Successful digital marketing campaigns normally rely on being able to reach and influence the target audience who are interested in purchasing your product or service. The advent of search marketing (both PPC and SEO) transformed a marketers ability to achieve this, as users could be targeted by what they were searching for online. Couple this with the fact that the vast majority of goods are services are either purchased and/or researched online, the opportunity for companies to generate revenue online has become absolutely colossal.
However, for products/services that are not mass market and for which there is little search volume, it is much more difficult to tap into this audience using traditional methods of search marketing. Two examples we recently worked with included a University professor who wanted to enroll more students onto a certain course as well as a brand new medical product on the market that treated a very specific condition. In both instances, search marketing alone would not have been sufficient. Below are the methods we used to reach the right audience.
Display Advertising
Display advertising via GDN allows marketers to target users in a variety of different ways including by placement, keyword, demographic, topics, age, interests and well as combinations of these. By using these methods you can hone in on where your audience is likely to be online and the publications or sites they are likely to read.
Approaching sites direct
Not all sites use GDN ads – some manage their own advertising, whilst others may use other ad networks. It is for this reason that is is worth researching for sites using relevant keywords and then finding if their are any which would be a good match. Even if traffic volumes for sites like this are quite modest (as they are likely to be for a niche topic), the visitors to these kind of sites should be relevant to your product or service.
One of great advantages of Facebook advertising is the almost endless number of targeting options. As they hold an unrivaled amount of data on each person who is a member, they provide huge opportunity to reach niche audiences. For example you can target by behaviour, interest, fans, friends to name but a few. Again the volume maybe low, but if you can identify groups or people who match your audience you can lazer target them with ads.
Use remarketing data
Once you have done some of the above hopefully you will have generated some inbound traffic. The next step is to ensure you remarket to these visitors, which can be done on a number of platforms including Adwords, Facebook and a host of ad plaforms. When running this in Adwords, you will be able to download the sites that your remarketed audience has been visiting, as well as ascertaining demographic data. This information should be useful in giving you further insight into what type of user is coming to the site, and which other sites are of interest to them.
Niche audiences will always be inherently more difficult to target than mass market industries such as travel, retail and finance. As search volume is limited, you can only go as far as tapping into the online communities or publications which the target audience is likely to part of. And whereas search marketing tends to target end of funnel / ready to purchase users, this activity is likely to be more about raising awareness and pushing users down the purchase cycle, as opposed to working as a direct sales channel.
If you would like assistance is targeting a niche audience online, contact us today.
