Despite doing their best, brands often fail to grow and increase their consumer-base. Among several reasons accounting for their failure, some are
- Losing the focus
- Losing the momentum
- Targeting the wrong group
These reasons are way too common, but brands tend to overlook them. Keeping the focus intact, harnessing the momentum and reaching the right group – all become easy when a brand aims for niche marketing.
In this article, we’ll shed light on niche marketing benefits and discuss the best practices.
Niche marketing for dummies
A niche market consists of a fairly small group of purchasers. It is also a highly specialized market. A golf equipment manufacturer is a player in the niche market. The consumers are either golf players or retail outlets that place bulk orders.
There’s a perception that local businesses operate in the niche market. That’s not true. Operating locally doesn’t necessarily indicate catering to niche consumers – it depends on the company’s product line and the industry it belongs.
Benefits of niche marketing
Niche marketing opens the doors for new avenues. Every industry has niche areas. Selecting a niche area allows you to streamline your marketing goals. You can focus on an achievable target and the chances of success increase dramatically.
Organic growth is very common in niche marketing. Here’s an example; you open a auto parts recycling center near an automobile store, or near a towing service. You don’t have to find customers, customers will find you.
As niche marketing brings targeted prospects at a reduced cost, small businesses can make substantial gain from it. The competition is low in niche marketing.
Niche marketing strategies
In the preceding paragraphs, we’ve discussed the benefits of niche marketing. Now let’s have a look at the best practices, following which you can make the most out of niche marketing.
Strategy #1: Finding customers
The customer pool for niche businesses is small, take advantage of that. Create customer profile before you start the hunt. Because you are selling products that satisfy specific needs of customers, identifying them is easy for you.
Let’s say you sell cheap Smartphone cases. Your niche market consists of people who can’t afford pricey cases.
How can you identify them?
Simple. Keep the top and bottom price brackets of your products under the affordability margin. This will automatically make people looking for Smartphone cases at an affordable price range your customers.
Niche business forums are scattered all over the Internet, making it easy for both a business and a customer to find each other. Social listening is a great way to find customers. Don’t forget to build an email list. Since customers are targeted, it’s easy to reengage with them, but you may lose their contact details if you don’t build a list.
Strategy #2: Customer testimonials
An average customer now reads six reviews before buying something. He prefers testimonials from past or existing customers, someone whom he never met before.
You may wonder how a niche market can function as a leverage for customer testimonials. I’ve mentioned already that niche marketing fixates on a targeted segment of customers. It’s easy to persuade them to write positive reviews for your brands, provided you treated them well. Powerful customer testimonials can do wonder for your business.
User-generated content (UGC) is the new mantra in content marketing. Customer testimonials are UGC and promote a company for free. The content looks 100% organic. As it comes from customers belonging in your niche, the prospective customers take it seriously.
Strategy #3: URL and site content
A domain should be reflective of the niche where a business belongs. The more specific the domain name, the better for the business. Niche marketing largely depends on the URL and the content on the site – the two are critical to its success.
How does a niche-specific URL look like?
Let’s say you have a tech blog and you want to cover news and updates on iPhone 8 (rumored). You can choose this domain name: iphone8update.com. From the domain name, it’s clear to your readers that the site is about iPhone 8 news and speculations. Someone who wants news on Android 6.1 Marshmallow will not visit your site. Your visitors will be people interested to know about iPhone 8.
Here’s a cautionary advice; Google hates URLs that are a poor rip-off of competitive keywords. The search engine giant already warned digital marketers about this. Besides, it’s a small ranking factor. Even Bing released a spam filtering for keyword-stuffing, which would presumably affect three percent of search queries.
The content should revolve around the niche – it can be on the hottest trends, the case studies or the information that customers don’t know yet. Cutting through niche content marketing is challenging but overcoming the challenge is worth.
Select a social network that you deem most useful for businesses belonging to your niche. Take peer opinion in case you are not sure which platform to select. If you want my opinion, I wouldn’t recommend Facebook.
Surprised, right?
I have my reasons. Facebook is a good platform for advertising, but not for organic niche marketing. It’s tough to identify targeted customers there. You might argue that there are many groups in Facebook and joining those groups can bring you close to your customers, but no, the majority of members in those groups are people like you.
Pinterest, Gentlemint, Cafemom and LinkedIn are the best social channels for niche marketing. Pinterest is predominantly used by women. So if you sell women’s products, then create a presence on Pinterest and repin from other’s pinboards. LinkedIn is the mecca for B2B marketers. The new boolean search feature can help you find key people from your industry and connect to them. Cafemom is a social network for moms; you can’t find a better marketplace for kid’s products.
Hence, make sure the social network you are selecting can add value to your niche business promotion.
Strategy #5: Solve customer’s problems
In order to be ahead in the competition, you need to have a USP. Solving the problems faced by customers can work like a charm. You will earn reputation and besides, grow on the seedy underbelly of your niche market.
For example, customers often complain restaurants cannot accommodate special requests. They take orders but make delay in delivering the food. You can open a food joint which takes orders and sends the food right in time. In this example, late delivery of food is the problem and your business solves it.
The more customer problems you’ll address and solve, the better will be your acceptability in your niche and the more growth opportunities you’ll have.
Conclusion
Success in niche marketing can bring you better results than mainstream marketing. Some brands have a presence in various niche markets. Some bloggers make money from AdSense by writing niche-specific content. To explore the opportunities in niche marketing, follow the five strategies shared here.
Images: ”Business concept – girl with screen / Shutterstock.com“
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