By: Meagan Matthy
Identifying Your Niche, and Catering to Your Target Market in 2024
It’s a harsh reality: there are not many things worse (in the marketing world) than putting in hours and hours of effort and thought to create great deliverables, only to see your efforts fail because of a lack of precise audience targeting.
In the fast-paced world of marketing, success hinges not just on the quality of your deliverables but on the precision with which you target your audience. Once you get an idea, and before you run with it, make sure you market it to the right people.
The first step in marketing to the right audience is determining and establishing your niche and furthermore, your target audience.
Don’t just market aimlessly, determine your niche, and market it to the people ready to hand you their money.
Precise audience targeting can be equated to playing a game of darts and hitting (or getting close to) the bullseye.
How do you Determine your Niche for your Business? Here are the Basics:
Make a list of the top 5 services you offer and determine what sets you apart from other businesses in the area offering these same 5 services.
Complete a buyer persona profile to figure out who you want to target.
Create a Buyer Persona Profile
Creating a buyer persona profile is especially important for service based businesses.
Marketing products is often significantly easier than marketing services because as a whole people shop more for products for themselves, their family, and their friends (i.e. gifts) whereas people shop for services (most often) for themselves or their businesses.
The takeaway of this key point is that you can market more broadly around products than you can service, so you have to “niche down” more cautiously a service based business.
Speak Directly To Your Ideal Customer
It’s also important to use language your target audience understands in your social media posts, captions, blogs, commercials, emails, and text message marketing.
For example; If you offer tutoring services for English as a Second Language (ESL) your target audience is more than likely a demographic of people who don’t read or write in English. Your marketing move at this point would be to create content in various foreign languages that details the services you offer.
You need to use your efforts to speak to the people who are listening, or those that need to be listening. Your message should resonate with them on a personal level, making them feel that your product or service is the solution they've been searching for.
Want to talk about more strategies for finding your niche? Schedule a time to meet with our marketing experts here.
Once you’ve determined your niche, it’s time for the fun stuff!
Using precise audience targeting, you get to market your services to the type of people looking to hire a professional company like yours.
The final step in the target market selection process is testing the waters… we will talk more about A/B testing in a future blog, but the cliff notes version is:
Strategically present 2 different versions of the same deliverable (ad, social media post, email) to different people in the same target audience. This will aid in identifying gaps in engagement, and help you see what works and what doesn’t.
If You Want Your Message to be Heard, You Must First Listen
Equally as important to getting your target audience to listen to you, is to make sure you, as a business owner, are listening when your target market talks back.
When your audience engages, make sure to listen equally as carefully as you’ve been speaking up to this point and respond with authenticity - it would be a shame to make all this hard work go to waste if you lost your voice in responding.
What’s the Key Takeaway on How to Speak to your Target Audience?
Use precise audience targeting, listen to the responses of your audience, stay on brand in your communications, and be sure, above all else, to “niche down” before you invest your time, or money in marketing.
Still Struggling to Figure Out your Niche and Best Marketing Practices for it?
Don’t stress - if you still find yourself wrestling with the intricacies of niche identification and the implementation of effective marketing practices, Makin’ It Marketing is here to help.
Book a complimentary consultation here, and let our team of marketing experts guide you toward a marketing strategy that aligns seamlessly with your business goals.
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