When to use these strategies: Site Architecture Planning, During Creating of Content Strategy and Editorial Calendar, and Planning Ad Campaigns
Your ability to identify and connect with niche markets can be completely game changing and separate you from the competition. Connecting with niche markets can give you a powerful introduction to your target customers that can lead to sales of your core product down the road.
What are niche markets?
A niche market is a subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. (Wikipedia). There can also be niche markets within niche markets. For example: In the Action Sports Industry, Surfing is a niche market. In the Surf market, Surfboards are a niche. In the Surfboard market, Surfboard shaping techniques are a niche. In the Surfboard shaping techniques market, Surfboard shaping tools and materials are each their own niche.
Why are niche markets important?
Niche markets can allow you to make a connection with someone about a topic of mutual interest and indirectly give you an opportunity to introduce them to your products and services. This type of interaction can lead to more initial connections, and because those connections are focused on building more trust, those people will be more likely to purchase from you when they are ready.
Niche markets are also important because they allow you to be specific. In marketing, case study after case study has shown that what often separates an unsuccessful advertising campaign from a successful one is the specificity of the message.
For instance (staying with the surf example): A San Diego Sporting Good retailer put out two different ads to promote an online sale.
The first one said:
“Blowout sale! Get 50-75% while supplies last, sale ends tomorrow!”
The second one said;
“Surf gear blowout sale! 50% off Surfboards, 75% off accessories. Sale ends tomorrow.”
The first campaign received a less than 0.86% conversion rate. The second campaign received a 8.7% conversion rate. That is over a 1,000% increase. Same company, same headline, the only differences were that the ad copy of the second ad was specific. It addressed specific niche markets by saying "surfboards" instead of "surf and made a specific offer. By repeating the pattern of niche market specificity, and using interest category marketing in Google Display to deliver ads based on the browser history of the user, or where the ad is being viewed lead to significantly higher conversion rates as well.
How can you use niche markets to sell your core product?
The first way you can use niche markets is to identify information that your target market may be interested in, that is related to your core offering, and by becoming a good information resource for them, you can establish a relationship that leads to future sales and referrals.
The second way you can use niche markets is to create very specific offers that speak to very specific needs. While these tend to be relevant to much smaller segments of the total market, they are tremendously more effective in capturing interest and conversions.
Finding and Organizing Niche Markets
Step 1. Create an Aggregated Sitemap
Use the competitors reports from SEMrush, ScreamingFrog and PowerMapper to identify all categories and category related terms.
- Open an new Excel spreadsheet and begin building a single aggregated competitor sitemap that includes every applicable category and sub-category of content that appears on the sites of your top competitors.
- Start with the PowerMapper Site Tree reports. Go through each Site Tree and add the appropriate categories and sub categories, in the appropriate places to the aggregated sitemap. Note that competitors will often use different terms for the same things. You want to create a sitemap that streamlines all categories, sub-categories and pages of content.
- Go through the Screaming Frog SEO Spider reports and continue adding to the aggregated sitemap,
Step 2. More Ways To Find Niche Markets
Are there any niche markets that you may have missed? Now is the time to identify them. Brainstorm all of the niche subject matter that is somehow related to your core topic.
Powerful tools for uncovering niche markets
- Google’s “Searches related to…”: Over the years Google has changed where these suggestions are found. Currently they are located at the bottom of the organic search results for any search. The “Searches related to…” suggestions represent the most popular next-searched terms that people type into Google after searching for the current term.
- Wikipedia: Wikipedia pages explore topics in nearly every conceivable way, and therefore are quite adept at providing insight into different niche markets that are related to the topic.
- Ubersuggest.org: Ubersuggest takes your search term and systematically enters it into Google, along with each individual letter of the alphabet, and scrapes the Google Instant suggestions. For instance: keyword, keyword a, keyword b… and so on.
- KeywordSnatcher.com: Keyword snatcher is a tool that does the same thing as Ubersuggest.org, however Keyword Snatcher takes it up several notches, but performing the same thing in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and YouTube. It then continues to run every suggested keyword back through each search engine adding each individual letter of the alphabet and number, scraping the results and repeating. Keyword Snatcher can create over 40,000 keyword suggestions from a single term.
- Quora.com: Go to Quora, enter your category keywords and browse through the Questions to find topics of discussion. Repeat the same using Yahoo Answers.
- Google Discussions Search Modifier: For each core topic, take the core topic keyword and enter the following search strings into Google: You will get results for more forums to browse for discussion topics & niche markets.
- “keyword” + “forum”
- “keyword” + “forums”
- “Keyword” + “board”
- Example of search for Health Food forums: “health food” + “forum”
Step 3. Find A Place for Niche Markets In Your Sitemap
Remember to add every niche market to your Aggregated Sitemap in the proper Category, Sub-Category structure so that the information will be well organized.
So, now we’ve got all this research, but…
How Do We Put It To Use?
Next In the next lesson you will begin putting the niche markets (and everything else you have learned so far) to use in a very powerful way. You are going to learn how to dig through all of this keyword research to find the patterns that people tend to use most when searching for things. That information will let all of your keyword research in the future (for this same industry) become incredibly fast, thorough and easy to do.