Successful Niche Marketing with B2B PR
By Cara Sloman, CEO and President, Force4 Technology Communications, LLC
Reaching your target audience is a challenge no matter what. If you can pinpoint your niche, however, you will know the specific market segment to focus your marketing efforts on, giving your business a competitive edge.
Staking your claim to a niche market and positioning yourself as the go-to brand establishes your credibility over competing generalists. With a unique value proposition, focusing on a niche market makes it easier for the right customers to find you and recognize that you have the solution their business needs.
Two niche marketing challenges
To get started, your niche market strategy must address two primary challenges.
The first is that a niche market has a limited pool of customers or prospects. When you have a smaller number of potential customers, there will be a limited number of opportunities. Each opportunity is potentially more important in niche markets than in mass markets.
The second challenge is breaking through the noise to ensure your audience hears your message. Competing for share of voice and market share is an ongoing issue. You’ve got to make sure your message is heard – but you may encounter competitors with bigger marketing budgets that supply a full system or solution where your niche products or services are only a part of an overall whole.
Make your niche products stand out
Successful niche products address a targeted and specific business challenge that customers are struggling with. Make sure you’re fully aware of the trends shaping your market segment and the customer pain points that aren’t being adequately addressed by current solutions. Solicit feedback from industry analysts and influencers. Gather potential customers in focus groups and ask them what they think.
Gather this information as early on in your marketing strategy or product development phase as possible. This will help you to deeply understand the market need and hone your solution and go-to-market strategy. For instance, who are the job roles that need to sign off on purchasing your solution? Where do they get their information? Make sure they can find resources that help them make a decision in the outlets where they turn to for research.
All these elements come together in a strategic B2B PR plan, alongside the essential tactics and success metrics to know if you are reaching the right audiences and whether it is making the impact you want.
Developing a strong niche market strategy
To address the right market via the right tactics at the right time and cut through the noise, PR is essential. Your PR team will develop targeted messaging, conduct message testing based on your unique value proposition and communicate your value proposition.
It’s important to increase the number of prospects and touch points through outbound and inbound marketing to maximize the potential for success in a niche market. An important step in this process is to create a content strategy for inbound leads. Customers and prospects want to see content that shows you understand their business and their challenges. This means you’ll want to create content that addresses the needs and desires of each of your target markets, including vertical markets.
One of the best ways to do this is to include customer success stories across a variety of content types. Press releases, case studies and joint speaking opportunities are three powerful opportunities to leverage the success you’ve already had with customers to bring in new customers.
Make sure your content strategy is tightly tied to your Google Ad strategy, since your prospects usually start their search for helpful resources with a search engine. Making sure SEO keywords get included in your content significantly helps to direct organic traffic to your company’s website.
You’ve also got to enable and encourage constant interaction between the sales and marketing teams. Coordinate efforts, collaboration and tracking of results with respect to measurable metrics. Google Analytics is a useful tool to help keep track of your metrics, which will give you greater insight into where customers find you, which external channels are driving traffic and what content is most meaningful to them.
Niche product success
You’ll never be all things to all people, so it’s not a good idea to try. Your niche product has its unique market and target personas, and once you find them, it’s time to go to work with a combined PR and marketing effort. Use the best practices outlined above to develop and implement a plan that will, with consistent effort, bring not only greater brand awareness and market share but PR ROI, as well. Want to learn more? Shoot us a message here.
