MARKETING
Diving for Pearls: A Guide to Long Tail Keywords – Next Level

Welcome to this refreshed installment of our educational Next Level series! Originally published in June 2016 this blog has been rewritten to include new tool screenshots and refreshed workflows. Together we’ll uncover keywords in the vastness of the long tail.
Looking for more Next Level posts? Previously we explored how to create relevant and engaging SEO reports.
One of the biggest obstacles to driving forward your business online is being able to rank well for keywords that people are searching for. Getting your lovely URLs to show up in those precious top positions — and gaining a good portion of the visitors behind the searches — can feel like an impossible dream. Particularly if you’re working on a newish site on a modest budget within a competitive niche.
Well, strap yourself in, because today we’re going to live that dream. I’ll take you through the bronze, silver, and gold levels of finding, assessing, and targeting long tail keywords so you can start getting visitors to your site that are primed and ready to convert.
Quick steps to building a long tail keyword list:
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Draw from your industry and customer knowledge
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Add suggestions from Google Autocomplete
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Explore industry language on social media
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Pull relevant suggestions from a keyword tool
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Prioritize using popularity and difficulty metrics
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Understand the competitive landscape to pinpoint opportunities
What are long tail keywords?
The “long tail of search” refers to the many weird and wonderful ways the diverse people of the world search for any given niche.
People (yes, people! Shiny, happy, everyday, run-of-the-mill, muesli-eating, credit-card-swiping people!) rarely stop searching broad and generic ‘head’ keywords, like “web design” or “camera” or “sailor moon.”
They clarify their search with emotional triggers, technical terms they’ve learned from reading forums, and compare features and prices before mustering up the courage to commit and convert on your site.
The long tail is packed with searches like “best web designer in Nottingham” or “mirrorless camera 4k video 2016” or “sailor moon cat costume.”
This adaptation of the Search Demand Curve chart visualizes the long tail of search by using the tried and tested “Internet loves cats + animated gifs are the coolest = SUCCESS” formula.

The Search Demand Curve illustrates that while “head” and “body” terms typically amass higher search volume, seeming appealing at first. The vastness of the “long tail” presents a more substantial opportunity and larger percentage of search traffic that shouldn’t be ignored. You can really see this illustrated when combined as a percentage of search traffic. While this graph contains no cats, it is still entirely illustrative. However the long tail of search isn’t slowing down anytime soon with voice search and AI integrations we can expect the vastness of the long tail to continue to grow.

While search volume for any individual long tail keyword is typically less, user intent is much more specific and viewed as a group targeting the long tail often enables you to target a larger more engaged audience. Also beautifully illustrated in Dr. Pete’s infamous chunky thorax post.
The long tail of search is being constantly generated by people seeking answers from the Internet hive mind. There’s no end to what you’ll find if you have a good old rummage about, including: Questions, styles, colors, brands, concerns, peeves, desires, hopes, dreams… and everything in between.
Fresh, new, outrageous, often bizarre keywords. If you’ve done any keyword research you’ll know what I mean by bizarre. Things a person wouldn’t admit to their best friend, therapist, or doctor they’ll happily pump into Google and hit search. In this post we’re going to go diving for pearls: keywords with searcher intent, high demand, low competition, and a spot on the SERPs just for you.
Bronze medal: Build your own long tail keyword
It’s really easy to come up with a long tail keyword. You can use your brain, gather some thoughts, take a stab in the dark, and throw a few keyword modifiers around your ‘head’ keyword.
Have you ever played that magnetic fridge poetry game? It’s a bit like that. You can play online if (like me) you have an aversion to physical things.

I’m no poet, but I think I deserve a medal for this attempt, and now I really want some “hot seasonal berry water.”
Magnetic poetry not doing it for you? Don’t worry — that’s only the beginning.
Use your industry knowledge
Time to draw on that valuable industry knowledge you’ve been storing up, jot down some ideas, and think about intent and common misconceptions. I’m going to use the example pearls or freshwater pearls in this post as the head term because that’s something I’m interested in.
Let’s go! Let’s say I run a jewelry business and I know that my customers regularly have questions, like:
How do I clean freshwater pearls
Using my knowledge I can rattle off and build a keyword list.
Search your keyword
Engage google suggested search tool to get some more ideas. Manually enter your keyword into Google and prompting it to populate popular suggestions, like I’ve done below:

