One of the most effective ways of making sure that your advertising money is spent correctly is by getting into niche marketing. Niche marketing is taking focused marketing and giving it more…well, focus, for lack of a better term.
It basically is breaking down markets into smaller sections, or niches, and this can help ensure that you’re marketing to the correct target audience. You don’t want to spend thousands of dollars marketing your new line of running shoes to 83-year old ladies. You want to get your product out to the marathon runners and daily joggers.
Niche marketing can also help cut down on competition, therefore giving you an edge when it comes to sales. If you’ve created a sunscreen lotion that is very effective for people with tattoos, you’ve got a built-in target market. Sure, they can use any sunscreen out there, but yours is formulated especially to make sure that their tattoos don’t fade after several trips to the beach. Why wouldn’t they buy your product? It’s important to meet your niches unique needs, and this is just one example of how this can be done.
It’s also a good idea to know the ‘lingo’ of the group you’re marketing to. This can help solidify your position as one of them and won’t make you seem like an outsider or some sleazy marketer who’s just out to make money off of them.
Let’s say you’re selling pickups for electric guitars; instead of knowing product numbers and names, it’ll help to know which pickups will suit both the type of guitar and the style of music your customer plays. This will both include you in the group (and can help make you into an expert or guru of sorts), and can also effectively create loyal customers by showing that you know and care about what they’re talking about.
Test marketing can be helpful when selecting your niche market. You may find that there’s no competition, and that can be a good thing – you’ve found a hole that you can fill. But you’ll want to make sure that if other people have tried to fill that hole and failed that it’s not a hole that can’t be filled. These cases are rare, but it does happen occasionally. When marketing to a specific group of people, it won’t hurt to know the background of the market.
Niche marketing can also help with your SEO process by making your keywords and phrases more clear; when you get to your second and third tier keywords and phrases, these can be very obvious if you’re marketing to a certain niche. Let’s stick with the electric guitar pickups for a moment. You might break your different tiers down as far as “Gibson PAF Humbuckers” or “Split Rail Pickups”.
In short, niche marketing can be the best way to break into your new online business. Find a hole and fill it in. And here at Melbourne SEO Services we can help you with that and all other aspects of your online business. Check out some of the other services we offer at the services tab above.
Shortly after trying my hand at blogging, I discovered niche marketing and decided to try it too. What I discovered is that the choice of niche market really matters a lot. Even after going through research and some testing, it’s still possible to make mistakes in market choice. I suppose there is no magic wand that can make niche market selection easy.
If you go over to the Warrior Forum you would find some threads talking about micro niche marketing. The idea is the same as the one presented here, I guess you just go deeper.
Can you make money with just about any niche? How can you tell if you hit it right when you do your niche research? I am 50/50 when it comes to finding profitable niches. But I think Grace is just right, that there is no magic wand to make it super easy.
I think the concept of creating an avatar to market to is a great idea. It has helped me focus my ideas so much more and is a really good way to get a good understanding of the market.I plan to use this idea for all of my future campaigns.
Thanks for the feedback Grace and Elaine. The concept is really powerful.
All I can say is finding a niche is hard, or I just don’t know where to begin. Do you need to be an expert in that niche before you should even consider getting into it? I’ve heard of people just outsourcing everything they need to someone who is more knowledgeable about the topic. I was wondering if I should take that road as well.
@John, it certainly does help if you are at least knowledgeable or passionate about the niche that you choose. It will make creating content so much easier down the track.
Something that I was taught a while back was that if you can not imagine yourself creating at least 50 posts on your topic, then it is going to be a hard slog.
I have tried this before as part of my experiment in doing keyword research. I have found out that there are really good websites that cover niches like collapsible dog houses, do it yourself paper dolls and other interesting topics I have never imagined that there’s a market online.
This proves that there are a lot of opportunities available for those who would like to try niche marketing. Just be patient in doing your keyword research to tap the market that no one else have found recently.