CrowdTamers focuses on helping startups find the first small, well-defined market that they can tackle—called a niche—which is defined usually by having a single type of person who has a narrow problem they want to be solved, and you can focus on delivering exactly what they want. It removes you from consideration for almost every audience out there because you’re focused on delivering something extraordinary to a narrow persona.
But why should you consider the path less traveled?
Niche marketing offers various advantages. Firms that are specialized in niche services and focus their marketing efforts are more likely to:
- Enjoy greater margins.
- Spend less on marketing.
- Have a greater competitive advantage.
Why niche marketing?
Here are 4 questions to help you evaluate the fit of niche marketing:
Who are your target audiences, and what are they looking for?
Do not rely on guesses. Client experience surveys and internally generated focus groups only go so far. What your prospects and clients do and say varies greatly depending on a variety of factors. Third-party research can help, as can rigorous performance marketing tests. Once you know your niche market’s pain points, make sure you have a solid plan of what to do with that vital information.
What is going on in your industry?
Take an unbiased look at your industry. Analyze the latest trend, competitive landscape, and common issues or challenges facing firms such as yours. Can you target a smaller audience than most of your competitors and, by doing so, stand out? CrowdTamers, for example, helps SaaS founders with little marketing experience figure out their go-to-market approach with a data-based marketing approach.
What is/and is not working with your current business model?
It is one of the most difficult questions to ask. How closely aligned are your business development and marketing teams? How healthy is your sales pipeline? What is your effort on certain marketing activities versus the impact you are seeing from them? If you’re finding a mismatch between effort and reward—call it ROI if you ever got an MBA— identifying your few best customers and finding ways to win more of just that type of person can make a huge difference.
Do you invest the time to see your efforts pay off?
Content development will be essential to help increase awareness and education among your targets. And it takes time. If your organization’s key stakeholders aren’t convinced that niche marketing is a long-run play, you will set yourself up for failure.
Answers to these and a few other questions lead to the ultimate one: Can you afford (organizationally and financially) to make sweeping changes to your model or strategy?
What about diversity?
There’s an argument to being a diversified and large organization. Suppose you can offer anything and everything a potential client could ever want. In this case, your company is surely likely to stay even busier and keep employing a diverse group of skillful employees, right? If you’re a jack of all trades, you’re probably a master of none.
Bigger organizations often grow by diversifying their portfolio and adding client-requested locations and services. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with this growth strategy, it is important to revisit this strategic plan often.
The other side of the road
It is equally important to consider the potentially negative outcomes of a niche marketing strategy gone wrong:
- A large perception gap – Make sure that your team and your clients both agree on what it is that you’re providing. It’s easy to get too pigeonholed if you focus on serving a niche.
- An identity crisis – If you’re changing your focus and niching down, it’s important to make sure that, internally and externally, you’re clearly communicating what your new focus is.
- Organizational silos – Decreased interaction among markets, verticals, or departments often lead to a lack of fellowship and the non-existence of cross-selling—the bane of many larger organizations.
- Timing. The decision to focus on a niche market is often a temporary thing. Knowing when to broaden back up your marketing approach is the key to your marketing and business’s long-term success.
Key Niche Marketing Takeaways
Few key points to help your brand achieve niche marketing success:
- Niche marketing involves focusing on a specific subgroup with shared characteristics and at least one not achieved pain point.
- Identify pain points, master retargeting segmentation and email marketing, focus on local niche markets, create niche content.
- Identifying a niche allows brands to create highly targeted and personalized messages to niche market individuals to increase conversion rates within an existing customer base and efficiently market to the outside niche market.
Whether or not niche marketing is right for you, you should always make your clients and prospects feel like you are giving them special attention. By specializing in a particular niche, you can address this and help ensure your message hits its targets.