Awesome, I’m adding Freshwater pearls price to my list.
Explore the language of social media
Get amongst the over-sharers and have a look at what people are chatting about on social media by searching your keyword in Twitter, tiktok, Instagram, and Youtube. These are topics in your niche that people are talking about right now.
YouTube is also pulling up some interesting ideas around my keyword. This is simultaneously helping me gather keyword ideas and giving me a good sense about what content is already out there. Don’t worry, we’ll touch on content later on in this post. 🙂

I’m adding understanding types of pearls and Difference between saltwater and freshwater pearls to my list.
Ask keyword questions…?
You’ll probably notice that I’ve added a question mark to a phrase that is not a question, just to mess with you all. Apologies for the confusing internal-reading-voice-upwards-inflection.
Questions are my favorite types of keywords. What!? You don’t have a fav keyword type? Well, you do now — trust me.
Answer the Public is packed with questions radiating out from your seed term
Pop freshwater pearls into the tool and grab some questions for our growing list.
To leave no rock unturned (or no mollusk unshucked), let’s pop over to Google Search Console to find keywords that are already sending you traffic (and discover any mismatches between your content and user intent.)
Pile these into a list, like I’ve done in this spreadsheet.
Now this is starting to look interesting: we’ve got some keyword modifiers, some clear buying signals, and a better idea of what people might be looking for around “freshwater pearls.”

Should you stop there? I’m flabbergasted — how can you even suggest that?! This is only the beginning. 🙂
Silver medal: Assess demand and explore topics
So far, so rosy. But we’ve been focusing on finding keywords, picking them up, and stashing them in our collection like colored glass at the seaside.
To really dig into the endless tail of your niche, you’ll need a keyword tool like our very own Keyword Explorer. This is invaluable for finding topics within your niche that present a real opportunity for your site.
If you’re trying out Keyword Explorer for the first time, you’ll have 10 free searches/mo with a free Moz Community account and even more with a Moz Pro free trial or paid subscription.
Find search volume for your head keyword
To start, enter a broad industry keyword. In my case I’ll type in “pearls” into the Keyword Explorer search box. Now you can see Moz’s Monthly Volume displaying how often a term or phrase is searched for in Google:

Now try “freshwater pearls.” As expected, the search volume goes down, but we’re getting more specific.

We could keep going like this, but we’re going to burn up all our free searches. Just take it as read that, as you get more specific and enter all the phrases we found earlier, the search volume will decrease even more. There may not be any data at all. That’s why you need to explore the searches around this main keyword.
Find even more long tail keywords
Below the search volume, click on “Keyword Suggestions.”

Well, hi there, ever-expanding long tail! We’ve gone from a handful of keywords pulled together manually from different sources to 1,000 suggestions right there on your screen. Positioned right next to that, search volume to give us an idea of demand.
The diversity of searches within your niche is just as important as that big number we saw at the beginning, because it shows you how much demand there is for this niche as a whole. We’re also learning more about searcher intent.
I’m scanning through those 1,000 suggestions and looking for other terms that pop up again and again. I’m also looking for signals and different ways the words are being used to pick out words to expand my list.
I like to toggle between sorting by Relevancy and search volume, and then scroll through all the results to cherry-pick those that catch my eye.


Now reverse the volume filter so that it’s showing lower-volume search terms and scroll down through the end of the tail to explore the lower-volume chatter.
If we don’t have tracked data in our database you can always cross reference with another data set to validate their value.
This is where your industry knowledge comes into play again. Bots, formulas, spreadsheets, and algorithms are all well and good, but don’t discount your own instincts and knowledge.
Use the suggestion filters to your advantage and play around with broader or more specific suggestion types.

Looking through the suggestions, I’ve noticed that the word “cultured” has popped up a few times.

To see these all bundled together, I want to look at the grouping options in Keyword Explorer. I like the high lexicon groups so I can see how much discussion is going on within my topics.

Scroll down and expand that group to get an idea of demand and assess intent.

