Niche marketing and brand development go hand in hand because you really can’t effectively develop a brand without first choosing a target audience. When you choose that target audience – you are – in fact – choosing a NICHE market!
I’ve worked with top branding professional Rosemary Davies-Janes of Miboso.com for more than a decade. When Rosemary works with a client, she instinctively begins systematically narrowing the focus of her client’s marketing message to a target audience. It’s one of the main reasons she’s able to effectively develop cohesive brands for her clients. While some branding professionals think that branding is simply a logo and a color scheme – Rosemary recognizes that it’s so much more. Effective brand development is all about seeing the business through the eyes of the target audience and then building the individual branding elements – like logos, color schemes and marketing messages – to appeal to that specific audience.
When Rosemary and her graphic design team began designing the cover of my book, Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results
That focus upon the target market for the book influenced every aspect of the book cover design. From the choice of colors, to the choice of fonts to the choice of images displayed on the cover – the niche market was the focus of Rosemary’s efforts.
My favorite clients are the ones who have been through Rosemary’s “branding boot camp” experience. Rosemary takes small business owners through the grueling process of developing a powerful and effective brand because once a small business owner has had a brand developed by Miboso – bringing that marketing me3ssage to the web and other media is a relatively simple process. You simply choose appropriate places to feature your brilliantly branded marketing messages – and wait for the cash register to begin singing!
I’m currently working with a client who has not been through Rosemary’s branding boot camp – and to be honest, I’d forgotten how GRUELING the process of targeting a niche market can be. A while back I worked with another client who hadn’t been through Rosemary’s branding boot camp – and I finally gave up trying to nail her down in defining her target audience and sent her over to the crowd sourcing design site – 99designs.com for a logo for her self hosted blog. She posted her logo project on the site – and was instantly pummeled with questions from the better designers there asking for answers to the very questions she had been unwilling to answer in her preliminary work with me: who is the audience? what demographic information can you provide?
You can run from the questions which must be answered surrounding niche marketing – but in the end, those questions must be answered before you can begin the process of effective brand development. If you haven’ t tightly targeted your niche market – how can you expect to develop an effective brilliantly branded marketing message? Any brand development process embarked upon without a niche market definition is simply wasted time and effort.
Finding a niche, is definitely a process that requires a good systematic technique. Many people try to pinpoint a niche by cutting corners. The absolute best way, I’ve found, to find a niche market is to start with a broad market and work your way back. Most people simply try to think of niche without thinking about the broad market first. Start with a broad subject and keep working toward a specific niche.