, and others.

The strategy these companies share is built on what’s known as a long-tail content approach, producing hundreds of thousands or even millions of individual pages, one per item, whether that’s a specific postal address, a company, or a hotel. Each item is added to a database and given its own page with unique content.

Zillow and its competitors, Homesnap and Redfin among them, have millions of content pages. They host a separate page for every address in the United States, complete with a photo of the house, apartment, or building, its location, number of rooms, and most importantly, an estimated property value calculated from recent sales of similar homes in the area.

Zillow built these pages so that almost any search for a US address returns their website as one of the first results. This way, anyone buying or selling a home will inevitably come across Zillow’s content.

And even if you’re not in the market for a property, if you’re simply looking up an address, you’ll still land on Zillow, and over time the brand becomes a familiar, trusted source of content you find genuinely useful.

This is a remarkable achievement considering that Zillow has not spent a penny on Google advertising. Its marketing costs are essentially fixed, covering only the research and development of its content.

Similarly, CrunchBase has created a page for every company in the world, with each page containing basic information about that company. The real draw is the financing data, how much money the company raised, across how many rounds, who invested, and when. When you search for almost any company name on Google, its CrunchBase page will appear among the first results. This tells you that CrunchBase has built extremely powerful branding, positioning itself as the go-to source for reliable information on company financing.

TripAdvisor is a similar story. The company created content pages for hotels and tourist destinations around the world, allowing visitors to add their own reviews and ratings to every page.

Over time, a wealth of user-generated content accumulated. As more material built up, Google began prioritizing TripAdvisor pages whenever someone searched for a specific hotel or tourist site.

This created a powerful positive feedback loop. The higher Google ranked TripAdvisor’s content, the more people read it. And the more useful and engaging that content was, the higher Google ranked it in return.

The interesting part of a long-tail content strategy is that the number of Google searches for any single page is almost negligible.

How many times a day will someone search for “23 Beacon Street, Brookline, MA”? Probably almost never.

But how many searches are there each day for addresses across the United States? Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands.

By creating a separate page for every address, a company ensures that hundreds of thousands of times a day, Google will consider surfacing its content as a top result across an enormous range of searches.

This strategy is very different from manually producing large amounts of content and trying to work in the words and phrases people are likely to search for, what’s commonly known as search engine optimization.

What would be more effective for CrunchBase? Writing articles about corporate finance, or publishing millions of automatically generated pages on actual company funding rounds?

In our next article, we’ll look at some examples of how to build a long-tail content strategy, even in cases where it isn’t immediately obvious how to do it.