I’m also interested in the words around “price” and “value,” so I’m doing the same and saving those to my sheet, along with the search volume. A few attempts at researching the “cleaning” of pearls wasn’t very fruitful, so I’ve adjusted my search to “clean freshwater pearls.”
Because I’m a keyword questions fanatic, I’m also going to filter by questions (the bottom option from the drop-down menu):

OK! How is our keyword list looking? Pretty darn hot, I reckon! We’ve gathered together a list of keywords and dug into the long tail of these sub-niches, and right alongside we’ve got search volume.

You’ll notice that some of the keywords I discovered in the bronze stage don’t have any data showing up in Keyword Explorer (indicated by the hyphen in the screenshot above). That’s ok — they’re still topics I can research further. This is exactly why we have assessed demand; no wild goose chase for us!
Ok, we’re drawing some conclusions, we’re building our list, and we’re making educated decisions. Congrats on your silver-level keyword wizardry! 😀
Gold medal: Find out who you’re competing with
We’re not operating in a vacuum. There’s always someone out there trying to elbow their way onto the first page. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because it’s a long tail term with a nice chunk of search volume all those clicks will rain down on you. If the terms you’re looking to target already have big names headlining, this could very well alter your roadmap.
To reap the rewards of targeting the long tail, you’ll have to make sure you can outperform your competition.
Manually check the SERPs
Check out who’s showing up in the search engine results page (SERPs) by running a search for your head term. Make sure you’re signed out of Google and in an incognito tab.
We’re focusing on the organic results to find out if there are any weaker URLs you can pick off.
I’ll start with “freshwater pearls” for illustrative purposes.

Whoooaaa, this is a noisy page. I’ve had to scroll a whole 2.5cm on my magic mouse (that’s very nearly a whole inch for the imperialists among us) just to see any organic results.
Let’s install the Mozbar to discover some metrics on the fly, like domain authority and back-linking data.

Now, if seeing those big players in the SERPs doesn’t make it clear, looking at the Mozbar metrics certainly does. This is exclusive real estate. It’s dominated by retailers, although Wikipedia gets a place in the middle of the page.
Let’s get into the mind of Google for a second. It — or should I say “they” (I can’t decide if it’s more creepy for Google to be referred to as a singular or plural pronoun. Let’s go with “they”) — anyway, I digress. “They” are guessing that we’re looking to buy pearls, but they’re also offering results on what they are.
This sort of information is offered up by big retailers who have created content that targets the intention of searchers. Mikimoto drives us to their blog post all about where freshwater pearls come from.

As you get deeper into the long tail of your niche, you’ll begin to come across sites you might not be so familiar with. So go and have a peek at their content.
With a little bit of snooping you can easily find out:
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how relevant the article is
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if it looks appealing, up to date, and sharable
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be really judge-y: why not?
Now let’s find some more:
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when the article was published
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when their site was created
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how often their blog is updated
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how many other sites are linking to the page with Link Explorer
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how many tweets, likes, etc.
Learn more about how to do a competitor analysis in our free guide, and don’t forget to download the handy worksheet.
Document all of your findings in our spreadsheet from earlier to keep track of the data. This information will now inform you of your chances of ranking for that term.
Manually checking out your competition is something that I would strongly recommend. But we don’t have all the time in the world to check each results page for each keyword we’re interested in.
Keyword Explorer leaps to our rescue again
Run your search and click on “SERP Analysis” to see what the first page looks like, along with authority metrics and social activity.

All the metrics for the organic results, like Page Authority, goes into calculating the Difficulty score above (lower is better).
And all those other factors — the ads and suggestions taking up space on the SERPs — that’s what’s used to calculate Organic CTR (higher is better).
Priority is all the other metrics tallied up. You definitely want this to be higher.
So now we have 3 important numerical values we can use to gauge our competition. We can use these values to compare keywords.
After a few searches in Keyword Explorer, you’re going to start hankering for a keyword list or two. For this you’ll need a paid subscription, or a Moz Pro 30-day free trial.
It’s well worth the sign-up; not only do you get 5,000 keyword queries per month and 30 lists (on the Medium plan), but you also get to check out the super-magical-KWE-mega-list-funky-cool metric page. That’s what I call it, just rolls off the tongue, you know?
Okay, fellow list buddies, let’s go and add those terms we’re interested in to our lovely new list.

Then head up to your lists on the top right and open up the one you just created.
Now we can see the spread of demand, competition and SERP features for our whole list.

