The internet has made it possible for businesses of all sizes to reach their ideal customers. It is realistically possible to build a marketing campaign with a limited budget, develop a customer base, and gradually scale up your enterprise.
For many online businesses, though, their niche doesn’t immediately lend itself to the common marketing strategies. Popular niches like fitness, business, and beauty have numerous success stories to learn from, but less popular markets like embarrassing medical complaints, technical industries, or fields with nondescript products don’t have any immediately obvious entry point. So how can a business create marketing campaigns in these tough niches?
Market Research
Promoting products is far easier if you understand your audience. Conducting market research will give you a lot of demographic data about your potential customer base, allowing you to target them directly. Sites like Facebook, for example, offer detailed demographics, so you can target a group of people even if they are not expressly discussing your niche. MakeMyPersona, Ubersuggest, Social Mention, SimilarWeb, and Alexa all offer tools that provide detailed market research data.
SEO
SEO can be effective in tough niches due to the ability to target specific keywords. The search engines have improved their ability to understand the content on a page, so you don’t need to focus as much attention on keyword anchor text. A piece of content can also cover a broader theme, but still potentially rank for your ideal keywords if they are covered within the article. Additionally, you can use rich snippets to be featured at the top of the search results, offering a partial answer to a search that requires the user to visit your site for more detail.
Content Marketing
Content marketing in tough niches requires more imagination than in mainstream markets. You might sell products that are fairly boring to people looking for readable content. For example, a timber supplier might struggle to create content about their products, but the woodworking niche is incredibly popular online. By focusing on the popular and related interest, you can create content that appeals to an audience that might require your products. Every niche has a tangential market that can be used to generate interest on related blogs and authority sites.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising, particularly on the established platforms, lets you reach distinct audiences, focusing on keywords, demographics, or particular websites. Depending on the platform, you can target groups based on age, gender, and interests, the sites they visit, and the related niches that suggest they would be a good fit. Your niche will determine how you advertise, though, as you may need to use the same approach as content marketing to draw people in first. When interested parties have consumed your initial content, you can introduce them to your range of products.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is so effective due to the ability to develop relationships over an extended period of time. As long as you can keep subscribers opening emails, you have time to build a rapport. This extended period of time means you can gradually introduce your products without your subscribers losing interest or rejecting your marketing attempts. Email marketing also lets you test messages to segmented audiences, so you can experiment with message length, humour, stories, and video. You can read about how to improve your email open rates here.
By using these tactics, even the toughest niches have a potential entry point. You can start to build a following around a broader topic, building interest in your products and services. Of course, the best type of marketing would involve highly targeted messages delivered to the ideal customer base. However, this is not always possible, so you have to consider alternative ways of reaching the people who could most benefit from your offers. Thankfully, as you start to develop your brand, you should find your marketing gets easier as more potential customers are familiar with you from reputation alone.
