If you run a small or local business, the first marketing strategy you should focus on is niche marketing. Why? Because if you shout generic messages out into the void, hoping to target as many people as possible, you may find that they don’t resonate as well as they should.
If something is aimed at everyone, it’s effectively also aimed at no one in particular, which weakens the message and makes it harder for it to reach people who are actually interested in your product.
Instead, you need to establish a niche audience, research their pain points and desires, and shape your messaging around solving their particular problems. This tactic is much more effective for small-scale businesses and individual entrepreneurs, and understanding why is the first step to taking advantage of it.
What is Niche Marketing?
Sometimes, calling something “niche” is a bit of an insult. It can be used to mean that not many people like it, or that the people who do like it are a little odd. Niche marketing, however, is completely unrelated to this.
Other ways to describe the strategy include “targeted marketing” or “tailored marketing,” and it’s all about focusing on a specific type of person and speaking directly to their problems. This involves detailed messaging, tailored advertising, and specific use cases that show how your product can solve specific problems.
Another misconception is that niche marketing means you have to advertise to fewer people. This doesn’t have to be true—you can still target large audiences, you just need to craft different messages for the different categories of people within them. You can also still run general ad campaigns alongside targeted ones.
Benefits of Niche Marketing
There is a range of benefits to reap from niche marketing, some universal and others that specifically help small businesses.
Understanding Your Audience Better
When you get into niche marketing, you’re simultaneously conducting the kind of user research larger companies use to succeed. It helps you think about who your product or service can help, what kind of features they need, what kind of pricing will suit them, and much more.
You might even end up finding ways to improve your core product along the way.
Minimizing the Competition
By focusing on specific audiences, you can also target groups of people that are neglected by the competition. Entrepreneurs cover every area imaginable, and although they might not always be able to find advice specifically tailored to their needs, you can be sure they will try.
An entrepreneur with a roofing company, for example, is very likely to type “roofing marketing strategies” into Google. Marketing companies that choose to cover the roofing niche will have a good chance at ranking high on Google and a good chance of converting visitors because they’re saying, “Our product is perfect for your specific situation.”
Your competition might be a perfectly viable option, too, but roofing entrepreneurs won’t know that if there’s no content or advertising that addresses their industry specifically.
Fostering Meaningful Relationships
When you’re talking to a hyper-focused subset of people, it often leads to more personal connections. When a customer knows that you care about them, they’re more likely to reach out, develop a relationship with you, and recommend you to others.
Chekkit provides a platform to help you nurture the leads you earn through your niche marketing campaigns. Send personalized texts, close deals over video calls, take payments, and manage reviews all in one place.
Reducing Marketing Costs
For smaller businesses, niche marketing isn’t just powerful because it yields results—it also costs a lot less to achieve those results. You don’t need to compete with global brands for attention, and you don’t need big-budget advertising campaigns to try and stand out.
Examples of Niches To Target
Finding niches is all about breaking broad categories up into smaller groups. Here are some examples:
- Specific locations (targeting neglected locations)
- Specific budgets (offering normal, budget, and premium options)
- Specific pain points (i.e., hyper-focusing on specific problems your product can solve)
- Specific needs (e.g., home delivery, international delivery, budget delivery, installation options)
Final Thoughts
When people are looking for a service or a product, they nearly always have one main priority. For instance, loads of people need new sofas—but some will care most about color options, some about delivery options, some about removing their old sofa, and others about how well the upholstery deals with cat claws.
By diversifying your marketing messages and addressing multiple concerns, you can go from being a “possible option” to “the perfect option” for all sorts of different people, simply because you spoke directly to their needs. This is the power of niche marketing, and why you should start including it in your strategy today.