You can compare Volume, SERPS Features, Difficulty, Organic CTR, and Priority across multiple lists, topics, and niches.
How to compare apples with apples
Comparing keywords is something our support team gets questions about all the time.
Should I target this word or that word?


For the long tail keyword, the Volume is a lot lower, Difficulty is also down, the Organic CTR is a bit up, and overall the Priority is down because of the drop in search volume.
But don’t discount it! By targeting these sorts of terms, you’re focusing more on the intent of the searcher. You’re also making your content relevant for all the other neighboring search terms.
Let’s compare the difference between freshwater and cultured pearls with how much are freshwater pearls worth.


Search volume is the same, but for the keyword how much are freshwater pearls worth Difficulty is up, but so is the overall Priority because the Organic CTR is higher.
But just because you’re picking between two long tail keywords doesn’t mean you’ve fully understood the long tail of search.
You know all those keywords I grabbed for my list earlier in this post? Well, here they are sorted into topics.

Look at all the different ways people search for the same thing. This is what drives the long tail of search — searcher diversity. If you tally all the volume up for the cultured topic, we’ve got a bigger group of keywords and overall more search volume. This is where you can use Keyword Explorer and the long tail to make informed decisions.
You’re laying out your virtual welcome mat for all the potential traffic these terms send.
Platinum level: I lied — there’s one more level!
For all you lovely overachievers out there who have reached the end of this post, I’m going to reward you with one final tip.
You’ve done all the snooping around on your competitors, so you know who you’re up against. You’ve done the research, so you know what keywords to target to begin driving intent-rich traffic.
Now you need to create strong, consistent, and outstanding content.
As Dr Pete confirmed:
We don’t have to work ourselves to death to target the long tail of search. It doesn’t take 10,000 pieces of content to rank for 10,000 variants of a phrase, and Google (and our visitors) would much prefer we not spin out that content. The new, post-NLP (Natural Language Processing) long tail of SEO requires us to understand how our keywords fit into semantic space, mapping their relationships and covering the core concepts. Study your SERPs diligently, and you can find the patterns to turn your own long tail of keywords into a chonky thorax of opportunity.
Here’s where you really have to tip your hat to long tail keywords, because by strategically targeting the long tail you can start to build enough authority in the industry to beat stronger competition and rank higher for more competitive keywords in your niche.
Wrapping up…
The various different keyword phrases that make up the long tail in your industry are vast, often easier to rank for, and indicate stronger intent from the searcher. By targeting them you’ll find you can start to rank for relevant phrases sooner than if you just targeted the head. And over time, if you get the right signals, you’ll be able to rank for keywords with tougher competition. Pretty sweet, huh? Give Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool a whirl and let me know how you get on 🙂
MARKETING
Comparing Credibility of Custom Chatbots & Live Chat

