Niche Marketing Strategy

Niche marketing is by far the most effective and efficient use of your marketing dollars.  By tightly targeting your audience – by getting to know who they are and what they want from your business – you can grow your business profitably without wasting marketing dollars pursuing potential customers who have neither the means nor the desire to purchase your product or service.

Many clients with whom I work are confused when it comes to creating an effective niche marketing strategy.  They somehow believe that by narrowing their marketing message and delivering it to “someone” – they’ll miss out on sales and profits.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather – by focusing your marketing message to a particular target audience – “someone” – you’ll increase the profitability of your marketing message.

Take for example – that popular social networking site – Facebook.   Contrary to popular belief – EVERYONE on the planet is NOT on Facebook – but with over 500 Million active users (according to the site) – chances are that Facebook has the attention of more than enough eyeballs to fill your business with all the customers you could ever want or need.

If you were to decide to run an ad on Facebook to bring a handful or so of the half a BILLION users to your business – Facebook would begin by asking you to compose your ad.  Later it will ask you WHICH of it’s users you wish to target.  If you created the first step – without an eye on the second – then you’ll probably find your results are less than stellar.

The fact is – if you don’t want to be flushing your hard earned money down the online advertising rat hole – you’d better invest some time and effort getting to know what’s going on with your prospective users and why they should be buying from you.

I once worked for over six months with a client – defining his target audience and getting to “know” who they were and why his customers were buying from him.  We then created a tightly targeted television commercial which effectively and concisely delivered the desired message.  The next step was making the media buy – and that’s where the process got UGLY.  The service fell squarely in the “health care” arena – so the local cable rep suggested my client run a schedule on what was known at that time as “Discovery Health”.   However, as scrolled through the upcoming programming – what I saw were back to back “baby” shows.  Their entire schedule for the upcoming month was focusing on labor and delivery.  That would have been fine if young mothers were my client’s target audience – but they weren’t.  My client’s niche market were more likely to be mothers of teens or even grandmothers.

Instead we chose to run the ads for this health care arena service on – get this – the Travel Channel.   No – he wasn’t running a travel agency – but in defining his niche market we knew that his ideal clients were probably watching shows on that network.

The “knee jerk” reaction of the rep was to offer up a network with “health” in the name – without looking at the demographics of the audience those shows were delivering.

If my client hadn’t carefully identified his ideal target audience – he might have thrown his money away on that media buy.  Instead – he was able to choose a better fit – which resulted in a successful niche market campaign.

You’ve GOT to know the who, what, where, when and why of your target audience.  Need help? Pick up a copy of  Beyond the Niche: Essential Tools You Need to Create Marketing Messages that Deliver Results