If you have carved yourself out a bit of real estate in a niche marketplace, you are on the heels for success. Did you know that the number one reason why startups fail is lack of market?
By not defining your niche, you are essentially trying to market your brand to everyone. And when you do this, you are pretty much marketing to no one. This can spell business disaster pretty quick.
By focusing on a niche marketplace, you’re targeting a specific group of people who are likely to be interested in what you offer. This is a great way to launch any business. However, there is a challenge. How can you raise your brand’s profile in a niche market where other similar brands are already succeeding?
The great news is there are several ways to accomplish this. By understanding your customers thoroughly and making your brand more social, you can improve your brand and find success. Let’s explore a strategy that has worked for me and my brand.
Know Your Niche Audience Better Than Anyone Else
If you’re in a niche marketplace, you have a short list of consumers you have one chance to connect with. This is good, because your content, marketing, social media, and ads can be highly focused. But on the other hand, you need to get your target audience to trust you, buy from you, share your brand with friends, family, and colleagues, and then buy from you again and again.
Once you know your niche audience better than anyone else, especially your competitors, you can build a community around your brand that absolutely loves you. Airstream, one of the oldest camper brands has done this to perfection. Their focus is on community, and by knowing what their target audience wants, needs, and does, they were able to revive the brand.
This is how they communicate what it means to be a part of the Airstream community:
By knowing their niche audience, Airstream is able to communicate how anyone can be a part of their community. It pulls at the emotions of consumers and gives them what they truly want — a sense of belonging to something greater than themselves.
Make Your Brand As Social As Possible
If it’s not happening on social media, it is pretty much not happening. And when you’re in a niche marketplace, you better believe your audience is on social media daily. Social is where they are communicating, shopping, and sharing those shopping experiences. In short, if your brand is not a consistent presence on social media, you are missing out on big time potential for elevating your brand.
First, you need to find out where your niche audience is hanging out online. If you’re marketing to mainly men, then Pinterest is probably not the place you want to focus your social efforts. Here’s an example from Day Translations on connecting with your audience on Twitter, a more B2B centric social platform:
Next, use the information you have about your audience (see know your niche audience better than anyone else above) to craft content on a consistent schedule. For example, post every few hours daily at the same time. There are platforms like Buffer and Hootsuite that can serve useful for creating a schedule and automating your posts.
Create Stellar Content Your Niche Audience Will Love
Now there’s a catch to all this social media stuff. There are plenty of brands in niche marketplaces posting regularly on social media without success. No engagement, comments, or shares are rolling in. Why? Their content sucks. You could have the best niche brand ever, but if you don’t communicate to your audience correctly, they will not be interested.
This is why creating powerful content that speaks to your niche audience at certain steps along the way is essential. Now here’s an example of social media content via Manscaped that really connects product to audience:
This post is certainly nothing special. It is four words with no hashtags. What sets this post apart is that the content has value, connecting brand with customer interests in a unique way.
The main point is to create quality content that has value for your niche audience. This will elevate your brand to new levels. In fact, social media evangelist Gary Vaynerchuck recommends spending most of your budget on content with some cash left over for ads.
Vaynerchuck explained, “Basically, here’s my overall belief: if you’re a small business, you want to focus on spending your time, money, and effort on creating great content (and a lot of it). You should be spending $85,000 a year on creating quality content and only another $35,000 on paid amplification—not the other way around.”
Employ Social Media Ads For Viral Content
Last but not least, think ads and viral content for your social media posts. You spent a lot of money on that stellar content, so make sure said content gets in front of as many people as possible. Facebook and Instagram ads are a great place to start, especially if those social channels are where your niche audience hangs out online.
To get as much traction as possible for your ad for viral success, put your ad against your top competitor. This ensures that the people your ad gets in front of are definitely interested in what you have to offer, because they are already buying from your competitor. And if your content is better than said competitor’s content, conversions will not be difficult to net.
Great example is this Instagram post with over 900,000 views:
This post is also a video, which is already going to earn more engagement than other post types. Instagram food for thought for everyone ready to elevate their brand.
Wrapping Up . . .
There is a methodical process to elevating your brand in a niche marketplace. You simply need to put the work in and be clever. The order goes like this; Know your niche audience, get social with your audience, create content they will love, boost content with ads for viral success. That is my formula for success, in a niche marketplace or otherwise. What’s yours?