Long-Tail Paid Diversification
After the big four ad platforms, buy the dozens of small ones nobody bothers to set up.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~months to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
Once the four or five major ad platforms are covered, Deel deliberately went down-market into placements that individually look too small to care about — review sites, newsletters, podcasts, niche sites with 50-100k monthly visitors. No single one moves the number, but collectively they diversify lead flow and add up to roughly 30% of it. They are overlooked precisely because each one takes real setup effort for a small return.
Origin
Deel's paid team practice, described by Berkowitz. The insight is that the effort-to-payoff ratio per placement is what keeps competitors out, which is exactly why the aggregate is available.
Core principles
- 01Individually insignificant, collectively material: ten small placements beat waiting for one big one.
- 02The barrier is effort, not money — that is what makes it a durable edge.
- 03Diversified lead sources are a resilience asset, not just a volume asset.
- 04Budget the team's time accordingly: the long tail deserves as many hours as Facebook and Google.
How to run it
- 1
Cover the big platforms first
Establish the basics on the four or five major ad platforms before going anywhere else. The long tail is an extension, not a substitute.
- 2
Enumerate long-tail placements your buyer touches
Build a list of review sites, niche newsletters, podcasts, and smaller outlets that run ads — including sites with only 50,000-100,000 monthly visitors, which look negligible on a media plan.
Pro tip A single podcast ad will not bring 2,000 customers. Ten of them start to add up.
- 3
Staff the setup work honestly
Accept that each placement must be set up from scratch and takes real effort. Deel's paid team spends as much time running third-party smaller platform ads as it does running Facebook and Google.
Watch out This is where most teams quit — the placements are 'oftentimes overlooked because they're not as easy'. That difficulty is the moat.
- 4
Refresh creative on a fixed cadence
Treat creative fatigue as a certainty: an ad that works stops working in about three weeks. Update the ads on a monthly cycle, with the exception of a few Google ads that must stay blunt and direct.
Pro tip Also re-sync messaging as the product evolves — even a well-performing ad goes stale against a product that has moved on.
- 5
Judge the aggregate, not each placement
Evaluate the long tail as one portfolio line. No individual outlet will justify itself; the diversified sum is the unit of decision.
In the wild
After covering the big ad platforms, Deel's paid team built out review sites, newsletter ads, podcast ads and niche websites with as few as 50,000 monthly visitors — each requiring bespoke setup that most competitors will not do.
→ The long tail collectively became roughly 30% of Deel's overall lead flow, with materially more diversified sources than a Google-plus-Meta-only program.
Common mistakes
Dismissing a placement because it is small
Judged one at a time, every long-tail outlet fails the bar. The correct unit of analysis is the sum, which is around 30% of lead flow.
Letting a winning ad ride
Creative fatigue is real — people stop responding after about three weeks. An ad that is still 'working' is already decaying, and its messaging may also have drifted out of sync with the current product.
Is it for you?
Best for
A paid acquisition lead at a company that has already saturated Google and Meta and needs both incremental volume and less concentration risk.
Not ideal for
A very early team with one part-time marketer — the setup effort per placement will starve the fundamentals.
From the transcript
“we started looking into the long tail places so those are the platforms that individually never contribute a significant enough chunk for you to individually…”
“you run an individual podcast ad yeah you're probably not going to get 2 000 customers from one podcast but you run 10 of those…”
“our paid ads team they spend just as much time running Facebook and Google ads as they do running those third-party much smaller platform ads”
“creative fatigue is a real thing you know when you put an ad out there that works for three weeks people get tired of seeing…”
From the episode
An inside look at Deel’s unprecedented growth
Meltem Kuran Berkowitz (Head of Growth)