How to Market Niche Companies

In many ways, if you have a tightly focused niche, your marketing strategy can be more straightforward than a business with a widermarket. It makes the job of creating an avatar for your ideal customer a lot easier, and you will have a more specific set of media outlets for your advertising. The basic principles of good marketing practise will still apply, but your spread will be simplerto define. You’ll also have a more direct voice to the potential customers for your business; with a less focused niche you would have to get your message out to many people, only some of whom will be interested, whereas marketing a specialist niche allows you to get your message to a far higher proportion of people who are likely to be interested in what you’re selling.

Avatars

The concept of the avatar is to create a picture of the person most likely to be interested in your product,and can be further developed to target the kind of people that you want to be working with. In any business, there will be timewasters and tire kickers, who take up your time and resources but are more trouble than they’re worth. By factoring in the incomes and attitudes of people most likely to spend money with you, your avatar becomes a guide to the most appropriate places to target your marketing efforts. Say for example you sell specialist gaming equipment, perhaps Xbox external hard drive products. Your avatar needs to reflect the demographicof people who have both the need and the wherewithalto purchase such products. If you haven’t already got detailed information, find out the statistics for the ages and incomes of gamers who are likely to want external storage for their games consoles, and build this into your avatar.

Targeting

Once your avatar is fully formed, you can then analysewhich publications and websites a person fitting that mold ismostlikely to frequent. Thisenables you to select the platforms that will reach the highest proportions of potential customers. Using the gaming hard drives as an example again, to get the best, most effective exposure, you will want to put advertising or relevant copy into a specialist gaming magazine or website, rather than a site that attracts new gamers or people who only play occasionally. The platform with the more general approach may get a much higher rate of visits, but only a small number of those people are likely to be interested in specialist gaming tech. On the more tightly focused site, the readership may be a lot lower, but the proportion of users likely to be interestedin your product will be much higher. In other words, it’s better to be reaching fifty per centof an audience of 10,000 than 1 per cent of an audience of 100,000.

When it comes to marketing a niche business, the numbers of people reached are largely irrelevant. It’s the numbers of people you reach who have the need and ability to buy from you that counts.