Depending upon who is writing or speaking, targeting a niche is either an all important key to marketing success or an optional activity to be engaged in AFTER you have been marketing your product or service for years.
There’s a lot of “hype” out there about niche marketing… what it is and what it isn’t. Here’s an explanation of how the term “niche marketing” is used on this site.
Niche marketing is literally concentrating all of your marketing efforts upon a well defined segment of the population. A niche market may be quite small or quite large, depending upon how many people fall into your tightly targeted niche market.
A niche market is not something to be discovered, but rather a niche market is something you define and create.
To create your own niche market, you must first successfully identify a need or a want which is NOT being met in the market. Then, begin developing and delivering goods or services to satisfy the want or need you’ve identified. Follow that by creating tightly targeted marketing messages which let the world know about your products or services.
The Business Dictionary’s definition of Niche Marketing is surprisingly similar.
Niche marketing is also known as “behavioral targeting” in marketing and advertising circles.
Because the internet presents such a “big pond” in which to “fish” for customers, many business owners (especially those competing online) are embracing the marketing strategy of tightly targeting a well defined “niche” audience.
However, even if you’re taking your marketing messages to a geographically confined market, you still need to focus upon a target audience for your message.
Unfortunately, even those who believe that picking a niche is vital to your marketing success rarely offer more than a haphazard solution to actually TARGETING your niche market.
The dictionary Wordsmyth.net defines a niche as:
“a situation or activity for which a person or organization is especially well suited.”
From that definition, if one is going to perform an MBA style marketing SWOT * analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) then it goes without question that every business should first finds it’s niche and then begin to embark on promoting their product and services to that niche.
Defining your target market, or your “niche” is critical to your marketing success.
The book, Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results will help you to recognize the individual customers who make up your niche market. Once you’ve identified your target market or “niche”, then you’ll learn how to tailor your marketing message directly to individuals within your “niche.” By focusing on a individuals within this tightly targeted niche market, you’ll dramatically increase your advertising and marketing effectiveness .
If you’ve been in business for any time at all, your niche audience has probably already found you. After all, if you already have satisfied customers, then what you really need to do is to add more to their numbers.
Beyond the Niche will help you to identify the reasons those satisfied customers already do business with you!
Once you recognize WHY your customers choose you, then you can focus on telling OTHER PEOPLE just like those customers you already have why they should do business with you!
Beyond the Niche goes beyond broadly defined “niche categories” and delves into how you can personalize your marketing message so it breaks through the advertising clutter and connects with your target customer.
It’s all about the customer.
It’s just that simple. You simply shift your focus to your customers’ GDP= Goals, Desires and Problems
Sound easy, doesn’t it? However, if you don’t know who your customer is then you can’t know their goals, their desires or their problems. Worse yet, is when you think EVERYONE is your customer. If that’s the case, then your marketing messages are doomed to failure before you’ve paid a cent to deliver them to a non-targeted customer.
If you don’t know your customer’s Goals, Desires and Problems, then you can’t break through the clutter and capture their attention.
Look around you! As far as the eye can see there’s advertising clutter! Billboards are everywhere, radio stations take music breaks instead of commercial breaks… the same is true of television.
What can you possibly do to get your marketing messages to break through all that noise?
By targeting your niche market… and focusing on your target audience.
It’s just that simple.
If you need help doing this, be sure to pick up a copy of Beyond the Niche. It will take you step by step through the process of identifying your niche market’s unique needs and developing marketing messages that appeal directly to your target customer.
If you need a step by step guide to creating truly effective marketing messages for your small business- pick up a copy of my book Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results.
