Blog About Niche Marketing For Small Audiences
Marketing In A Saturated Industry
How to stand out online with niche marketing
Feeling stuck in a crowded industry and unable to stand out? Do you have a niche product or service with a small audience? A yes to either of these means you know it's one heck of an uphill climb reaching your target audience & demographic.
This why leveraging niche marketing is a must for your business.
What Is Niche Marketing?
What is niche marketing and why you should use it
Niche marketing in a nutshell: any marketing tactic aimed to attract and convert a specific segment of your market with unique preferences & demands.
The standout differences between niche marketing and it's counterparts its use of hyper personalized communication and selectiveness about platforms.
To truly grasp the concept of niche marketing, we first need to understand what it is. In simple terms, a niche market is a defined, small segment of a larger market. This niche has its own needs, desires, and identity.
Let's use Simple Tax as an example. The accounting market is, let's admit it, insanely saturated with products and services. So what did they do? They targeted the small business owners, sole proprietorships, and individuals, and focused their marketing on user friendliness and accuracy - you know - since we all feel like we're "getting had" by The Man.
Why Start Niche Marketing?
Niche marketing and its advantages
Get More Visibility To The Right Audience
Narrowing down your focus to target solely relevant customers with niche marketing has a result of making you stand out of the crowd. Using strategies designed for the those who would most likely be interested in what you have to offer if is to your advantage. Know Your Client!
Marketing Budget Optimization
Instead of throwing money at a wider crowd that may get fewer conversions, targeting your niche means your odds of converting increase. The result is you spending less on ads while enjoying higher conversion rates.
Less Competition
Going niche means you may reach fewer people, but it also has the advantage of less competition. Most brands aim their marketing rather broadly, niche marketing allows for marketing a product or service to a specific group.
As you become more specialized, you may see fewer direct competitors.
7 Strategies to Use for Niche Marketing
What you can do to target your niche audience
1. General Keywords
This may sound counterintuitive, you would think your route is to use more super specific keywords. However, using niche-specific keywords may not get you the ton of traffic you're looking for.
The key is to understand the way your target audience searches online.
Their queries will no doubt have natural language and are very unlikely to have extremely specific keywords. That's why these particular keywords have really low search volumes. Here's an example using a specific niche keyword: handmade puzzles for children. It's search volume is near zilch. That doesn't mean there isn't a market for it! We've just used the wrong keyword strategy.
By being more general and using 'handmade puzzles' as the keywords, you're now going to show up for those looking for handmade puzzles. Who can you find in that audience? Surely a whole bunch of folks that have children around them, who would be inclined to make a purchase.
As you plan that niche strategy, be weary of how you do your keyword research. General keywords over hyper-targeted ones are the way to get your product or service out there to the best audiences most likely to convert.
2. Extensive Audience Research
Researching your audiences should be given the time it needs. Niche marketing is a bit more challenging than general marketing - you're answering unique demands. You need to understand what they truly want and how it should be delivered.
Audience research for a niche market:
Social Awareness:
Use social listening tools, like Google Alerts, to monitor what is being said about your brand, your products, services, or even yourself. Doing this will help you understand what your audience is looking for from brands like yours.
Competitor Research:
Who are they targeting? How much do they engage with their audience?
Buyer Personas:
Create the ideal customer personas so you can better know your client.
This may take time but you're doing this because your audience has unique needs and desires. The extensive research is needed to understand the best way to reach them. You'll discover pain points and to create your messaging to address them.
3. Choose Your Platforms With Care
Does being active on every platform matter? No.
If you're trying to reach a particularly tiny target audience, you need to consider which social media platforms they use regularly and get there.
For example, research shows you’re better off reaching millennials on Facebook when it comes to social media. Gen-Zers, on the other hand, prefer Snapchat.
Social Media Demographics
With a niche marketing strategy, being active everywhere is not a must. You just need to appear on the platforms your audience frequents.
Ask yourself these types of questions:
• Where do my customers shop?
• How do my customers find products?
• Which social media channels do my customers prefer?
Answering these should assist in narrowing down the platforms you chose to communicate with your target audience. Once decided, it's just a question of tailoring your content for those platforms.
This can help you maximize your marketing budget and should allow you to produce higher quality content. You'll be focusing your energy on platforms that can give you good Return On Ad Spend (ROAS).
