Niche Marketing And How It Will Help Your Business
It’s likely that you’ve already heard of the wonders of niche marketing. Yet, perhaps due to the fear of limiting your market size, you might have opted to stick with a more generic marketing strategy to appeal to a broader segment of the market.
This makes sense, to many people as it feels counter intuitive to limit your market to a specific group of people. Yet when you understand the powerful psychology behind niche marketing strategies you might change your paradigm.
This article encourages you to make the shift to niche marketing on the basis it tends to make financial sense for your business whilst simultaneously delivering more sustainable long term returns on your marketing spend.
Niche Marketing Example
To put this into context, let’s take a look at the medical profession. Let’s imagine that a general practitioner wants to promote their service versus a specialist medical consultant.
The GP faces substantial competition when it comes to marketing on platforms such as Google. Because if we were to look, for instance, at “doctors in Perth” Google would pull up hundreds of relevant results.
Competition in this sense means two things; on the one hand, it means you’re more likely to show up after the first page of Google, which as the Digital Hitmen (https://www.digitalhitmen.com.au/) will tell you, is a major problem for your marketing visibility.
Secondly, competition relates to the competitive value of keywords; for instance, “doctor in Perth” will be a highly sought after phrase – meaning you will have to spend more for an advert competing for this phrase than a more niche search such as “knee surgeon in Perth”.
Then, when we look at the amount people are able to charge – as a principle that can be applied to most business, we’ll find that the specialist knee surgeon charges much more money than the general doctor.
The reason for this is due to the fact they solve a more specific problem, and people are willing to pay more money to have a specific problem fixed… whereas, those searching for a generalist tend to be less motivated in terms of wanting the very best.
If you were to be having a knee replacement, what would you prefer – a generalist surgeon that does knee replacements along with all sorts of other operations… or someone that only deals with knees, meaning they “live and breathe” the challenge of solving knee complaints?
Would you be willing to pay more, or wait longer, for a knee specialist than the general surgeon that does everything from circumcisions to cesareans? Of course you would, because the value placed on a specialist is much higher than a generalist.
In this sense, you want to promote yourself and your company as a specialist at solving one specific (and ideally, profitable) problem people face, and that you can stand out in as the go to expert in your geographical area.
WHAT IS A NICHE?
A niche is a focused subset of a particular market group. If you were to think about cat food, for example, we could chunk that down to dry food and wet food – but this is still a very broad market that is essentially the same target audience.
If, however, we were to look at gourmet pet food that is organic with pieces of proper meat, such as chicken breast, then this could be considered a niche market. Because there’s a select portion of the market that would be interested in a premium product like this vs. the more cheap and cheerful standard options.
A further example within the same category could be cat food that is designed for specific issues, such as poor eyesight, heart conditions, or joint conditions – this way, with just a few tweaks of the actual product itself, for instance by adding a few different supplementary nutrients to the same base product you have created a special interest product that solves a particular problem for a particular set of people.
In that sense, a niche is very simple – you are solving a particular problem, or scratching a particular itch for a specific group of people that are seeking a solution.
WHY HAVING A NICHE IS IMPORTANT?
When you have a niche you make it much easier for the right people to find you.
Again, searching for a generalist doctor versus a specialist surgeon is a completely different proposition; the surgeon is likely to be competing with a handful of websites, whereas the generalist will be competing with many others.
In a nutshell, the true power of having niche marketing is that you are more relevant to the right people and less relevant to the wrong people.
The latter is important, because if you are paying for each person that clicks on your ad, you want to make sure you are sending relevant and pre-qualified prospects your way. Therefore, your niche acts in some ways like a filter.
See, when you are more relevant to someone, in terms of meeting their specific needs and requirements – scratching an itch they have, if you will, by solving a particular challenge then people will pay attention and be much more motivated to try you out.
Indeed, relevancy is the basis on which we make all decisions – even simple ones such as getting takeaway food. You are looking for the most relevant outlet to scratch the itch of hunger and wanting food you fancy at that given time.
In having a niche, you are much more relevant to those naturally seeking out your solution, meaning not only will it cost less to reach them via ads, but, when you do reach them, you will be much more aligned with what they are looking for – thus standing out from the crowd of generalists that tend to dominate search results.
WHY YOU WON’T LOSE CUSTOMERS
A common concern is that it can feel unwise to limit your market, as basic maths suggests you don’t want to limit your market.
However, let’s go back to the medical analogy – the specialist consultant is VERY relevant for a select group of people… meaning he or she does not have to compete with everyone that is a surgeon, or water down their skillset by opting to do a variety of different operations.
If you’re looking for a cancer specialist, then you want someone that is an expert within the area of cancer that is of most interest.
If you have breast cancer, for example, there’s little point wading through the results of all the surgeons in the area – you would type in a phrase incorporating the niche.
In this way, niche marketing for your business is very similar.
You want to position yourself as the go-to-expert, as when you align your product, service or knowledge with a particular problem your target audience (not the world at large) faces, this subset of the market are magnetically attracted to your area of expertise.
Remember, the whole premise of marketing is that people have problems and seek solutions in order to eliminate pain or derive pleasure.
If you can position your product or service as a more relevant or wise solution to solving your audience’s particular problem then you will gain a lot of interest from a very highly targeted and motivated crowd.
See, when it comes to marketing relevancy is everything.
One of the most potent ways you can market yourself from the masses is to use niche marketing to your advantage.
Even though you limit the width of your market you can position yourself as the go-to expert in your area… meaning, not only will you not lose customers, but you will gain customers from far and wide, who are looking for your solution.
Insanely Clever Marketing 