The days of targeting everyone with advertising are over. In fact, I don’t know if they ever existed. Mass targeting is an illusion. There is a target audience behind every advertising effort. Targeting your market through niche marketing will help concentrate your efforts and make you more successful.
What is Niche Marketing?
In a nutshell, niche marketing targets one distinct group of people who need what you are offering. Regardless of what you are marketing, there is a specific audience that needs what you offer. Understand all the nuances of your audience, solve their problem and you will soon be on the road to raging profits. But before you can advertise your services and products, you must understand “how” to niche market.
How to Begin Niche Marketing
You’ve got an awesome product or service, you know who your audience is, and you’re almost ready to make money! Niche marketing really is quite simple and effective. It enables you to concentrate your efforts on a specific group. You don’t have to worry about what the masses will think. What will your group of people think? Marketing resources, such as available money, are more concentrated. Would you rather spend your hard earned money targeting all the people on the Internet or perhaps a smaller group of a few hundred thousand? It’s really a no-brainer.
Begin your marketing strategy by first listing the type of niche you are planning to market. If you are unsure about what niche to market to, examine your product or services. Let’s say that you are selling premium dog food. From this point research existing dog niches. No need to create your own niche, it’s costly and time consuming. A quick internet search will easily reveal a dozen niches that will interest you. But a good target audience will be hungry for the product you offer.
Time to Target an Audience
We’ve established that targeting one specific group of people saves you marketing dollars and valuable time. It helps to establish you as an industry leader, which will lead to credibility with consumers. Using our fictitious dog food product, we will break down how to target the specific audience that desperately needs this dog food!
Let’s say that your dog food is all natural and organic. Who would buy such a product? Obviously the dogs are not doing the purchasing! But their owners are. Now don’t be tempted to target all dog owners. Many could care less that your product has no bi-products if it costs an extra $1 a bag. You must research deeper than just dog owners.
When you are short on ideas, ask your family and friends their opinion! Other good sources are magazines, local newspapers and any industry publications. Don’t forget to write down your findings. You think that you’ll remember, but when it comes down to implementing your strategy, it’s impossible to remember everything.
Now that you have your marketing research and have narrowed your audience you are ready to market. It’s recommended to target a few niches in your market rather than depend on just one paying off. For example, a couple of niches for your healthy dog food would be environmentally conscience owners and owners that have dog with existing health problems. You will need to tailor your message to each niche you plan to target. How does your product meet their needs? Anticipate what questions your audience will ask.
Next, you will need to find out everything possible about your audience. What are their likes and dislikes? The goal is not only to communicate to your target audience, but to do so as one of them. Approach your potential consumers as a trusted source and your results will be far greater than expected.
You’ve got your niche, you understand your target audience, now make sure that you get your message to them on their home turf! Don’t make your audience find you. Put your message right in front of them. You can do this through targeted email campaigns, AdWords marketing or advertising on web sites that they already visit. There really is a myriad of options. It comes down to concentrating your efforts on the most interested audience available. Now, if that’s not a recipe for success, I don’t know what is!
