Defining a target audience is one of the greatest challenges I help clients to overcome. Implementing a niche marketing strategy is a formula for success. It can make it easier to create compelling and selling marketing messages. By focusing on a specific audience – you reduce your competition. When you reduce your competition, you increase your odds of success.
Targeting your message reduces competition and increases your odds of marketing success.
A former client contacted me the other day. I got a lot of push back when we worked together, so I was surprised. When we worked together, she did not want to limit herself to a specific audience. Eventually she chose a target audience. I then created a website for her targeting that audience. That’s where our work together ended. She fired me before I could complete work on her website.
She contacted me the other day because she wanted to hire me again.
She shared that she had found a consultant who told her what she wanted to hear If she expanded her audience, her business would grow faster.
Free from the “constraints” a niche marketing strategy placed upon her business, she was free to pursue every thought and every fad. She had hated the constraints that targeting a specific audience had placed on her . However, without those constraints, she lost focus.
As the years passed, the targeted content I created for her rose in search results. Why? Because there wasn’t much competition for those keywords. By targeting her message, she was creating content for a specific audience. This audience was too small for bigger sites to target, but it was perfect for her small business.
Meanwhile her new content was in the internet wastelands. When a website isn’t focused, there’s just too much competition to stand out.
When she contacted me, she confessed that she had to take a full time job to pay the bills. She wanted to give her business another shot. She wanted me to help.
When we first worked together, I had to work really hard to get her to focus on the problems she was solving for her clients. She wanted her business to be about making money. She thought if she targeted more people with her message, her business would make more money.
She didn’t realize that when she stopped targeting her audience, she increased the number of competitors.
When we first worked together, she was the only one targeting that audience. When she contacted me the other day, others had rushed in to fill that space. Those competitors, by the way, were targeting this audience as well as other audiences. They were taking their core message and altering it slightly for each niche market. At the core was the same program, but the images and references were different for each audience.
She didn’t HAVE to confine herself to this particular niche market. Instead, she could have done as her competitors had done. She could have finished creating her product for this audience. Then she could have made changes to her program, altering it slightly for a new audience.
Her business solves problems. Your business solves problems. Solving problems is the foundation of every business.
When my former client expanded her audience, she diluted her message. She wasn’t able to speak to the unique challenges face by her target audience. She wasn’t able to get her broad message SEEN by consumers.
Just because you’ve targeted one audience doesn’t mean you can’t target another. It just means you create a separate campaign and/or website for the new target market.