Addressing customer issues quickly is not merely a strategy to distinguish your brand; it’s an imperative for survival in today’s fiercely competitive marketplace.
Customer frustration can lead to customer churn. That’s precisely why organizations employ various support methods to ensure clients receive timely and adequate assistance whenever they require it.
Nevertheless, selecting the most suitable support channel isn’t always straightforward. Support teams often grapple with the choice between live chat and chatbots.
The automation landscape has transformed how businesses engage with customers, elevating chatbots as a widely embraced support solution. As more companies embrace technology to enhance their customer service, the debate over the credibility of chatbots versus live chat support has gained prominence.
However, customizable chatbot continue to offer a broader scope for personalization and creating their own chatbots.
In this article, we will delve into the world of customer support, exploring the advantages and disadvantages of both chatbots and live chat and how they can influence customer trust. By the end, you’ll have a comprehensive understanding of which option may be the best fit for your business.
The Rise of Chatbots
Chatbots have become increasingly prevalent in customer support due to their ability to provide instant responses and cost-effective solutions. These automated systems use artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to engage with customers in real-time, making them a valuable resource for businesses looking to streamline their customer service operations.
Advantages of Chatbots
24/7 Availability
One of the most significant advantages of custom chatbots is their round-the-clock availability. They can respond to customer inquiries at any time, ensuring that customers receive support even outside regular business hours.
Consistency
Custom Chatbots provide consistent responses to frequently asked questions, eliminating the risk of human error or inconsistency in service quality.
Cost-Efficiency
Implementing chatbots can reduce operational costs by automating routine inquiries and allowing human agents to focus on more complex issues.
Scalability
Chatbots can handle multiple customer interactions simultaneously, making them highly scalable as your business grows.
Disadvantages of Chatbots
Limited Understanding
Chatbots may struggle to understand complex or nuanced inquiries, leading to frustration for customers seeking detailed information or support.
Lack of Empathy
Chatbots lack the emotional intelligence and empathy that human agents can provide, making them less suitable for handling sensitive or emotionally charged issues.
Initial Setup Costs
Developing and implementing chatbot technology can be costly, especially for small businesses.
The Role of Live Chat Support
Live chat support, on the other hand, involves real human agents who engage with customers in real-time through text-based conversations. While it may not offer the same level of automation as custom chatbots, live chat support excels in areas where human interaction and empathy are crucial.
Advantages of Live Chat
Human Touch
Live chat support provides a personal touch that chatbots cannot replicate. Human agents can empathize with customers, building a stronger emotional connection.
Complex Issues
For inquiries that require a nuanced understanding or involve complex problem-solving, human agents are better equipped to provide in-depth assistance.
Trust Building
Customers often trust human agents more readily, especially when dealing with sensitive matters or making important decisions.
Adaptability
Human agents can adapt to various customer personalities and communication styles, ensuring a positive experience for diverse customers.
Disadvantages of Live Chat
Limited Availability
Live chat support operates within specified business hours, which may not align with all customer needs, potentially leading to frustration.
Response Time
The speed of response in live chat support can vary depending on agent availability and workload, leading to potential delays in customer assistance.
Costly
Maintaining a live chat support team with trained agents can be expensive, especially for smaller businesses strategically.
Building Customer Trust: The Credibility Factor
When it comes to building customer trust, credibility is paramount. Customers want to feel that they are dealing with a reliable and knowledgeable source. Both customziable chatbots and live chat support can contribute to credibility, but their effectiveness varies in different contexts.
Building Trust with Chatbots
Chatbots can build trust in various ways:
Consistency
Chatbots provide consistent responses, ensuring that customers receive accurate information every time they interact with them.
Quick Responses
Chatbots offer instant responses, which can convey a sense of efficiency and attentiveness.
Data Security
Chatbots can assure customers of their data security through automated privacy policies and compliance statements.
However, custom chatbots may face credibility challenges when dealing with complex issues or highly emotional situations. In such cases, the lack of human empathy and understanding can hinder trust-building efforts.
Building Trust with Live Chat Support
Live chat support, with its human touch, excels at building trust in several ways:
Empathy
Human agents can show empathy by actively listening to customers’ concerns and providing emotional support.
Tailored Solutions
Live chat agents can tailor solutions to individual customer needs, demonstrating a commitment to solving their problems.
Flexibility
Human agents can adapt to changing customer requirements, ensuring a personalized and satisfying experience.
However, live chat support’s limitations, such as availability and potential response times, can sometimes hinder trust-building efforts, especially when customers require immediate assistance.
Finding the Right Balance
The choice between custom chatbots and live chat support is not always binary. Many businesses find success by integrating both options strategically:
Initial Interaction
Use chatbots for initial inquiries, providing quick responses, and gathering essential information. This frees up human agents to handle more complex cases.
Escalation to Live Chat
Implement a seamless escalation process from custom chatbots to live chat support when customer inquiries require a higher level of expertise or personal interaction.
Continuous Improvement
Regularly analyze customer interactions and feedback to refine your custom chatbot’s responses and improve the overall support experience.
Conclusion
In the quest to build customer trust, both chatbots and live chat support have their roles to play. Customizable Chatbots offer efficiency, consistency, and round-the-clock availability, while live chat support provides the human touch, empathy, and adaptability. The key is to strike the right balance, leveraging the strengths of each to create a credible and trustworthy customer support experience. By understanding the unique advantages and disadvantages of both options, businesses can make informed decisions to enhance customer trust and satisfaction in the digital era.
MARKETING
The Rise in Retail Media Networks

