For businesses who sell specialized products or services, understanding niche marketing is an absolute must. In this blog, we’ll discuss some of the benefits of marketing to a specific group of people, as well as some top strategies to do so.
What is Niche Marketing?
Within each target audience are smaller subgroups of people, also known as niches. Niche marketing then, refers to how a business promotes to these narrower audiences.
For example, ESPN targets sports fans, which is already a niche (although a rather broad one). But, for their NFL programs, they develop even narrower niche marketing campaigns to appeal to football enthusiasts.
So, while niches are subgroups of the entire consumer market, they’re not necessarily tiny. It’s safe to say that there are a lot of sports fans out there, however, they still occupy a niche because they only make up a fraction of the entire market.
Benefits of Marketing to a Niche
Brand Loyalty through Close Client Relationships
Since there are relatively fewer people in a niche audience, it’s extra important to build brand loyalty among your clients to turn them into repeat buyers. Luckily, catering your marketing efforts to a specific group of people makes it a lot easier to understand their behaviors, language and needs after a while.
Highly-personalized emails, useful blog content and a relevant social media strategy will certainly keep niche clients coming back to you in the future.
Fewer Competitors
The more specialized your products or services, the fewer companies there are doing the exact same thing you’re doing. Thus, competition is not as steep, allowing you to set your own prices and do things your own way.
A Budget Better Spent
When you understand a niche, you’ll know which forms of marketing work. This way, you can allocate your assets to whichever platforms perform best for you, and forget about the others.
How to Market to a Niche
Conduct Thorough Research
If you’re considering niche marketing for a hyper-narrow audience, be sure to conduct enough research to determine whether or not it’s actually feasible. Though you’re promoting to a niche, you still have to appeal to enough people to be profitable.
Research will also give you some valuable insight as to how you can best reach your audience, whether through digital marketing or more traditional methods.
Attend Industry Events
Attending tradeshows and networking events relevant to your niche is absolutely one of the best ways to increase brand awareness. You may meet future customers or business partners in person, and will likely find inspiration for your next marketing campaign or product launch.
Test Every Available Marketing Medium
Since niche marketing is sometimes extremely specific, it can be tricky to figure out the best mediums of promotion. For example, the targeting criteria offered by most social media platforms may be a bit too broad to really hone in on a small population. Try out everything, ranging from email marketing to print ads to PPC, in order to figure out what resonates the most.
Whether your business focuses strictly on a small audience or uses niche marketing as just one facet of a larger promotional strategy, make sure you don’t fixate your efforts on a market so narrow it’s not lucrative.
