How do startups find and conquer a niche market?
A good marketing strategy must include ways of finding and establishing contact with your niche market. Any ad that is not targeted to them is bound to fail.
When I started to develop a Reviews and Coupons site, one of my first tasks was to create what I call a "visitor's profile” in order to know exactly what kind of people I was going after. Before you even start thinking of getting your product or services out there, you must clearly identify the people you are targeting, your exact audience, or potential customers - so to say.
You will have to define their needs and expectations from you, what they want done, the kind of products they prefer, what their problems are and their preferred ways of solving them. This is simply the reason big firms spend fortunes in conducting a market survey or feasibility study long before they launch a product; they might be spending now, but they are sure to get the profit when the customer-tailored products begin to come out.
Define Your Audience
The first step to achieving success with your business is to find out who your audience are. Your product and services may not be suitable for kids, as well as adults, and youths. No, even if they are, it will not be applicable in every human endeavour; hence the need to define a stream or category of people you are targeting.
Let us assume you have a product that will aid teachers in their teaching services, you may still have to define the category of teachers; is it nursery school teachers, primary school teachers or lecturers?, where do they live? etc. These are the things you will have to analyze before setting out a campaign. If you want to be straight and have perfect marketing campaigns, you sure have to ask them and find out appropriate answers, as it underlines your success margins.
Categorize Your Audience
In order to drive this home, you can start from categorizing your audience with regards to their spending habits. If your audience is students, you know that students generally like to spend with caution and may not have huge spending budgets. In this regard you need to be cautious too and choose only those products and services they can not do without.
Start Your Campaign
Your marketing campaign should start from the place your target market is. If you are marketing to teachers, you need to locate places where teachers hang out online, go to teachers forums, post in teachers fan pages or groups and establish yourself as an expert in that field. As these people are always looking for places to learn, they will soon turn to you to answer their questions and offer solutions to their challenges.
Start Blogging
Start a blog in that niche posting regularly high quality content. Visit other blogs too, to be 100% up to date and aware of the trends in your niche. These blogging activities should be geared towards updating your website and getting more targeted traffic.
Use SEO Strategies
Employ search engine optimization techniques and be generous. Optimize the contents of your blog and website and any other content you may be using for campaigns. Optimizing them will ensure that you have access to search engine users; yes, it is free!
People always get stuck with somebody that is generous. Offer something to your target audience and make them understand that you are doing it as part of your commitment to helping them. Through this method you can also get their email address and thus develop a warm advice and helpful relationship with them; which will enable you turn them into dedicated buyers.
Any entrepreneur that has not taken time to define his/her audience will sure face crisis and several business challenges. Knowing things as the age of your target group, their gender, where they live, how to reach them, their spending habits, the most popular bought item within that population, etc, helps the business owner refine his choice of products and marketing strategies. As soon as you are done with that, you are ready to launch your campaign. Keep your visitor’s description and use it as a feedback that will help you in the future make any necessary modifications in your blog.