A few articles get most of the clicks.
A few videos get most of the views.
A few posts get most of the engagement.
The top performers don’t just get better results, they get exponentially better results. Marketing charts are never straight lines, they’re hockey stick curves. The top performers in any marketing channel get all the love.
For years I’ve been looking at these charts, asking Why the steep drop? Why the long tail? What is this pattern??
Then I came across Zipf’s Law.
It’s a statistical concept that came out of linguistics, but can be applied to any list of values. It states that when you sort a list in decreasing order, “the value of the nth entry is inversely proportional to n.” In other words, second place has half the value of number one. And third place has one third. And so on down the line…
Marketing charts usually follow a curve. Here’s a quick example. It shows the organic clickthrough rates for non-branded keyphrases in Google, based on their search position. (source)
It’s an almost perfect match. In Google, organic CTRs follow the Zipfian distribution. The top ranked site gets around 25% of the clicks. Number two gets 12.5%.
Does this apply in other channels? I reached out to the marketer with the most data, Pete Caputa, founder of Databox, to discuss. He shared some charts from his Databox Benchmarks project. He shared other charts that follow this pattern.
I’ll show those here, then below I’ll show three ways to adapt your marketing to this reality.
Content formats: Video
First, YouTube views per video. In this dataset of 23k videos, a tiny percentage of YouTube videos gets most of the views.
Marketing channels: Social media
Next, LinkedIn. In this dataset of 750 company pages, a tiny percentage of LinkedIn company pages get most of the clicks.
Pages on websites
It’s also true for website traffic. In this dataset of 9926 GA4 accounts, you can see that a tiny percentage of pages get most of the traffic.
Probably, you aren’t surprised.
Probably, you’ve seen this before.
You can find this pattern across all marketing channels.
- Social media influence: A small number of accounts have disproportionately large followings and engagement rates, while most accounts have small followings and low engagement.
- Email campaign performance: A few campaigns achieve exceptionally high open and click-through rates, while most campaigns do not perform nearly as well.
- Ad clicks and impressions: A small minority of ads receive the majority of clicks and impressions, while most ads get very low performance.
- SEO authority: A small set of pages attract the majority of links from other websites, while most pages attract no links at all.
- Content virality: A tiny percentage of articles, videos, and social posts go viral. Most get shared very little.
And of course, the Zipf distribution is there in the mind of your target audience. How many brands are top-of-mind in any given vertical? Two or three at most.
It’s clear. The top performers across all marketing formats and channels don’t just get better results. They get exponentially better results.
So what? How does this affect my marketing strategy?
With George Zipf in mind, our goal should be to create top performers, where results are 100x the typical results.
But how?
Focus. Don’t dabble in a bunch of channels and formats. Choose one or two and go all in. Quit the channels and formats that you aren’t committed to. Pick your battles and put in 10x efforts. Keep going until you can notch some big wins. Don’t expand into new channels until you’ve got strong results that you can leverage.
Peter Caputa IV, CEO of Databox“If you want to win in a new marketing channel, you have to go all-in. Doing a little bit on Youtube, a bit on your blog, Linkedin, X, etc isn’t going to cut it. In any given population of companies doing some specific marketing activity, some companies put extraordinary effort into a channel and crush it. Some put in half that and do half as well, and then some who do half that — and so on until you get really close to zero. The results follow the effort.” |
So true. Thank you for the insights, Pete! And for sharing your data. Want to benchmark your marketing performance? Try Databox Benchmarks. It takes just a few minutes to set up.
To the victor go the spoils
There are three strategic approaches that correlate with top performance. I’ll borrow these from a history book I once read. It had a chapter about surviving plagues in the middle ages, which sounds irrelevant but applies perfectly here. Winning at marketing is exactly like surviving a plague, but hear me out. It makes sense.
1. Leave early
The first mover advantage is real. Brands that launch early on a new channel often gain traction quickly. From TikTok to LinkedIn newsletters, the top accounts in each niche are often the accounts who got in early. Of course, this doesn’t always work out. Just ask a Google+ influencer.
But it’s never too late to launch a content program.
There are people out there right now, looking for your expertise and insights. So get started. The sooner you start, the sooner you get feedback, learn, iterate, improve and build. You can’t optimize until you have data.
2. Go far
The top marketers don’t do a little more. They do a lot more. They obsess over quality.
We’ve seen this again and again in the data from our annual blogging survey. The top performers write much longer posts, publish much more frequency, use many more visuals, etc.
- Be the primary source. Publish original research.
- Take a stand. Publish strong opinions or counter-narratives.
- High frequency. Put out way more than your competitors.
- Dig deep. Publish much more in-depth, detailed content than your competition.
Pro Tip: 10x content isn’t always 10x more words. Try to make something 10x more concise. It’s challenging but your audience may love it.
What does Zipf’s Law mean in the context of AI? The best AI use cases are for quality, not speed. Find ways to have AI help you create more top performers. Here are a few starting points:
- First, teach the AI about your target audience
- Then, ask the AI to review your most important assets
- Or use AI to find highly differentiated topics
It doesn’t matter how fast or efficient your content creation process is if the final result is just another medium quality blog post.
If the goal is 10x content, then why use AI to save time? Your readers don’t care how much time you spent writing it. But they do know if you exceeded their expectations for depth, detail and relevance.
3. Stay long
Digital marketing is an endurance sport. Some say it takes at least a year and a half to build a successful content program from scratch. And to build the top content program in your niche? These things take time.
Is your boss pushing back? Impatient for results? Just tell them they don’t know Zipf.
If they did, they’d know that discrete probability rank-frequency distributions are an inverse power law relation. Duh. The strategy implications are obvious.
What would it be worth to have one of the top blogs in your niche? The top YouTube channel or event or search rankings? It’s hard to imagine until you’ve seen marketing metrics for yourself. Most marketers have never stood in a steady stream of traffic and leads. Most dip their toes and move on.
These things take time, but are extremely valuable in the end. Persistence alone is omnipotent.