When life gives you lemons, make lemonade right? While being optimistic seems easy, business owners within an extremely “niche” market often see a smaller potential target audience as a detriment to their business.
However, your niche audience is a captive audience…
And having access to a captive audience will positively affect your ability to influence and inspire those individuals to take action.
The best perspective to help you see the value in developing a content strategy for super niche industries is to consider the point of view of your target customers. Their problems are often so specific that they must assume that there’s simply no help to be found, and that they’re going to have to figure it out on their own. That’s a terrible feeling to have, and given the fact your business was established to solve that very need, you… more than anyone else, can empathize fully with their challenge.
For these types of customers with such highly specialized needs, they are overjoyed when they discover someone has the solution they were hoping to find. Ultra-niche marketing is doubly satisfying for business owners because it allows you to:
- secure a foothold and grab a much larger portion of a more specialized “pie” without having to compete with thousands of competitors locally, regionally, nationwide, or even globally.
- deliver and maintain a much higher rate of overall satisfaction from customers because your business provides a unique solution that speaks directly to their needs. This means customers who buy from you will do so for much longer and are certainly more like to become brand advocates as well, sharing the great news about your product or service with others.
Brand loyalty today is so critical due to the number of options. For example, look at toothpaste brands, such as Crest, Colgate, Tom’s, etc. How hard would it be for a new player to enter the market and steal customers? Probably not very hard at all because customers do not feel overly loyal to which toothpaste they buy. Price, quality, effectiveness, and taste would most likely be their major determining factors.
Niche industries on the other hand are often delivering a highly specialized solution that create a natural “barrier to entry.” This would be difficult to overtake without an emerging competitor putting in the time and effort to create a far superior product which would compel this small customer base to choose their offering over yours or other pre-existing entities.
Here are some of the major points to consider when developing a winning content strategy for super niche industries:
A Specific Market Has A Specific Ear
A super niche market tends to respond to a different voice than the mainstream, or even semi-mainstream. The more niche you go, the more specific and authoritative that voice is expected to be. Look at existing content that your market responds to. Read the comments, see how people respond. Do they appreciate a sense of humor in their content, or do they prefer a strictly professional approach? Are they looking for something deeply technical, or more formal? A specific market has extremely well-defined tastes and behaviors which you can utilize to develop a marketing approach that appeals directly to their needs most. Take the time to research and explore what successful content in your niche actually looks like. And, of course, your company will wind up putting your own spin on your version of this successful content you create simply because that’s what writers do… especially those with such an authoritative, knowledgeable understanding of a super-niche industry.
Speak to the Niche…
Inside the Niche…
Inside the Niche
Within the smallest niche, you will always find competitors.
The question is not “how can I prove we’re better than our competitors?” The question is “how can I do this differently than my competitors?”
If you’re entering a super-niche market that already has a market leader, what is a problem that you can address that they cannot? What are they failing to address?
Keep following the path that brought you into a niche market in the first place, and then into the sub-market within that niche. We’ll call it the Spiral of Specificity: Keep narrowing your focus down until you’re appealing to a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the mainstream market.
Did you know that there’s actually a market for vegetable flavored soda?
Even within that market, there are customers wondering where the heck all the jalapeno sodas are, and within that market, customers wondering why these jalapeno sodas aren’t spicier.
It’s possible to find a niche so small that you simply won’t be able to support your business, or the cost to create products and services for such a small group becomes far too expensive, but it’s more difficult than you might think it is to find such a small market that won’t reward you for your attention. Use your content to reach out to the people who feel left behind by your super-niche’s market leaders, and find out what they want.
Content marketing for niche industries isn’t just about broadcasting all the benefits of your product, it’s also about making contact, touching base with your best customers and prospects.
Take People With You for the Ride
In this regard, niche content marketing isn’t really any different than developing content for a larger brand: take your customers with you every step of the way. Don’t go into hiding and then come back a year later with the finished product, keep your readers up to date on new developments within the company, post articles commenting on the state of the industry so that they can understand your reasoning behind new products and other business decisions. In many niche markets its not uncommon for customers to help refine, beta test, or provide regular feedback or commentary on ways to improve the product even further.
Not forgetting about keeping your audience “tapped in” is probably a word of warning when you’ve acquired 10,000 followers. When you only have 500, the story will inherently be more intimate and personal, and best of all, every individual customer feels like an integral piece of the brand. Share your brand’s story, and leverage your small size by telling it in a more personal manner. The CEO of Wal Mart could never send out a handwritten thank you card to every single customer, but you can.
Final Thoughts
If you are considering targeting a super niche industry for the first time it certainly will require you to refine your marketing strategy.
Niche markets want specialists. They pay for specialists, not generalists. And, they pay far more on average.
For example, think about the difference in salary for a medical doctor who is a general practitioner (about $100k to $150k annually) versus a neurosurgeon (averaging about 700k per year). People pay for specialization when general solutions do not solve their problem.
When it comes to developing a content strategy for super niche industries, pursue your content creation and promotion as seriously as any major market brand would. Post regularly. Pay attention to your metrics and adjust your content accordingly. A super-niche business gets to be more personal, but it’s still a business. Listen to your customers or your prospects and develop a better marketing strategy and a better product that will keep them coming back for more, for years to come.
We develop content marketing strategies for all industries, niche, super niche or broad. Our first step regardless of the competitiveness of any industry is to first identify who our client’s target buyers are and then develop a content strategy that will attract this particular group. If you are looking to develop a winning content strategy, we can help. Contact us and schedule a marketing assessment today.
