When Is Niche Content Too Niche?

Aaron Agius is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of the award-winning global marketing agency Louder.Online.

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At one point or another, every marketer and entrepreneur will have to decide whether to focus on a wide audience or a narrow one. Many choose to go with a smaller market—a niche. And there are definitely advantages to being a big fish in a small pond, like less competition. However, if you’re not careful, you could end up going too niche and losing out on potential customers.

So how do you find that balance? In this post, I’ll cover what a niche actually is, how to know if you’re going “too niche,” and how to create effective niche content without going too far.

What Is A Niche?

A niche is a smaller subgroup of people within a larger market. The people in a niche will typically share broader desires and problems with the overall market. However, the niche subgroup also has specific wants and needs that you can cater to in order to make your product or service more attractive.

For instance, imagine two bakeries. Bakery A has every single baked good you could think of—from muffins to sourdough bread to chocolate-covered bacon cupcakes. This bakery is likely to appeal to most people who want a quick treat. It has a wide audience. Bakery B, on other hand, only offers a very specific range of goods. It focuses on gluten-free vegan products. This bakery appeals to a much smaller audience, a niche.

The above example applies to any industry. You can attempt to capture as much market share as possible for the broader market, or you can try to be the go-to place for a particular segment of that market.

The Benefits Of A Niche

Identifying a niche and creating content specifically for them has a number of advantages:

• Easier Competition: Going up against the giants in your industry can eat up a lot of margin and be more difficult, as you’re competing with potentially millions or billions of dollars worth of resources. A niche can be easier to dominate.

• First Mover Advantage: The smaller the niche, the less likely someone else has already offered the specific products or services as your brand. You can stand out more easily.

• Loyalty/Affinity: Let’s take the bakery example again. If someone is a vegan for moral reasons, they may choose to do business with a company that aligns more strongly with their own core values.

• Perceived Value: It’s easier to market your brand as the best when you can say things like, “We bake vegan goods all day; it’s the only thing we do.” In other words, it’s easier for your audience to make the logical conclusion that you’re the expert.

These are just some of the many benefits of marketing to a niche rather than a broad audience. However, sometimes niche content can go too far. You can go so niche that the negatives of missing out on a big market outweigh the positives of exceeding in a small market.

When Niche Content Is Too Niche

How do you know when you’ve gone overboard with niche marketing? Well, every situation is different, but there are two great rules of thumb to keep in mind:

Audience Size

If there are only 12 people in your niche audience, you’ve probably gone too far. Now, of course, the exact audience size that is appropriate for your niche will depend on your own KPIs. How many units do you need to sell? Is your offering a one-time or a repeat purchase? What is your customer lifetime value (CLV)? Does the audience size support your profit margins?

Your niche-oriented content is going to look different if your market is only large enough to support a small, one-person lifestyle business versus a high-growth tech startup. The moral of the story is that if you’re not careful, you could spend a lot of time and business capital creating content for a tiny market that can’t possibly provide an acceptable return on investment.

Level of Competition

Less competition is typically a good thing. There are fewer search results to compete with when creating content to rank your website on Google, for instance. But having almost zero competition isn’t necessarily preferable. The presence of competition means that other brands have found that niche to be a sustainable source of growth. If there are zero search results for “vegan gluten-free faux chocolate Valentine’s Day bars for golden retrievers named Sparky,” there might be a reason. Niching down doesn’t mean creating content to generate demand if no demand exists in the first place.

Ideally, you’d like to see someone already attempting to address that subset of the market, but poorly enough that you can create more specific and valuable content.

How To Get Niche Content Right

If you avoid the pitfalls above, you’re already off to a great start. But how do you create niche content that your audience loves and that keeps the sales coming?

Market Research

Look for proven interest in a smaller niche. One great strategy is browsing online forums that your target market hangs out in. Try to identify any emotional language around unresolved frustrations and also unmet desires that they have.

Trends

Google Trends is an amazing tool to see the relative popularity of search terms over time. You can cross reference a search term that’s growing in popularity with the quality and quantity of search results addressing that interest.

Testing

If marketers were mind readers, we would all be trillionaires. The ultimate way to identify if your niche content is just right or if you’ve gone too far is monetization.

Is your niche content resulting in a consistent, growing, profitable stream of revenue? If not, the market is sending you a message to broaden your focus still.

Conclusion

No matter what industry you’re in, you can create niche content to capture a smaller section of the market. Just make sure to check out the competition and ensure the audience size can meet your revenue needs.

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