Ask any marketing consultant their biggest frustration when they work with SMB clients – and they’ll probably tell you that getting their client to tightly focus their marketing efforts at a well defined target audience – a.k.a. implementing a niche marketing strategy – is by far the hardest part of the job.
I spent so much time “wrestling” with clients over the importance of tightly targeting their marketing message to a well defined target audience – I wrote an entire book on the subject, Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.
When I started launching self hosted WordPress blogs as a marketing tactic for my SMB clients – I found I had to revisit the whole “tightly targeting your target audience” conversation all over again.
Whether it’s an advertising campaign launched in “traditional” media – or an online advertising campaign – when you tightly target your message – you greatly increase your odds of success.
Just the other day, I was contacted by a client with whom I had worked four or five years ago. I was surprised to hear that she wanted to begin working with me again. During our time together, I constantly battled with her to tightly target her service offerings to a narrowly defined audience. During our work together, we determined her target audience was divorced woman over 50. What I saw when I went to her website was a link in the sidebar which took you to a page targeted towards “guys and gals under 50″. I asked her why – and she reported, “Someone told me to do that.”
A thousand lashes for such hair brained advice!!!
Any marketing consultant who tries to tell you that you shouldn’t be pursuing a niche marketing strategy for your small business should be fired immediately. If my client had started with my predecessor instead of me – her email newsletter list wouldn’t be growing by leaps and bounds today. Those “spray and pray” web pages and articles have been relegated to the deepest, darkest parts of Google’s index.
Meanwhile- over the past four to five years – those tightly targeted web pages and articles have slowly been gaining valuable “ground” in the search engines. If you type in “divorced women over 50” – you’ll see one of her tightly targeted articles on the first page of Google.
Happily, the reason she contacted me was that she has seen a surge in newsletter subscribers – and she wasn’t sure why. I assured her that the recent updates to Google’s algorithm are probably responsible for her cherished top 5 position on this tightly targeted keyword and we’re going to resume our work on pursuing a tightly targeted niche audience for her services.
Can a woman under 50 benefit from Judy’s services as a divorce coach? Most definitely. However, Judy is quick to point out that she doesn’t want to coach women who are involved in child custody disputes – which makes targeting women over 50 an ideal audience for her.
Implementing a niche marketing strategy doesn’t have to be “limiting”. On the contrary, by tightly focusing on a small niche audience – it’s easier to create compelling and selling marketing messages.
