Companies trippin’ over the webs’ White Noise Hurdle

How does White Noise cannibalization of the Long tail impact online businesses?

Smarter shoppers, harder shoppers:
White Noise can be seen as commercial website pollution. Web users, your future and potential customers are getting wiser, smarter, but regrettably they are also getting more suspicious. Remember that a user makes his mind up about a website in less than 3 seconds, in the next 5 to 10 seconds he will have decided whether he wants to leave the site or not.

Credibility, trust and confidence:
As a consequence of the web’s White Noise, the level of effort to build trust and confidence is much greater. But trust also has less time to be conveyed to your visitors, it is now a matter of seconds. Branding and brand values become increasingly important, as brand reinforces positive consumer perceptions and confidence.

Getting into search engines:
Getting in to search engines but especially ranking in the first few pages has become all the more difficult. Greater competition for the same markets, the White Noise of millions of blogs and affiliates sites have pushed Search Engines to be more stringent in the way they measure, rank websites and display search results. So you will need more effort, more patience and greater skills to rank high in Search Engines today compared to just a few years ago.

Added value and differentiation:
Cannibalization of your audience by the White Noise layer, your competition, direct and indirect make your efforts to differentiate all the more important. Your business strategy must focus on added value and benefits of your products and services. Your communication strategy, your website, content strategy and marketing need to be fine tuned to much higher standards to be successful.

Research and preparation:
So your preparation and strategy caries a higher level of effort. No longer do you focus on just your target market, but you sub divide it in market segments. Each market segment gets chopped in sub segments that evolve with products and seasonality, geo location of your customers, etc… simple right?

Website content structure:
What the hell is this? Well structuring a site and its content does simply need to cater to your audience. It needs to cater to search engines, RSS feeds, support marketing activities branding activities, email. You don’t just build a site for people, you build it for systems, crawlers, spiders, scrapers. You don’t have content, information, words… you need “Hyper relevant content” in a properly structured Niche ladder structure.

Marketing and PPC:
Long tail market segments aren’t cheap anymore. Everybody targets Long tail keywords, the White Noise Layer is full of failed attempts of sites and blogs targeting the Long tail micro segments. Result: Even when bidding in the PPC arena on Long tail words, they cost a lot. White noise has pushed cheap 5 cent words to 15, 20 and 15cents a click for ridiculously small volumes.

Customer retention and conversion:
Of the many consequences of the increase competition in the Long tail is the ever increasing need to develop and improve customer conversion and retention. Customer life cycle and spending is getting shorter as loyalty drops, but an increasing proportion of your profits lie in your businesses capabilities to generate repeat business and customer retention.