4. Deep Dive Into Your Competitor’s Strategies
When it comes to marketing, particularly niche markets, your competition can be your best resource from which there can be a whole lot to learn. For example, you get much needed insight on:
• Your audience and theirs
• The market
• Your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses
Of course, competitor analysis starts by first identifying your competitors. From there, pay close attention to the:
• Keywords your competitor uses
• The way your competitor distributes their content and on which platforms
• How your competitor structures customer messaging
• How your competitor engages with their audience
Get as much intel as possible from your competitors. Doing so can help you know how to tailor more effective niche marketing strategies.
5. Build Relationships and Utilize Partnerships
Because the number of customers in a niche market is limited, you must devise ways to drum up business continuously. Here are some of the ways to do this:
Build A Relationship With Your Audience
A key to success in niche marketing is relationship building with your audience and customers. An important reason for this is good relationships mean return customers. It's generally simpler (and cheaper!) to retain customers than acquire new ones.
Strategic Partnerships
Strategic partnerships are vital to your success. Mike Holmes would be an excellent partnership with a specialized tool company. The tool is niche, Mike is HUGE. I'll be pointing to another strategic partnership that blew the world away, down below.
She who says niche marketing says you can not ignore relationships! Once you are trusted and known, selling becomes easier.
Specialized Marketing Agencies
Understanding your audience identification of threats
Partnering with specialized marketing agencies can be one of the best moves you can make. They know your audience better and are in a position to better identify threats -- and opportunities -- in your niche.
Partnering With Brands
Hook up with a brand your audience already knows. A good example is the Red Bull and GoPro duo. Can we call this a partnership made in heaven? Yes. Yes we can. Red Bull is a behemoth media brand while GoPro is a specialized brand, making cameras for capturing active lifestyles.
6. Brand Loyalty
Building your brand loyalty paves the way for your customers to shift into your brand ambassadors. It quite often leading to you having one of the most powerful marketing strategies of all time - Word Of Mouth Marketing (WOMM).
If research shows 83 percent of people trust recommendations from family and friends more so than any other source, that makes WOMM the marketing strat you need to employ. After all, when it comes to niche markets, the best way to get the world to know about your product is when other customers rave and rant about it.
This is all about brand loyalty. People who drink Tim Horton's hate coffee at Starbucks. Those who love a sausage egg McMuffin turn away from A&W's copycat - and the same goes vice versa.
Brand development methods include:
Creating Exceptional Experiences
From products to customer service, make sure every interaction with your customers have your brand smothered on them. In a positive way - of course! You want to me remembered.
A good (yet bizarre) example of this is Dick's Last Resort. Because there are so many false reviews for restaurants floating and bloating the internet, this place said "why not give them a reason". Their whole marketing strategy is based on giving you the rudest service possible, from insults to vitriol. Sounds counterproductive - but it worked! In a world where the culinary industry is saturated, where we worship chefs and Michelin stars, you need to stand out. They did.
Audience Engagement
Use. Every. Opportunity. Whenever you're given the chance to engage with customers, whether through email, social media, or elsewhere - take the time to do it.
Anticipate Needs
Those personas I mentioned? Use them to predict what your customers are likely to need and do the next logical thing; offer it to them. Doing so shows you value them as humans, their needs and desires, and you want to make life easier for them.
Core Values And Your Brand
By aligning your brand with your customer's core values, you're touching upon research that shows millennials prefer to buy from brands that are aligned with their own values. Knowing those values and fitting yours with them like a puzzle is crucial to developing brand loyalty.
In short, a loyal customer base is an essential piece of the marketing puzzle for success in niche markets.
7. Claim The Role As The Authority In Your Niche
Your biggest challenge (or one of) as a niche product or service is winning trust. Because of your audience and their unique preferences, they'll need to trust that you can deliver as promised.
A couple of useful ways to your claim to niche market fame:
Create valuable resources
Resources like blog posts, case studies, and white papers can showcase your expertise and build authority.
Give Free Advice
Leverage niche forums and social media to engage in conversations with your niche audience. As you do so, give free advice. This could show your customers you understand their needs.
Run Webinars
Information for niche markets can be scarce. Run webinars to educate and inform your audience to help them find what they need.
Once you establish yourself as an authority in your niche, customers should come looking for you, and their word of mouth could result in free marketing.
Last Words (finally!)
Niche marketing can be a scary place if you're not certain how to approach it. With a proper strategy, you should on your way to:
• Optimize your marketing budget
• Increase your conversion rates
• Reduce your competition
Your niche audience is always looking to be understood. Once your figure that out, once you understand who they are what they need, get out there and rock the world!
Which strategy would you use? Let me know in the comments below!
Need help setting up a communication strategy? Contact my team and I at info@tldr.quebec.
Much love and happy niche marketing!
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