If you're running a niche business, gaining sales can feel like fishing in a small pond – your number of potential customers is restricted. So, is a ‘mass marketing’ strategy such as Inbound marketing appropriate for businesses such as these? Yes. In fact, inbound marketing is the perfect growth strategy for specialist businesses operating in a small sector. In this article, we’ll explain why – as well as reasons why some businesses may have struggled with inbound marketing in the past.
Why Can't I Reach My Prospects?
The most obvious reason why you're not getting the attention your products or services require isn't (usually) that there's anything wrong with what you're selling. You can be offering a superb product and be getting nowhere. Why? Because niche businesses are normally competing with other specialist businesses for the same customers! The answer is not to shout louder or say the same things as your competitors, but to offer your prospects a better, and more personalised marketing experience. This approach will bring prospects to your door in a way that other ‘outbound’ or direct marketing approaches might not.
Inbound Marketing Is Perfect For Targeting Niche Audiences
If you're in a niche business, then massive, expensive ad campaigns aimed at a mass-market are exactly the wrong way to go. You may reach a few new potential customers this way, but the vast majority of the people who see your ads will have no interest in what you do. Instead, target the people you do see as potential customers, by creating fantastic content that's relevant to their needs.
Authority Matters
Among the most effective ways to gain visitors to your website is to establish and maintain a high-quality blog. Giving people tips, help and answers that fit their questions, and giving them insight, will help build your authority and reputation. This is just as important in the niche arena as in any other kind of business – perhaps even more so, since people may be looking for answers to very specific questions. Use your inbound marketing content as a platform to demonstrate your expert knowledge.
Making The Most Of Automation
Among the most powerful tools a niche business can leverage is marketing automation, a cornerstone of modern inbound marketing. Among other tasks, automation makes it quicker, easier and more cost effective to set up complex email chains that provide appropriate information in response to behavioural cues, and record the results in a unified database. You can easily do A/B testing on your email campaigns to determine which designs work best. You can also make sure you're not caught by spam traps, and send your emails at the predetermined times that fit in with your targets' working patterns. Automation also brings the ability to use powerful, personalised forms to gather contact details and establish new relationships, as well as tracking campaigns to ensure you're not wasting limited resources on an approach that isn't bearing fruit.
Find Out More
Inbound marketing's ability to nurture leads is something that niche businesses can utilise just as well as those with more broad-based audiences. In fact, its ability to help you target exactly the right people, in the right ways, at the right time gives it even more power and appeal. To find out more about how inbound marketing can make you money this year, give us a call today.
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