As LL Cool J might say, “Don’t call it a comeback. It’s been here for years.”
Paid advertising is alive and growing faster in different forms than any other marketing method.
Magna, a media research firm, and GroupM, a media agency, wrapped the year with their ad industry predictions – expect big growth for digital advertising in 2024, especially with the pending US presidential political season.
But the bigger, more unexpected news comes from the rise in retail media networks – a relative newcomer in the industry.
Watch CMI’s chief strategy advisor Robert Rose explain how these trends could affect marketers or keep reading for his thoughts:
GroupM expects digital advertising revenue in 2023 to conclude with a 5.8% or $889 billion increase – excluding political advertising. Magna believes ad revenue will tick up 5.5% this year and jump 7.2% in 2024. GroupM and Zenith say 2024 will see a more modest 4.8% growth.
Robert says that the feeling of an ad slump and other predictions of advertising’s demise in the modern economy don’t seem to be coming to pass, as paid advertising not only survived 2023 but will thrive in 2024.
What’s a retail media network?
On to the bigger news – the rise of retail media networks. Retail media networks, the smallest segment in these agencies’ and research firms’ evaluation, will be one of the fastest-growing and truly important digital advertising formats in 2024.
GroupM suggests the $119 billion expected to be spent in the networks this year and should grow by a whopping 8.3% in the coming year. Magna estimates $124 billion in ad revenue from retail media networks this year.
“Think about this for a moment. Retail media is now almost a quarter of the total spent on search advertising outside of China,” Robert points out.
You’re not alone if you aren’t familiar with retail media networks. A familiar vernacular in the B2C world, especially the consumer-packaged goods industry, retail media networks are an advertising segment you should now pay attention to.
Retail media networks are advertising platforms within the retailer’s network. It’s search advertising on retailers’ online stores. So, for example, if you spend money to advertise against product keywords on Amazon, Walmart, or Instacart, you use a retail media network.
But these ad-buying networks also exist on other digital media properties, from mini-sites to videos to content marketing hubs. They also exist on location through interactive kiosks and in-store screens. New formats are rising every day.
Retail media networks make sense. Retailers take advantage of their knowledge of customers, where and why they shop, and present offers and content relevant to their interests. The retailer uses their content as a media company would, knowing their customers trust them to provide valuable information.
Think about these 2 things in 2024
That brings Robert to two things he wants you to consider for 2024 and beyond. The first is a question: Why should you consider retail media networks for your products or services?
Advertising works because it connects to the idea of a brand. Retail media networks work deep into the buyer’s journey. They use the consumer’s presence in a store (online or brick-and-mortar) to cross-sell merchandise or become the chosen provider.
For example, Robert might advertise his Content Marketing Strategy book on Amazon’s retail network because he knows his customers seek business books. When they search for “content marketing,” his book would appear first.
However, retail media networks also work well because they create a brand halo effect. Robert might buy an ad for his book in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal because he knows their readers view those media outlets as reputable sources of information. He gains some trust by connecting his book to their media properties.
Smart marketing teams will recognize the power of the halo effect and create brand-level experiences on retail media networks. They will do so not because they seek an immediate customer but because they can connect their brand content experience to a trusted media network like Amazon, Nordstrom, eBay, etc.
The second thing Robert wants you to think about relates to the B2B opportunity. More retail media network opportunities for B2B brands are coming.
You can already buy into content syndication networks such as Netline, Business2Community, and others. But given the astronomical growth, for example, of Amazon’s B2B marketplace ($35 billion in 2023), Robert expects a similar trend of retail media networks to emerge on these types of platforms.
“If I were Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, HubSpot, or any brand with big content platforms, I’d look to monetize them by selling paid sponsorship of content (as advertising or sponsored content) on them,” Robert says.
As you think about creative ways to use your paid advertising spend, consider the retail media networks in 2024.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
MARKETING
AI driving an exponential increase in marketing technology solutions

The martech landscape is expanding and AI is the prime driving force. That’s the topline news from the “Martech 2024” report released today. And, while that will get the headline, the report contains much more.
Since the release of the most recent Martech Landscape in May 2023, 2,042 new marketing technology tools have surfaced, bringing the total to 13,080 — an 18.5% increase. Of those, 1,498 (73%) were AI-based.

