~ Sankalita Roy
Marketing a business to a niche target audience is like buying the right toys for your children.
If my baby girl prefers soft toys and Barbies, I must buy them for her. It is obvious that if you buy her robots and remote-control cars, it is going to be a waste of time and money. Similarly, if I buy soft toys and Barbies for my baby boy, he will be offended to be gifted these toys as they are a sign of being related to girls. The same is true in the case of marketing. We must know our audience before we begin to market our products including their likes and dislikes along with their preferences, the field where they belong to know what shall we exactly do to promote our product.
In this article, we are going to discuss niche marketing about identifying and reaching the target audience for our books as a writer. Before we begin, let us know about the advantages of niche marketing.
Increased sales: if you are reaching out to people for a sale of a specific genre of book, then you are likely to attract an audience who love your books or buy other books of yours. If you love reading Dan Brown, you are more likely to love reading thrillers and buy more of his books to explore the suspense till the very end.
Reduced spending: companies can spend less on marketing and advertisement and more on focusing on a small group audience with a clear goal. It saves time, money, and effort to reach a large number of audiences.
Boosted competitive advantage: brands typically have less competition when focusing their marketing efforts on a niche audience. The more specific the customer’s needs, the fewer products you have competing against you.
Effective pricing: if you research well about your niche audience, then you are more likely to know well what price your buyers are willing to buy for your product than your competitors. You must minimize or maximize your profit without letting the audience be discouraged by the pricing.
Better content marketing: when your focus narrows down to a specific set of audiences, you are planning and posting content automatically becomes easier and more efficient. you can post content on what your audience wants and what keeps them hooked to your social media platforms.
Increased brand loyalty: appealing to your niche audience can make you post content based on their needs. It is always better to focus on a small group of audiences with specific needs than a large group of audiences with varying preferences. As a result, the loyalty of the followers towards your brand increases.
Some of the disadvantages of niche marketing are as follows:
Limited growth: since the niche market is only focused on a specific audience, it can affect the business opportunities for growth. Depending on a specific business niche, reaching the target audience can be limited.
High competition: competition has always been ruthless, no matter in what field you belong. Therefore, it is important to consult an expert to understand the target audience and the niche market. Otherwise, inexperienced people or people with a lack of skills are going to face cutthroat competition as an outcome of ongoing competition.
Marketing: Marketing is undoubtedly one of the significant things when it comes to the growth of your products. Marketing is imperative for niche businesses, as it is unknown. The business may fail or grow based on your relationship with the target audience.
No guarantee: when we talk about the success rate and niche marketing, there isn’t any guarantee of anything. You may follow niche marketing and apply all the basic marketing things, but there is no guarantee that it would give you the success that you want.
So, what are we waiting for, let’s start our discussion now.
Ways to start niche marketing
1. Define your goals and value proposition
Before you start looking for your target audience, you need to have a clear sense of direction regarding your goal and how you want to achieve them. you need to be clear about the following factors:
What are your goals?
What is the message or impact you want to have on your audience?
What are your strengths?
What are your weaknesses? How can you overcome them?
What are the challenges in today’s world? What role can you play to solve them? How?
2. Research your competitor’s market
Once you know your goals and value proposition, you need to research your competitor’s market which has similar goals as yours. You need to know about their potential client, customer, or followers that would benefit from your offer. You need to analyze what posts worked well for your others and what areas where they probably missed the mark. Moreover, you need to use online tools, surveys, interviews, podcasts, influencers, forums, blogs, and other sources to gather data and research your market and competitor.
3. Identifying a niche target audience
According to a source on the internet, a niche market is a subgroup of your business’s main target audience. This unique group of people has their specific wants, expectations, and pain points more than the broader market. Whereas your target audience refers to the specific group of consumers most likely to want your product or service, therefore, the group of people who should see your ad campaigns. The target audience may be dictated by age, gender, income, location, interests, or a myriad of other factors. Now, the question is how to know about your target audience, let us segregate them to get in-depth knowledge about them
Interest
Separate groups based on their interest, including their hobbies and the type of content they prefer such as self-development content, romance content, non-friction content. We can know these details by using polls on Instagram or Facebook or you can create a Google form to collect in-depth information about them. this way you can post your content based on what your audience wants and attract more like-minded people to your social media platforms and websites.
Purchase intention
Define groups of people who are looking for a specific book such as a motivational book, a thriller, or a friction. This will help you to tailor your message that addresses their needs based on your understanding of their pain points.
