5 Ways to Ace Your Niche Small Business Marketing Plan

Five techniques for building a successful niche small business marketing plan to draw in customers at launch.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Finding it difficult to get your niche small business marketing plan in place?

Starting up your own small business is an exciting time for any entrepreneur, even more so if your new business is concerned with something that you are passionate about. You might, for instance, have set up your own bespoke jewelry business or have taken the plunge after years of experience and set up your own cosmetic dentistry practice. However, it can be tough getting your business out there and noticed by prospective customers, particularly if it is quite niche, and you may find that you are spending an increasing amount of time marketing your business online rather than engaging in the actual practices of your business.

To help you streamline your time and successfully get your business noticed, here are five techniques for building a successful marketing plan for your small, niche business.

1. Get on social media

Social media is one of the most powerful – and cost-effective – marketing tools you can use.

It is an excellent way of interacting directly with customers and providing further information about your products and business as a whole. However, with so many different platforms available and the constant flow of information, many small business owners find themselves becoming adrift in the world of social media. The trick to staying afloat, therefore, is to be tactical in your use of social media.

First, consider which platforms your customer base is most likely to use; carrying out questionnaires and research into your customer base and creating customer profiles can help you to identify this. Then, ensure that you regularly check in on your platforms and consistently post interesting and valuable content.

If you are concerned about the amount of time this might take away from your business, be reassured that there are social media management apps, like Hootsuite, that you can use to schedule posts to ensure you always have a presence online. Simply dedicate an hour a week to scheduling your upcoming social media posts, and the rest of the time can be used to do the business development tasks you love. 

2. Content is king

Once you have set up the social media platforms for your business, how can you keep customers engaged with your posts and updates?

The key is to remember that when it comes to social media, content is king. Furthermore, customers want meaningful content that enriches their life in some way, rather than a constant barrage of hard-selling marketing posts, which can become spammy. Instead, take some to create meaningful content that your customers want to see in their feeds. It might be a series of informative blog posts discussing the current issues affecting your business – which can, in turn, spark a conversation on social media – or sharing behind the scenes photographs of your business practices on Instagram.

Many customers are increasingly put off by hard-selling corporate approaches, preferring instead to support small, independent businesses like yourself. Regularly posting meaningful content on social media demonstrates an approachability and level of trust for your followers, which will encourage them to transition into becoming loyal customers.

3. Remember industry-specific approaches

A lot of marketing techniques can be successfully applied to any type of business: an active social media presence, for instance, will drive customer engagement for both the bespoke jewelry business and the cosmetic dentistry practice mentioned in the introduction.

However, don’t forget to consider the approaches that would be specifically suitable for the sector in which your business sits. A marketing plan for a cosmetic dentist clinic, for example, might include the posting of before and after treatment photographs on your website and social media platforms to clearly demonstrate the efficacy of your treatment to prospective clients. Go to hip.agency to learn about how the experts do cosmetic dentistry marketing. On the other hand, the bespoke jewelry business might invest in learning macro photography techniques to take beautiful and aesthetic photographs of the jewelry to create a seasonal lookbook to be posted on your website and Instagram page.

4. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization – abbreviated to SEO – is the process of maximizing the number of visitors to your website by ensuring that your site appears high up the list of results generated by a search engine such as Google.

While it might sound complicated and impossible for a small, niche business to achieve, it is possible to climb the SEO rankings and enjoy success. Interesting, relevant, as discussed above, is a great way to have your website ranked high in search engine results – customers will purposefully search it out in order to access the value-rich information.

Another technique for maximizing SEO is to make sure that your metadata and titles contain relevant keywords that will be commonly searched by the user. For example, the cosmetic dental clinic mentioned above could post informative blog articles describing different cosmetic dentistry procedures, such as teeth whitening, which will then be found by prospective customers who are interested in undergoing such procedures themselves. 

5. Advertising 

You might think that your marketing budget is too small to spend money on advertising; however, it is possible to find some marketing success through advertising while still keeping to a tight budget.

You might, for instance, consider social media advertising on your relevant platforms. Facebook advertising has very reasonable rates for hosting advertisements that can be accessed by small businesses of all budgets, for instance. You could also think outside the box when it comes to advertising your business, especially if it is in a niche area. Reach out to bloggers and suggest a collaboration in the form of paid reviews or perhaps even sponsoring a series of posts. This will get your brand out there to the huge number of followers the blogger may have from all over the world. Furthermore, if your collaboration is successful, it might be the start of a long-lasting and mutually beneficial relationship with the blogger in question, who will be sure to endorse your small business with enthusiasm and honesty.

These 5 tips will help you get your niche small business marketing plan in place, but mastery is going to take time and commitment. Take a look at some of our other resources here for deeper insight into marketing your niche small business.