Benefits Of Niche Marketing

As a marketing consultant, I always emphasize to clients the importance of finding their niche.

It may seem limiting and counterintuitive, but if you directly appeal to a niche segment of the market, you can work towards owning a whole slice. However, if you immediately try to appeal to a mass market, you’ll be lucky to even own a slither.

You want to start out by making big waves in small waters as opposed to small ripples in big waters.

The better you know your target market, the more you will end up influencing and engaging with them.

When you truly find your niche audience, you will know because it’ll be easy to build a rapport with them and you’ll no longer be distracted by potential opportunities on the periphery. In addition, you will start to recognize that you can’t be all things to all people.

Examples Of Niche Marketing

Back then during the dawn of advertising, baby boomers were usually clumped together as a group of like-minded people (demographic) by the advertising industry. As a result, they were continually hit with commercials that appealed to a wide range of people. This no longer works because generational groups are so fragmented in their characteristics.

On a basic level, demographics bunch people of the same age, education, economic class, employment status, and geographic location together in a box. This would be the Mad Men approach to targeting your market. Fun to watch on TV, but it’s no longer viable as a marketing approach.

When you segment your market to find a niche, you try to learn about your audience from a sociological perspective. You learn about their lifestyle choices, shopping habits, spending habits, values, belief systems, priorities, work life and home life, social media platforms they use and when, and the list continues. The goal is to know them so well that you can talk to them in a language they understand and create a product that they (might not even know they) need and want. How you get that product to them, and bring it to their attention, is through marketing promotions.

For this reason we have moved away from tracking demographics in isolation. We have to consider psychographics and sociographics.

Which leads to me asking what exactly is psychographic profiling? Here we look at the consumers’ thought process in the context of them being real people with emotions. It includes: needs, interests, activities, attitudes, values and aspirations (financial or other).

Aspirations are very important because you can market to a group of people based on what and where they believe they might be one day. Brands constantly rely on, and tap into, people’s aspirations.

So what is sociological profiling? This gives us an understanding of our customers’ friends, their hobbies and lifestyle. Think of it in terms of: personal needs, personal profile, passions, attitudes, social groups and friends we align ourselves with.

Target market profiling is a social science and it has been proven that identifying a niche and learning about your niche is going to put you in a powerful position as a business owner. After all, how can you expect your tweets to resonate if you don’t have a clear idea of the people you are talking to? The aim is be relevant to your target market.

Here is an exercise you can try. Ideally you would complete it before you build your brand plan, but you can start with your next Facebook post or tweet.

Picture your ideal consumer in your head. Walk yourself through their day and note down any key facts about their psychographics, demographics and sociographics. Consider everything from how they exercise, the environment they work in, what they do on the weekends, what they look for in a vacation, how they socialize, and where and who they aspire to be. Write it all down and get to know this person.

Completing this process should give you a better idea of how to engage with your niche.