Subcultures
Subcultures refers to groups of people who share a common experience such as music genres or entertainment fandoms. By understanding these factors, you can understand who you are trying to connect with.
4. Identify your niche marketing keywords
Another way of niche marketing is to learn about what consumers type into Google or other search engines when they to find solutions to their problems or answer their questions. Start typing a few Google inquiries and note the keywords and phrases that automatically google suggest, based on what’s trending.
For example- if you want to find out about toxic relationships’ you will come across words such as narcists, narcissism, depression, stress, emotional abuse and so on. Typing these words into SEO research sites can reveal important metrics such as the search volume for a particular keyword. These can offer clues to what is important to your niche.
5. Create and share valuable content
Let me share with you a story here, it was at the Ukiyoto Kolkata Literary Carnival that I came across a book named Now We Breathe: Overcoming toxic relationship and Abuse by the author named Rakhi Kapoor. Out of curiosity, I started to search her Facebook page to know more about her. what grabbed my eye are her posts. Most of them are reels which are funny, engaging in some South Indian language (which I do not know) which are directly related to the book. some of her reels were in English which showed a certain aspects of narcissistic relationship characteristics or advice about how to overcome them. Sometimes she shares behind the scenes of her writing journey, links to her podcasts and book promotional events. What keeps the audience hooked is the content. They are attractive, educating your audience and nurturing them to convert them into clients. The content is relevant, useful and showcases your personality, expertise and value proposition.
Apart from podcasts and reels, you can also use blogs, live streams, eBooks, stories, testimonials, webinars and so on. You can also use Buzzsumo or AnswerthePublic to find out about the relevant trends, questions and keywords in your niche.
6. Optimize your content
It is never enough to just post your content and wait for it to somehow get famous. You must ensure that you optimize your content while posting them. So, before going into details, let us know about optimization. Optimization means making sure your content is easy to find, consume and share by your audience and the algorithms. To optimize, you need to use keywords, hashtags, captions, titles, descriptions, tags, and categories that match your niche and the platform’s best practices. You should also post high-quality video, audio, and images and use tools such as Canva or Lumen5 to edit your video and optimize them for different platforms. Let me demonstrate this point with an example:
You are posting a picture of yourself holding your book for the first time on your social media platform. In the caption, you share your feelings and emotions to connect with your audience and develop their trust towards you. In the end, you are sharing the relevant hashtags say #booklover#authorsinindia#debutbook#booksavailableonamazon#bookreaders#writers and so on. However, instead of sharing the common hashtags, you are also sharing, you can share unique hashtags such as say the name of my debut book #someunbotheredtruths#bookleafpublishing and so on.
Another thing that you must keep in mind is sharing your content based on analytic insights. this means posting your content when the audience is most active to reach new followers. The content you post also depends on the platform you are using. For example- On Instagram, it is ideal to post reels that attract a young audience. On Twitter, you can post your quotes from your book along with relevant hashtags. On Facebook, you can post photos or reels based on what grabs the attention of the mature audience. On LinkedIn, the posts should be based on attracting business clients. The key is always when, how and why.
7. Engage with your audience
The most important aspect of niche marketing and its significant aspect is to engage with your audience. This can be done by building with them a good relationship gradually over time. But how do we do so? You must be wondering so here is the answer.
Post content that is relevant and useful to the audience
Share your behind the scenes of your journey as a writer which helps the audience to connect with you and built their trust towards you.
Join in groups, conversations, communities, and events that relate to your niche and participate in them
Respond to comments, messages, reviews, and questions and express your gratitude to the audience for believing in you.
Encourage user-generated content, feedback, referrals, and testimonials from your audience and share them on your platforms.
Remember always, engagement is what keeps the audience hooked to you and your social media platforms. It builds their trust and loyalty towards them. It is what compels them to read your book, develop interest towards your other works and build your brand as a writer. Engagement is what turns your niche audience into your advocate and clients.
8. Monitoring Industry Trends
Learning is a continuous process so do improvise yourself. even after reading several articles today, you need to continue it tomorrow as well to understand it better. In the case of niche marketing too, you need to follow the trends on other social media platforms. It is very similar to wearing a saree and attractive earrings to perform the ‘Jhumka’ song for Instagram reels. For your writing journey as well, you need to know what works well for the target audience. Today, the audience may enjoy a romantic story tomorrow they may prefer a realistic approach to a romantic story to see the plot going in an unexpected turn. As a result, paying attention to the trends helps you a lot to understand your target audience.
In conclusion, all I would say is experiment and go with the flow, automatically you will understand what to do and what not to do.
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