Niche Marketing Over Mass Marketing?
My business is for everyone! Yeah, bet you’ve heard that before. How did it end up doing though? Normally, not great. There is a misunderstanding that often occurs when it comes to marketing your business. People tend to believe that the more people they target, the more customers they will get. That hasn’t proved to be entirely true. In fact, more often than not it is just a means to wasted resources. As Pat Flynn would say, “the riches are in the niches.” What does that mean though? It basically means that the more specific and targeted your audience is, the more likely you are to succeed. How do you find that target audience though? This is where this post may be greatly beneficial to you.
Targeting The Market
First off, you can start by asking yourself some simple questions about your business. Questions like what problems your product or service can solve, who your competition is and who your own customers are at this point. Those questions will all help you build a better general understanding of the market. That is very necessary if you want your next step to be successful.
Targeting The Customers
At this point, your next move is creating personas. Personas are fictional characters created to represent the different types of potential customers you have. They cover aspects like who, what, where, when, and why. The main goal here is to better understand your target audience in hopes of creating more content that answers to their needs. You can use this persona template to give yourself a head start. It is also important to note that you can find these templates online for free, making it a very efficient tool to use.
Importance of Finding Your Target Audience
You may ask why it’s so important to find these target audience. What gain do you have from putting in all this extra work? Well, what we do know is that everyone appreciates saving money, and at the very least, you would be saving your company money in this process. That’s because this process allows you to direct your resources towards the customers with the highest potential to buy, the customers with the biggest interest, and the customers that will be the most loyal to your brand. This all accounts for a huge efficiency boost. At the end of the day you don’t want to be spending money advertising to people that are not in need of your product or service. It also gives your company a huge opportunity to grow based on the fact that its harder to be affected by competition when you are targeting a niche market with specific customers and certain problems you are looking to solve. Additionally, knowing your customers and building that relationship with them is key to building your brand loyalty, which will then result in more repeat business.
Tips
To continue building your brand loyalty, interacting with your audience (available and potential customers) is key. You may find it really useful to create surveys every now and then that keep you updated on who you’re talking to, what they’re looking for and how you can help them. Consider including giveaways with these surveys as a means to attract more people to complete them. You may feel like it’s an unnecessary cost at this point, but it will be very much worth it down the line. Another way to keep that connection is by asking your customers for feedback with an automated email. Its always good for the customer to feel like you care about how they feel.
Tools
There are a number of tools you can find online that can really give you a head start when you’re looking for that target audience. Google analytics may be the pre-eminent option as it offers you both an audience tab and an acquisition tab. The audience tab is meant to tell you who your audience are and where they are located, while the acquisition tab focuses on showing you where your traffic is coming from. On the social media side of things, you can use Facebook insights to see where your likes are coming from. Your twitter follower’s dashboard is also great at showing you what your followers are interested in, so that may also be a great tool to use.
Monitoring Your Customers
As always, it is important that you realize that your job is not over once you’ve found what you’re looking for. It is just as important for you to maintain these customers as it was to for you to find them. Make sure you keep an eye on social activity, who is interacting and who is not, and make sure you make the requisite changes in order to keep trending positively. Your customers will appreciate the fact that you are willing to make the changes to keep them happy.
Try Our Survey!
To get started with finding your target customers, make sure you complete our survey on Fitvertising.com. If you felt like this blog post was helpful, wait until you complete that!