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Niche Marketing Menu
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Niche Marketing
Niche marketing is a focused or targeted advertising technique that allows a business to concentrate marketing efforts and resources on a specific customer type. Niche marketing is also a process that involves three important steps: 1) Choosing what niche or customer base to focus on. Choosing one or more niche markets is an extremely important process that will require a bit of time and effort on your part. This step, picking a niche, demands that you take a long hard look at yourself as well as your community. In this initial step, you should try to determine your personal resources and the demographic characteristics of your city and surrounding communities. We will discuss the concept of personal resources in greater detail in the "Exchange Marketing" segment. The best way to explain the process of picking a niche market is by using a hypothetical. .Let's say that you live in a city with a population of 100,000. In this city there are roughly twenty-five MD's, four Chiropractors, three businesses that sell impairment products, ten drug stores, one small SSA office, three non-governmental foundations for the disabled and one city-wide Newspaper. In this example, I could go on and on with relevant demographic characteristics, but I think you get the point. Being the brilliant niche marketer that you are, you take the above data and use it to formulate and identify a niche market for your new disability advocacy service. The first thing you do is to take the population data and create a numerical assumption about your town. You determine that with a population of 100,000 people, approximately 1.7% or about 1700 people will apply for SSA disability benefits on an annual basis. The 1.7% figure is roughly the national average for disability applications. You know that you cannot handle more than 50 or so cases a year because you are planning to keep your full-time job. From this simple population data, you can determine that there is a sustainable market in your area for your service. Now you can begin evaluating your personal assets and resources. Let's say that you are a nurse who has worked with orthopedic patients for many years. Because of your experience, you would like to accept cases primarily from those suffering from orthopedic disorders. You feel that this is a good area of concentration because some sixty percent of all disability applicants suffer from one or more serious orthopedic conditions. You also personally know most of the doctors in your area who treat orthopedic conditions. You also have a good idea of how you might use other professionals and agencies in your area who work with those suffering from debilitating orthopedic conditions like Rheumatoid arthritis. From the simplified example above, you are already beginning to see how you can identify a specific niche market for your advocacy service within your community. Determining this niche has been based on personal and demographic information that can easily be acquired in any community. Personal data comes from you and describes your wants, needs and personal characteristics. You know or should know your own background, interests and goals for your advocacy service. Demographic information about your city is also readily available. In fact, acquiring information about your city is almost as easy as identifying your personal assets. Today, many cities have Internet sites that provide an enormous amount of demographic information about the community. The Internet may be your best source of information within the very community you live in. Make sure that you also search for information in local Government sites on the Web. If the Internet doesn't supply the information you want, visit the government records office in your city. Many types of records including demographic information is kept by government agencies and is open to the public. These sources can provide an enormous amount of information about your community that can be used to identify viable niche markets. Identifying customer location: Where is your niche market located? Since your service is local, identifying where your best potential customers are is made much easier. In our hypothetical example above, you have decided to work with patients suffering from orthopedic conditions. The fact that you have made the decision to work with orthopedic patients provides you with a focus point that allows you to target your search. Actually focusing your search is a matter of asking the right questions. The above questions represent just a few inquiries that can help you to focus your search for a particular niche market. Each question helps you to identify exactly where your niche market is and how it might be used. Remember, you are seeking two major categories of potential customers. Those individuals who may apply for disability benefits and those individuals or businesses, etc. who can refer potential applicants to your service. The above questions can also help you to determine the best methods of approaching clients who fit within your chosen niche markets. Now that you have identified your niche and determined where they are, it is now time to decide on the best methods of marketing to that niche. Here is where you can use the Internet with its beloved search engines to help you accomplish this goal. To a good online marketer, there is a lot more to the Internet than just "The Web." Online marketing opportunities abound in not only the Web, but also in e-mail, discussion list, Newsgroups and online forums. However, in this segment, we will concentrate on using the Search Engine as a marketing tool to identify the locations of the most appropriate businesses, discussion groups, forums, etc., for our niche market. Please note that we are not using the Internet to try and find actual persons applying for or thinking of applying for disability benefits. That would be a waste of time. In a previous segment of this course, we have already explained that disability applicants normally do not seek advocacy services online. Therefore, we want to use the Internet to identify and solicit those who best fit our referral category. That is, individuals and companies who can refer potential applicants to our advocacy service. Think of a search engine as a method of listing the most appropriate contact sources for the referral side of your niche market. To acquire this list, go to a search engine like Yahoo.com. You will note a search box. In this search box, enter a keyword that represents the niche your are trying to locate. Think local! In this example, enter the word "Your city name and state." Then click enter. You have entered what is called keywords into the search engine that makes the engine locate all subjects related to your city and state. Keywords determine what sites will be retrieved and listed by the search engine. Now, enter the words orthopedic doctors and your city name and state. By entering both your city and orthopedic doctors, you are performing an advance search which will retrieve even more specific information. Repeat this approach for every keyword or group of keywords you can think of for your resource market. Used in this way, the Internet will allow you to identify numerous local sources within your community that could be outstanding referral sources for your advocacy service. I'm not trying to teach you how to use a search engine. I am trying to show you that with a little imagination, you can use the Internet to identify an unlimited number of potential marketing sources in your area. Once you have identified these sources, you can then determine the best and least expensive methods of using these sources to reach your primary niche market. Here is an example of how you might use a local source found on the Internet. Let's say that you located a family owned drugstore in your community. The drugstore has an Internet site that it uses to serve its customers. You visit the store and speak with the owner. You tell the owner about your advocacy service and ask if you can do a link exchange on the Internet. You can recommend his drugstore on your site and he can recommend your service on his. We will discuss this technique in more detail in the "Exchange Marketing" segment of this course. The owner determines that this approach just might funnel new business to his store, so he agrees. You have just created a valuable relationship that if cultivated properly, can serve the marketing objectives of both you and the drugstore owner. Niche marketing, both on and off-line: Niche marketing is not something that should be exclusively performed on the Internet. Learn to use the strengths of the Internet to identify a potential marketing source, and traditional marketing techniques as a means of acquiring cooperation from the source. When I say traditional marketing, I'm not talking about advertising as in running an ad. I'm talking about creating referral relationships using traditional methods. Using this approach can be far more valuable than standard advertising and costs you nothing. Remember, the strength of the Internet lies in its ability to funnel information to you that can be used for marketing research. The strengths of traditional marketing approaches (like talking to the drugstore owner in person), are that they can be used to create valuable marketing relationships that are mutually beneficial to both parties. Orthopedic patients buy pain pills from drugstores, making drugstores a potentially profitable referral source for your advocacy service. This is just one example. There are countless numbers of referral opportunities out there if you use a little imagination in your search. And, there are countless ways of approaching and forging real world relationships with these potential sources.
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