How to Use Niche Marketing to Promote a Product

Niche marketing is a type of marketing strategy for promoting products and services that may only appeal to a small segment of the population. Examples of niche marketing abound in the e-commerce space, where retailers aim to reach customers with niche interests such as high-end audio, archery, needlepoint, cross-country skiing, or products made for lefties. While such people represent a sliver of the broader population, they can still be engaged customers who will exhibit brand loyalty to a company that can service their needs.

In order to achieve its goal of sharing a message with a curated group of potential customers, a niche marketing strategy involves many steps:

1. 1. Conduct market research. To kick off its marketing efforts, a niche business must identify specific needs and pain points within its target market. It must also identify the existing market competition. A niche market often has little competition due to a limited number of potential customers. Still, a startup small business must carefully do its research lest it bring a product to market that is either redundant or irrelevant to its target audience.
2. 2. Focus on consumer psychographics. A well-crafted niche marketing plan employs the use of psychographics, which is the study of market consumers focused on their activities, interests, and opinions (often abbreviated AIO). By isolating these aspects of a consumer profile, niche marketing teams can efficiently reach their target audience without wasting their ad budget on people who would never choose to engage with their brand.
3. 3. Establish targets and buyer personas. A niche marketing team should begin describing the specific customers they imagine purchasing their product or service. To do this, many marketing plans feature a buyer persona, a demographic description of their perceived ideal customer. Buyer personas include information like age, gender, nationality, relationship status, income levels, geographic location, personal interests, and preferred forms of media. Personal interests, location, and income are often the key factors that shape a niche market.
4. 4. Identify goals. Once it understands the market and its target customer, a company must determine the goals of its niche marketing campaign. Such goals may include building brand awareness, entrenching brand loyalty, driving sales of a specific new product, or grabbing market share from a competitor. In niche markets, existing companies often have a loyal customer base, so if the goal is to peel off market share, a company must use niche marketing to offer a unique selling proposition to customers aligned with other brands.
5. 5. Craft the perfect messaging. At this point, the niche marketing team must craft the message that will resonate with its target audience. This message will likely be more specific than the language used in a macromarketing campaign that gets beamed out to much larger populations. Language could reference quirks of local markets or specific terminology understood by hobbyists but not by the public at large. If a company is selling a niche product like guitar amp tubes or fishing lures, it does not need to use language that resonates with the broader market. It only needs to resonate with its specific niche audience.
6. 6. Create content. Now that the marketing team has its message, it must create content that eloquently and efficiently conveys that message. Marketing can take the form of print ads, podcasts, videos, or testimonials from influencers. If the niche marketing involves the product itself—such as new packaging for an existing product—that also gets created during this stage.
7. 7. Disseminate the campaign. Following completion of market research, goal-setting, messaging, and content creation, the niche marketing campaign is ready to be shared with the world. This is where the niche marketing team—depending upon its tactics—would purchase pay-per-click (PPC) digital ads, enlist social media influencers, release new packaging, employ street teams, and generally get the word out to its target audience. To reach a specific segment of the population, digital marketing teams may conduct search engine optimization (SEO) keyword research or find relevant trending hashtags on social media platforms. The goal is to get a marketing campaign in front of the right group of people.
8. 8. Study the results and adapt. Once the campaign launches, marketers monitor its results, looking to see if it generates the expected engagement or sales metrics. If the campaign fails to meet its goals, the marketers can tweak their strategy to better communicate with the target audience.

Niche marketing and micromarketing both involve selling goods and services to a relatively small segment of the population, but the terms are not quite synonymous. Consider the distinction between niche marketing and micromarketing:

• Niche marketing involves products that have a low level of demand. Some products, like extremely expensive luxury goods or tools pertaining to esoteric hobbies, have naturally low market demand. Companies promote these products via niche marketing, which adapts to the limits of an organically restricted marketplace.
• Micromarketing targets a subset of a broader target market. Micromarketing does not refer to a niche demand but rather to a specialized campaign designed to reach key corners of an economy. A company selling a product with mass appeal may use micromarketing to reach an untapped market segment.

Using niche marketing techniques to advertise a specific product or service can yield many benefits for business leaders.

• Niche marketing campaigns can be cost-effective. Manufacturers and service providers may find that a niche marketing campaign costs significantly less than a broad TV ad buy that targets the entire viewing public.
• Niche marketing connects you to consumers who care about your industry. Rather than waste time on consumers who do not care about your particular industry, a niche marketing approach lets you find hobbyists and niche groups who care about specific product features and production quality. You can reach these niche markets by advertising in trade publications, on specific social media channels, via word-of-mouth testimonials, or using hyper-targeted pay-per-click (PPC) digital ads.

Before diving into a campaign, business leaders and entrepreneurs should also familiarize themselves with certain cons of niche marketing.

• Niche marketing campaigns can miss potentially interested customers. When a marketing campaign targets a specific group of customers, it can leave out other consumers who may have been sincerely interested in a product or service but never learned about it. For instance, if an ad campaign promoting eco-friendly shoes only runs in coastal markets, the manufacturer may miss out on environmentally conscious consumers who live in the middle of the country.
• Niche marketing is time-intensive and potentially staffing-intensive. While niche marketing can be cost-effective in terms of overall ad spend, such marketing efforts require considerable time, research, and effort in order to yield meaningful results. Using standardized marketing templates may not work with niche customers. To truly understand a niche group's customer needs and to speak to them in appealing language, companies must invest in the process—ideally hiring dedicated staff who work on marketing and nothing else.

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