One of the most important concerns when venturing into the realm of content marketing is whether you’re going to focus your marketing campaign toward a general audience or if you focus your efforts toward a niche market instead. Both of these options have their own set of advantages and disadvantages.
When you target a general audience, you’re more likely to reach a large number of individuals. However, because it’s a general audience, it can be much more difficult to stand out in an already saturated market. You’re more likely to get a larger audience, but you might have more difficulty in getting conversions because of the competition.
On the other hand, a targeted audience in a niche market means that you almost always get quality leads, which in turn also means that you have a higher chance of landing a conversion. However, that’s only if you’re able to even find enough of an audience for your niche business to be sustainable.
This article puts a heavy focus on how you can establish a workable niche content marketing strategy. And as with any problem, the first step to solving it is to define the things that could hinder your campaign from reaching your target audience:
Because niche markets have fewer opportunities and a smaller prospect population, you need to ensure that your brand story is reaching the audience that you’re targeting. For this to happen, you need to outline the problems that your target audience is currently experiencing and what your brand can do to help solve these problems.
It’s a bad idea to simply echo what your competitors are saying, but it’s a good idea to see what your competitors are saying to their audience. The objective here is to provide your audience with information that isn’t found from your competitors. So, read on what the other brands are saying and fill in the gaps and improve on the information that’s already existing.
If you’re able to specify a cohort, you’ll also be able to profile your target audience. You’re going to be able to identify their habits and interests, as well as the problems that they want to resolve.
Here's an example: based on your research, there is a high demand for personal injury lawyers in your area but your target audience can’t seem to find lawyers on their own.
Even when you have experienced personal injury lawyers like the ones from the Davis Law Group, it’s not going to help much if the people who need them are unable to get in contact with them.
So, at this point, you simply enumerate the possible problems that your audience might be experiencing during their search for a lawyer, and provide solutions. So, in this example, these could be:
How to pick a good personal injury lawyer.
What are the thing to do after an accident?
A guide to personal injury claims.
These are topics that a first-time personal injury client would want to learn about and since they’re already looking for a lawyer, they are most likely to hire whichever lawyers are recommended by the guides they find.
It’s not as simply as doing guesswork for the topics that you might want to write about for your target audience. It’s also important to do a bit of research on actual searches. As seasoned content marketers, we all know the value of keyword data and the effective use of these keywords. This, once again, goes back to the principle of thinking like your target audience. What are the things you might want to search about and how can your brand fill in those gaps? The only difference here is that now there’s research involved.
Your content is going to be your primary weapon in trying to secure conversions for your brand. Whether your content is in video format, a presentation, a product review, a webinar, or even in the old-fashioned (yet very reliable) article form, you need to be able to create quality content. This is a good representation of your brand’s reliability and if you’re able to give your audience information that they’re looking for, you’ve already helped them and in doing so, established a relationship with them.
When you’ve earned the trust of your audience, you may even ask them to share your content. Sometimes you may not even have to ask. If your content is good, you simply observe, measure, and adjust when necessary, as well as create new content.
While the risk of going for a niche market approach may be significantly higher than taking a more generalized approach, it’s not entirely a reckless thing to do. As with all things that have a bit of risk, all we can really do is to make these risks manageable and if we’re able to, we may even attempt to nullify these risks.
