In this first episode of the Clickable Marketing podcast, I look at the most important decision you’ll make regarding marketing your small business online… your niche (target market). It will ultimately determine how successful your Internet marketing is.
Podcast Transcription:
PICKING AN ONLINE NICHE FOR YOUR SMALL BUSINESS
You’re listening to the Clickable Marketing Podcast where we help fired-up small business owners turn clicks into clients. Join us to discover how you can make more money online in less time. Now here’s your host, Mr. Web-Marketing, Brad Hauck.
Welcome to the Clickable Marketing Podcast. I’m Brad Hauck, and this is Episode 1. Today we are going to have a look at picking your niche. Some people say niche, and some people say niche. It really doesn’t matter. What we’re trying to do is pick the place on the web that you’d best fit so you that can reach your target audience.
Since 1996, when I first started working on the web, I’ve seen people struggle with this aspect of the business. They really want to reach the widest audience possible, and yet, at the same time, they want to get known for the one thing that they’re really good at. The fact of the matter is that you can’t be everything to everybody. It would be great. It would be a lot of fun, and I’m sure it would bring a lot more business. But on the web, if you try to be everything to everybody, and you try to target too wide an audience, quite frankly, you won’t reach anyone at all. Those you do reach will not be the people that you’re actually trying to target.
When I started about marketing online in about 1996, it was very simple to rank a website. All you needed to do was put a few keywords in, feed it into the search engines, and hey presto! You are getting traffic. It was really quite simple in those days. That’s changed a lot over the last few years. Obviously, there are now millions and millions of websites all trying to reach a particular audience, all trying to sell a product, or service, or information to somebody. In your case, you’re not the only one who is working in your niche, and that’s super important to understand.
NICHES WITHIN NICHES – TARGETING YOUR AUDIENCE
Within niches, there smaller niches, of course. It’s never as simple as just saying, “Well, I’m going to talk to people who are interested in training their dog.” Or, “I’m going to talk to people who are interested in learning to play soccer better.” You need to come even smaller than that. That was fine 10 years ago, but now, with so many people competing for the same audience that you’re trying to reach, you really have to dig in and find something specific that you can target. Once you’ve found that target audience and you’ve started to build an audience then you can expand out a bit.
But my advice to you, based on my experience is, try and keep it really tight. I’ve work on websites for audiences of all sizes and for markets of all sizes, but the one thing I do know is that you can break it down and find where your audience is. If you’re a local business, my advice to you is to actually focus in on the local area. The biggest mistake you can do is try and reach an international audience.
If you can only deliver your service or product within a defined area, then that’s where you should be marketing. The great thing about this is there are less people in that area. There’s not that many people competing for that market, so therefore your chances of showing up are actually much, much higher. You’re getting known for what it is that you do much more quickly.
If you’re in a city, then you should target the city itself, but also think about your suburb. Is your suburb big enough to actually support you? Is there more clients within 5 minutes of your home base than there is that you can handle in a year? If so, then stop trying to target the whole city. It’s just too many businesses.
For example, if you’re an electrician, most people are looking for a local electrician who can come around relatively quickly and do the job that they need completed. They’re not going to search the whole of a city. A local city to me is Brisbane. If you’re in Brisbane, they’re not going search necessarily for an electrician in Brisbane. They’re going to look for an electrician in Wynnum or an electrician in Redcliffe or somewhere like that, because they’re looking for the local person; and naturally, people like to support local business over big corporations.
In my personal opinion, local businesses actually have an advantage over people who are competing on an international stage. Because your audience is smaller and because they are working within a defined area or a defined interest, they are much easier to reach.
DIGGING DOWN TO YOUR NICHE – DEFINING YOUR FOCUS
How do you define your niche? Let’s take dog training. Dog training is always one of my favourite ones to use when I’m working out examples. Within dog training, there’s lot of different areas that you can focus on. You could train dogs to do tricks. You could train dogs in basic puppy obedience. You could train dogs to sniff out ants, or termites, or something specific like that. You can train Labradors. You could train Border Collies. There are so many areas that you can dig down in.
If we were to take dog training and Border Collies and then dig again and go down that next level to puppies – so puppy training for Border Collies – you’re now getting into a much tighter niche. You don’t train other sorts of dogs. You don’t train Labradors, and you don’t train Poodles. You only train Border Collies who are puppies who need their basic training. This is something that’s quite defined.
But if you then take that and step it down another level again and bring in a local keyword, like a city or a suburb, you could then say you’re the person who does dog training for Border Collies who are only puppies in Sydney. Or you can break that down again and say the Sydney CBD.
You can see by digging into the niche and digging right down, you become quite focused on what it is.
Often I’m asked, “Why do I need to do that? Why do I need to dig down so deeply?” The reason is that when you get down that deep, you can really focus your content. On your website, when you’re writing content, when you’re adding pictures, when you’re doing your keywords for SEO – and yes, SEO is still very relevant – and also on your pay per click advertising, you can focus in on this tiny, tiny niche.
