How do you scale search marketing?

For the keywords that are at the center of your market and brand, the best you can do to increase your flow of traffic is to tweak your ad creatives. But there’s only so much tweaking to be done in a 130 characters of plain text.

The other way to scale search marketing is through word associations.

For instance, if you’re a pizzeria, it’s pretty straightforward to bid for “pizza” and its variations. But that only works when people are explicitly searching for pizza. To expand your reach, you can bid on other keywords that might catch people in a seducible moment for pizza, even if that wasn’t at the top of their mind.

Our hypothetical pizzeria might bid on:

• birthday parties
• office parties
• affordable catering (really affordable)
• picnic places (yes, pizza delivered to the nearby park)
• sports bars (forget the bar, have beer and pizza at home!)
• gifts for new parents (pizza delivery gift cards — a life saver)

…and so on. I’m not saying that all of these are necessarily great ideas, but these are the types of above-the-funnel associations that businesses must consider as they expand their search marketing. This is part of what Long Tail marketing is all about.

However, it’s not always obvious — to the marketer or the audience.

The farther out you go in your associations, the greater chance you have of people scratching their heads and saying, “Pizza gift cards for new parents? Are you kidding?” They might click on the ad out of curiosity, but with a healthy dose of skepticism.

This is where post-click marketing must connect the dots.

Just sending them to the regular pizzeria’s home page won’t necessarily make the connection.

But if Hypothetical Pizzeria has a landing page that speaks directly to the topic of why delivered pizza is a new parent’s miracle dinner — a gift guaranteed to be savored when it’s most needed — maybe with a little humor, maybe not (that’s what A/B testing is for) — they might pull in a whole new set of customers. And, assuming the pizza is good, a happy new customer has a high probability of becoming a repeat customer.

The “pizza for new parents” landing page doesn’t have to be a big production. Spending 15-30 minutes or so on it — coincidentally, about the time it takes for a pizza to be delivered — would be more than sufficient. And then move on to the next Long Tail idea.

Long Tail marketing is about trying lots of ideas. Some will work, many won’t. You want to keep your investment in any one relatively low until it’s proven itself out. But by connecting the dots with your post-click marketing, you’ll find that a lot more work than you may have expected.