Jack of all trades and master of none – you might have heard this quote many times before. It applies to everyone, whether a person or an industry, even a marketing campaign. Marketing swears by having a specific target market, instead of trying to woo everyone; which is an impossible task anyway.
A niche is a specialized service that you are offering to your target market. The benefits of specialization are immense – especially in industries where there are many competitors and you need to stand out. It helps your product/service stand out since no one else is offering that. This way you’ll retain your customers for a longer time, and become more memorable as well as valuable.
Thus, niche marketing concentrated on targeted customers rather than the whole group of customers to provide the best services or products of particular interest. Even if the products are diversified, they are still focused on solving the problems of a single target market.
Common tactics to define your niche market can be based on price points, such as cars made for the mass market and high-end, luxury cars. Another factor can be demographics, such as products for a particular age group, gender, or region. Or niche marketing can be based on more qualitative factors, such as liking for a particular brand, attitudes, or even political inclinations.
Niche marketing is hard considering you have to make the most of an already small market. There are some strategies that you can follow to maximize your profits.
Identify Target Market
The first step as well as the biggest challenge in niche marketing is to define your target group. Identifying customers and differentiating them based on geographical area, age group, and other parameters require in-depth research about your current customers. To successfully do that, start with identifying the distinctive elements of your product or service so that you can understand who it would appeal to the most.
Understand Requirements for Target Market
Don’t sell the customer what you want to make, sell what they need. If your products add value and make the customer’s lives easier, there
is no doubt it will be successful. This basic rule of marketing applies to niche marketing as well. Market surveys and informal talks will help you identify the problems, no matter how small the target market. Your product will thus improve customer satisfaction and marketing campaigns will be successful.
Look Forward to Ignored Customer
Several niche markets are ignored by large companies, just because they feel it’s very small. If you identify such ignored markets, it will directly become your niche. You will also get the first-mover advantage in such markets, guaranteeing profits for a long time.
Evaluation
Evaluation and test marketing is an important phase of the strategy in which you can make the final decision. Once the blueprint of your products and services is defined and the target audience is identified, test market it to understand the response and make any changes if required.
Benefits of Niche Marketing
Niche marketing makes businesses build their brand loyalty. The customer continuously purchasing the same brand products creates brand loyalty. Since your business will be the only one providing that specialized service, the customers will stay for a longer time.
Niche marketing is also cheaper. The smaller the market, the easier it will be for you to know how to reach them. You can mostly rely on word-of-mouth marketing since people are more likely to be close-knit.
Niche marketing generally faces less competition because they deal with specific products or services for a small market niche. The big reason for that is most businesses realize that it is not feasible to compete with niche marketers. It enhances the relationship with the targeted customer.
With great benefits, come some disadvantages. It is up to designing your marketing campaign in such a way to outweigh the advantages.