Instead of writing articles that apply to all dog owners, you can write articles that apply to people who own Border Collies that are puppies. This make writing much easier, you don’t need to think about it. You can just know that you’re going to be focusing on puppies that are Border Collies. That allows you to do research for keywords and come up with different topics to write about.
PICTURING THE AUDIENCE – TARGET ACCURATELY
One of the things that I often do once I define the niche is I actually try and come up with a picture of the person that I’m talking to. I’ll define the niche and then I’ll look at – Who is the audience? Who is that person? What do they look like? Are they young? Are they old? Are they male, female, or both sexes? What is the person like? Are they a new dog owner or have they own dogs before? If you’re going to break that down and come up with that avatar, as we often call it these days, then that will allow the writing that you do to your niche to be even more accurate; because you’re writing to that person. You’re talking directly to them.
As a small business owner, one of the things you need to do is get to know your niche so that you can target your market properly. You’ll sometimes hear this called finding your voice.
Over the years I’ve worked with a lot of small business owners, and you can quickly improve your results online just by working out what your niche is. It’s not something people often take the time to do. They just sit down and say, “Well I’m a plumber,” or, “I provide consulting services,” or, “I’m a speaker and I speak about this topic.” They don’t dig down deep and define it really tightly.
In my case, this podcast, I like helping small business owners get better results online. That’s the key point of this. It’s to help you, as a small business owner, to get results more quickly without having to dig through the piles, and piles, and piles of information online to find some specific information to help you. There’s so much information out there that makes it difficult to find the basics.
One of the great things about having a niche is that is allows you to identify other potentials niches that you could be targeting with the same audience. We come back to our puppy dog training for Border collies in Sydney CBD. We can see that that can be applied in different cities. We can see that it can be applied in different suburbs, in different states around the world; but it does allow us to then specify something even tighter.
We could say, “We do puppy training for Border Collies, yes, but we have a special program for Border Collies that are used on farms,” or, “We have a special program for Border Collies that are house dogs,” because as we all know, Border Collies like to run so they’re not necessarily the best house dog because they need to get out in the back. That allows you then, once you’ve defined that niche, to see other opportunities that you might not see if you just said, “I’m a dog trainer.”
Because when you’re up there at that level, that high level niche where it’s mass market rather than specific market, there’s so many opportunities, so many products that, in the end, you’re just so general that no one really understands what it is that you do. Once they understand that you’re the Border Collie specialist within Sydney, then there’s so many opportunities to market to them with a range of products to hit other sections of the same market.
WORKING OUT YOUR SERVICES AND KEYWORDS
Coming back to where we’ve began, you really need to sit down with a piece of paper and work out what it is that you do best, where your audience is, in other words, who can you service? There’s no point in saying that you service the north side of the city when you don’t. You might be able to, but you don’t. Put your foot down, and think about that. Down the track, you may get some business from the north side of the city, and you will be able to service it; but let’s start off on the south side that you can service. Force yourself to think about the clients that you’ve had, and take the time to make some notes about them – the services they chose, the most common ones you get calls about.
I know that when I sit down with small business owners, there are certain questions I asked. One of them is, “What’s your most popular service?” Often, that’s the thing that people are searching for the most online. That’s the thing that you get known for. A second question that I sometimes will ask is, “What’s your most profitable product or service?” If they don’t know where to start, if you’re confused, sometimes you can start with your most popular; but the other one is, “What’s your most profitable?” With the most profitable, you’ve got an opportunity there to focus in and pull in the money that you need to make to keep yourself afloat.
Think about those two questions. Think about who you’re trying to target. Work out where your niche is, and then once you have that niche, sit down and do some keyword research. I’m going to have a look at keyword research in another podcast. I’m not going to look at that today. But do the keyword research, and look at the exact phrases people are searching for; and then you can bring those into your writing. You can bring those into your content – in your videos, in your texts, in your SEO, in your pay per click, etc.
Niching your business is the most powerful thing you can do to improve your marketing. If you want to succeed online, you need to find your niche and work it until you own the niche. Then, you can expand out. Remember, one website per niche. If you want to attack a different niche, and you want to get into a different market, you may need to set up a second website; because if you don’t, you will water down the content, and the search engine, specifically, will not reward you for that. They don’t like watered down content. They like it to be focused. They like to be able to see what the site is about and see that all the content supports that.
That’s it for this week’s podcast. I hope you have enjoyed this one. We looked at niches. There’s so much work to be done in that areas for most business.
I’m Brad Hauck, Mr. Web Marketing. If you’ve got any questions or if you got an idea for a podcast that you’d like me to cover, please send it to brad@mrwebmarketing.com, and you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter. My handle of course is @MrWebMarketing.
I look forward to talking to you in the next podcast. See you then.