“But where did it land?” said Frans Riemersma of Martech Tribe during a joint video conference call with Scott Brinker of ChiefMartec and HubSpot. “And the usual suspect, of course, is content. But the truth is you can build an empire with all the genAI that has been surfacing — and by an empire, I mean, of course, a business.”
Content tools accounted for 34% of all the new AI tools, far ahead of video, the second-place category, which had only 4.85%. U.S. companies were responsible for 61% of these tools — not surprising given that most of the generative AI dynamos, like OpenAI, are based here. Next up was the U.K. at 5.7%, but third place was a big surprise: Iceland — with a population of 373,000 — launched 4.6% of all AI martech tools. That’s significantly ahead of fourth place India (3.5%), whose population is 1.4 billion and which has a significant tech industry.
Dig deeper: 3 ways email marketers should actually use AI
The global development of these tools shows the desire for solutions that natively understand the place they are being used.
“These regional products in their particular country…they’re fantastic,” said Brinker. “They’re loved, and part of it is because they understand the culture, they’ve got the right thing in the language, the support is in that language.”
Now that we’ve looked at the headline stuff, let’s take a deep dive into the fascinating body of the report.
The report: A deeper dive
Marketing technology “is a study in contradictions,” according to Brinker and Riemersma.
In the new report they embrace these contradictions, telling readers that, while they support “discipline and fiscal responsibility” in martech management, failure to innovate might mean “missing out on opportunities for competitive advantage.” By all means, edit your stack meticulously to ensure it meets business value use cases — but sure, spend 5-10% of your time playing with “cool” new tools that don’t yet have a use case. That seems like a lot of time.
Similarly, while you mustn’t be “carried away” by new technology hype cycles, you mustn’t ignore them either. You need to make “deliberate choices” in the realm of technological change, but be agile about implementing them. Be excited by martech innovation, in other words, but be sensible about it.
The growing landscape
Consolidation for the martech space is not in sight, Brinker and Riemersma say. Despite many mergers and acquisitions, and a steadily increasing number of bankruptcies and dissolutions, the exponentially increasing launch of new start-ups powers continuing growth.
It should be observed, of course, that this is almost entirely a cloud-based, subscription-based commercial space. To launch a martech start-up doesn’t require manufacturing, storage and distribution capabilities, or necessarily a workforce; it just requires uploading an app to the cloud. That is surely one reason new start-ups appear at such a startling rate.
Dig deeper: AI ad spending has skyrocketed this year
As the authors admit, “(i)f we measure by revenue and/or install base, the graph of all martech companies is a ‘long tail’ distribution.” What’s more, focus on the 200 or so leading companies in the space and consolidation can certainly be seen.
Long-tail tools are certainly not under-utilized, however. Based on a survey of over 1,000 real-world stacks, the report finds long-tail tools constitute about half of the solutions portfolios — a proportion that has remained fairly consistent since 2017. The authors see long-tail adoption where users perceive feature gaps — or subpar feature performance — in their core solutions.
Composability and aggregation
The other two trends covered in detail in the report are composability and aggregation. In brief, a composable view of a martech stack means seeing it as a collection of features and functions rather than a collection of software products. A composable “architecture” is one where apps, workflows, customer experiences, etc., are developed using features of multiple products to serve a specific use case.
Indeed, some martech vendors are now describing their own offerings as composable, meaning that their proprietary features are designed to be used in tandem with third-party solutions that integrate with them. This is an evolution of the core-suite-plus-app-marketplace framework.
That framework is what Brinker and Riemersma refer to as “vertical aggregation.” “Horizontal aggregation,” they write, is “a newer model” where aggregation of software is seen not around certain business functions (marketing, sales, etc.) but around a layer of the tech stack. An obvious example is the data layer, fed from numerous sources and consumed by a range of applications. They correctly observe that this has been an important trend over the past year.
Build it yourself
Finally, and consistent with Brinker’s long-time advocacy for the citizen developer, the report detects a nascent trend towards teams creating their own software — a trend that will doubtless be accelerated by support from AI.
So far, the apps that are being created internally may be no more than “simple workflows and automations.” But come the day that app development is so democratized that it will be available to a wide range of users, the software will be a “reflection of the way they want their company to operate and the experiences they want to deliver to customers. This will be a powerful dimension for competitive advantage.”
Constantine von Hoffman contributed to this report.
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