New #MarketingNerds Podcast: How to Succeed in Niche Marketing

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Sometimes being “pretty good” at everything isn’t as good as being the best at one thing.

In today’s episode of Marketing Nerds, Katy Katz of Inturact sits down with Kelsey Jones to discuss why niche marketing could be just the ticket to have more successful clients. They talked about what works best in niche marketing and how to educate clients on best practices.

Here are a few of transcribed excerpts from our discussion, but make sure to listen to the podcast to hear everything:

The Benefits of Having an Specialization

It could be counter-intuitive to narrow your skillset, but there have been posts written and research into this concept of becoming a T-shaped marketer, and so learning broadly lots of things and then narrowing your skillset in a certain area.

You could think about applying it industry-wise. That’s where you have an opportunity to not only give your company a competitive advantage but give yourself a competitive advantage as well when you’re thinking about future career choices even or just positioning yourself as an expert on a certain topic.

As a marketing agency, we outsource a lot of the writing portion of the work that we do for our clients, and so we source people who are experts in their industry. We toyed around the idea doing the same thing for our own blog. Because there are so few people who actually are really knowledgeable about SaaS marketing, we would count on losing if we tried to do it for our own blog.

So the more and more specialized you get, you can make a nice chunk of change writing for those special industries.

Coming up With Content When You’re a Niche Marketer

I think it depends on what you’re niche-ing in.

When you’re thinking about something like higher education, it was actually really challenging for me to think about how to come up with ideas for multiple colleges, because a lot of their personas are very similar, and so the things that would be important to one college of students would be very similar to another college of students. You could see how you could get burnt out or worry about getting burnt out quickly, but there are lots of things you can do to counteract that, dividing up your team into certain ways and then just really digging into the intricacies of that particular college’s persona.

But what’s nice about some of the other things like niche-ing in law or software as a service is that there are intricacies that are common among the different types of companies. There are specializations, so you could potentially have clients that are completely unrelated to each other. You could have a package tracking client and then a health care app, which are completely different until you can apply some of the same ideas for coming up with content.

Always search with a persona and what’s important to that persona, and then look at keywords, and then really get into social data and forums and areas where people in that niche or in that special place are talking and communicating to get a sense of what is important to them, what questions they need answered.

Especially with SaaS, the companies come from the startup mindset where maybe the founder is a developer himself. They have this idea that they can do it all and they can learn to do it and implement themselves. But there are some things that, when you specialize in content marketing, that it just becomes second nature to you and maybe it gets not as important to someone who’s learning about it.

And so we find simple fixes like that that help their content enormously just by looking at the persona, doing a buyer’s journey, seeing what their pain points are along the way, and say, “Here you go. Here’s content for the next three months.”

Is it Worth it to Try Other Digital Marketing Platforms?

It really depends on the group. For example, we have a client that is B2B, and they have been so successful with LinkedIn marketing and can not get Facebook to work for them. Whereas, in my experience, Facebook is one of the least expensive forms of advertising, so I always do push it, but there are certainly cases where some of the other platforms are just better. And I think, for the most part, what I found is people are willing to try things.

A lot of people, especially in startup mindset, have this growth hacking mindset, where they want to try and grow as quickly as possible and find a solution that’s going to help them get there, and so they’re really willing to try new things, but it’s our job as the marketer to set goals for trying those new things and then measure whether it’s worth it or not for the client.

If you want to, as a marketer, really provide value for them, set those measurements for them and show why or why not it’s working.

To listen to this Marketing Nerds podcast with Katy Katz and Kelsey Jones:

• Download and listen to the full episode at the top of this post
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Think you have what it takes to be a Marketing Nerd? If so, message Kelsey Jones on Twitter, or email her at kelsey [at] searchenginejournal.com.

Visit our Marketing Nerds archive to listen to other Marketing Nerds podcasts!

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
In-post Photo #1: Flat Design/Shutterstock.com
In-post Photo #2: Image by Aki Libo-on