One problem I’ve encountered frequently as a business coach might seem quite counter-intuitive. It’s when a business has a fantastic product that’s accessible to almost everyone. Are you already exclaiming: That’s not a problem!!! This is because you may not be fully aware of the advantages of Niche Marketing.

You might think differently if you read on. Let me explain. In marketing, businesses often resist refining and narrowing a marketing campaign because they are concerned about the possibility of losing business.

But here is the reality of the debate about the advantages of Niche Marketing vs mass marketing. Even if you have a product or service that is accessible to most people, or most people or a large number of people in the UK or Ireland, or any other territory, you will likely increase sales if you refine your approach and target a niche.

The primary advantages of niche marketing

There are three primary advantages of niche marketing over mass marketing, especially in terms of marketing for small business.

1. Your Marketing Becomes Coherent

By targeting a niche, marketing for small business immediately becomes more focused. You’ll be better able to ensure that everything you do is pointed in one direction. That way, when your target market encounters whatever you’re selling, be it a product or service, they will be attracted by everything that you do. Because everything you do is pointed in that direction, you appear to understand your market, and so are more likely to have something of value for them.

Marketing campaigns that set out to appeal to almost everyone run a higher risk of being ignored by almost everyone. It’s a huge gamble, with the potential to make you seem like just another provider or product on the scene. Here’s what I have gathered working as a business coach for almost a decade: certainly in the UK, if you want to be seen, you must be a little different, and very specific.

2. It’s a More Direct Line to Customer Emotions

Science—using experiments based on fMRI neuro-imagery—provides evidence that the areas of the brain used in brand evaluation are the ones dealing with emotions, rather than the intellectual or information-processing centres. So it stands to reason that you need to target your customers’ emotions. But it means also that it’s easier to do this by targeting a narrower market, rather than “almost everyone”. Targeting a niche makes it simpler to determine the emotional appeal of your product or service, and then to foreground that in your marketing.

3. It’s a Business Growth Accelerator

The best advice to most business owners is to focus on one niche first initially, and target that niche hard. Once you’ve started to build up a decent flow from that niche, you can then synthesise and create processes for additional niches, diversifying as well as ramping up your marketing. This will lead to fast and sustainable business growth with very little additional effort.

If you want to target more than one niche at the outset, make sure you have the resources to do that. You will need to be able to administer multiple streams of marketing and promotions, each with a distinct message, style and strategy, but if your team can handle that, go for it! This is a segmented marketing approach that appeals to multiple groups of people more directly, which is far more effective than blanketing “almost everyone” with generic catch-all marketing.

Remember, choosing a niche doesn’t limit your sales and is, in fact, much more likely to increase them! So choose a niche and start creating a much more focused marketing strategy.

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