Back in the early days of the internet, just having a website was an exciting talking point. Now, even the smallest of local businesses is expected to have some kind of online presence. This means that cyberspace has become very crowded. Niche marketing is how you make your business stand out to potential customers.
Understanding niche marketing
The best way to think of niche marketing is to think about the difference between a push pin and a nail. A push pin has a very fine point so you can make a hole in a wall just with the pressure of your finger. A nail is much broader so you need to hit it with a hammer.
Translating that to marketing, if you focus on a single, very specific, area, you’ll get the best value out of a limited marketing budget. If, by contrast, you try to expand your scope, you’ll wind up spreading your resources more thinly and the quality of your content will almost inevitably suffer for it.
Picking the right size of a niche
As a rule of thumb, you want to start as small as possible but give yourself room to expand. One way to achieve this is to start by focusing on a single element of a much larger business area.
For example, plumbing is a huge category and it would take a lot of effort and resources to rank in that. Plumbing SEO, however, is a much smaller niche, hence it’s easier to make a mark in it. If you thought that plumbing SEO was far too specialized to have much of a market, then you might want to ask The Optimization Bros for a second opinion on that.
Unfortunately, there’s no “secret sauce” for working out the exact right size of a niche. In general, your best tool is competition analysis. Typically, you want there to be a low level of competition. No competition at all suggests that it is difficult to monetize that niche. A high level of competition, however, may make it difficult for a newcomer to gain traction.
Leveraging your niche
One of the main reasons it makes sense to focus on a specific niche is that it allows you to present yourself as an expert in that niche. The reason it has value to be an expert is that people should be able to feel that you can solve their problem in a way very few other people can.
This means that, in the early days at least, your content should be focused on addressing your customers’ pain points (or helping them achieve their goals). As you develop into one of the top brands in your niche, you can start expanding your range of content, if you think it would be appropriate.
While SEO is almost certainly going to form the core of your marketing strategy, remember that old-fashioned networking is still hugely valuable. Its immediate value is that it helps you build up your contacts. Its longer-term value is that it builds your credibility as an expert. You may then be able to leverage this later as part of your marketing.
