If you’re here and reading this, then chances are you’re a digital marketing beginner, or a new business owner wondering who’s your best target audience. Niche marketing, or micromarketing, is often attractive, because a niche audience is often cheaper to market to, has less competition, and is easy to build relationships with.
What is Niche Marketing?
So, what is niche marketing exactly? If you’re new to marketing you’d be thinking right about now that this is probably too good to be true. Well, you’re wrong. Niche marketing is common practice actually, and if you haven’t heard this term before, then let me break it down for you.
Determining and targeting your niche audience will help you concentrate your marketing efforts since you focusing on one small and specific segment. Focusing on a niche audience will help you better develop a personal relationship with your customers.
Let’s face it. A mass-market might be more appealing, but it will drain your resources. It’s really important to understand that it’s a good choice if you’re already a well-established corporation, that is well equipped to take the risk, otherwise a niche market is the wiser choice if you haven’t made it yet.
In short, focusing on a niche market will be more profitable for a newly established business.
Getting Started With Your Niche Market.
Getting started with niche marketing could actually give you an edge. To start with, you’re operating “under the radar”, with most of your competitors not knowing about you. Sounds good for a start, doesn’t it? Well, that’s not it. Niche marketing is also fairly cheaper than the alternative. All of this gives you enough time to build your audience and follower base, design your offering to near perfection, and build a brand that will inspire loyalty.
A general rule of thumb, you’re supplying demand with your product/service. Don’t push a product into a market where it’s not needed. The sales approach died in the last century, you’re thinking MUST be consumer-centric. So, the better you define your market, the better you understand its pain points, the more your product or service will sell.
Now, let’s properly discuss niche market development.
Identify Your Audience
Identify and understand who your audience is long before you decide on your products/services. Understanding and building a relationship with your audience is paramount, after which you will know what it is that they need.
A well-established audience base with remain loyal for years and years to come, while you change and develop your product or service.
Conduct a Keyword Research
Keyword research is essential to anything you’re doing. Understanding how your audience would search for anything related to your niche determines your success. This will help you know how to talk to them and how to market your products or services.
Knowing what they search for is knowing their pain points which will help you develop your whole marketing strategy. So, what tools can be used to conduct keyword research?
Start off by using Google’s Keyword Planner. Google’s tool will provide you with helpful data that includes estimated monthly search volumes, competition level, and the average cost per click (CPC).
Spy On Your Competitors
Once you’ve laid down the keywords you’d want to focus on, then identify your competitors. It makes sense to see how the competition is approaching its target audience. If they are not exactly the same as yours, then maybe there is a crossover. Learn how they are engaging their audience and then do it better!
Is this not the case? Then maybe you should be looking elsewhere and not waste your time and money.
Identify Industry Trends
The best thing to always do is head over to Google Trends. Google Trends provides you with Google search data about any topic you’d want to research.
Google Trends would also provide you with data that goes back all the way to 2004, with this data you could determine whether or not your niche market has been growing over time, or not. It goes without saying that if your niche market has been shrinking, then it’s best to stay away.
After answering and identifying all of the above, now it’s time to answer one final question. Is this niche market worth it for you? If you’re just starting out then try to stay away from markets that have top brands competing in them. Instead, try to start out focusing on keywords with low competition and growing from there.
