A niche marketing strategy is all about focusing on the needs of a particular audience, within a particular niche. With 80% of consumers more likely to respond to personalized ads, there’s no better time than now to leverage a niche marketing strategy.
One way to achieve successful niche marketing is to leverage programmatic advertising. From the ability to optimize and target the right audience in real time, to higher return-on-investment (ROI) and greater efficiency, programmatic offers plenty of benefits for marketers—including those who are targeting niche verticals.
Read on to learn what a niche marketing strategy is, innovative ways that programmatic advertising can be used for niche verticals, and best practices for campaign performance in niche verticals.
What is a Niche Marketing Strategy
The goal of niche marketing is to create highly targeted campaigns that attract a specific audience. Rather than catering marketing toward a broad group, a niche marketing strategy aims to deliver a personalized message to a well-defined target audience.
A Niche Marketing Example
Rather than running a broad marketing campaign, a skincare company could run a niche marketing campaign by honing in on the audience that will respond to the aspects of their products that are unique.
A niche marketing campaign might focus on the fact that their products are zero-waste, vegan, and cruelty-free. Messaging and targeting would be catered toward eco-conscious consumers who are socially aware and interested in a sustainable lifestyle.
In an episode of StackAdapt’s podcast, How Agencies Thrive, Maz Tannir and Anup Patel from the Toronto based agency, WS, shared how niche marketing benefited their clients in the agriculture sector.
Past clients of theirs in the agricultural sector would focus their efforts on direct display. They would go to specific publishers and use their 1st-party data to advertise on their websites.
WS wanted to shift the focus to the customer. They thought about what those customers were doing, and where they were browsing. They realized that a niche marketing strategy leveraging programmatic would work, because they recognized that farmers, like most people, are browsing online.
Why Use Programmatic in a Niche Marketing Strategy
Programmatic advertising enables media buyers to purchase advertising space using a programmatic platform that leverages data insights and algorithms. This form of media buying helps advertisers reach the right users, at the right moment.
Modern marketers are using a multi-channel advertising strategy that leverages a mix of programmatic channels, like native, display, video, connected TV (CTV), audio, and in-game ads. A multi-channel strategy increases the likelihood of reaching your desired audience, and it helps marketers craft a brand story throughout the entire customer journey.
Once a programmatic campaign is running, marketers can track the metrics that are most important, and also look into site transparency, geo performance, audiences, and more. It’s possible to review real-time metrics and optimize for maximum performance.
With the right programmatic partner, marketers can verify that their ads are served on relevant domains pre- and in-flight. This creates the ability to revise selected topics and keywords in real-time to improve the performance of programmatic campaigns.
With programmatic, marketers can create hyper-targeted ads, and get detailed reporting to learn about user behaviour and intent, and optimize campaigns. Programmatic also delivers the option of multi-channel campaigns to maximize reach. These features make it possible for marketers to cater their marketing campaigns toward niche audiences.
Tips for Running Programmatic Campaigns For Niche Audiences
Ready to target specific audiences? Here are tips to help you get started with building a niche marketing strategy.
Get to Know Your Niche Audience
Start with having a framework that is measurable, and really understand the audience you’re trying to reach. The best way to do this is by building customer profiles, which provide factual information about the demographics and buying behaviours of your target audience.
Once you know what drives decision-making for your target audience, you can start to develop a creative strategy and messaging that speaks to that audience directly.
Test Your Niche Marketing Strategy
Always avoid putting all your eggs in one basket. Mix A/B testing and brand lift studies into your strategy to see exactly what is driving engagement, and leave room to pivot. That way, when you identify what sticks for a niche audience, you can optimize for the best results.
Adjust as Your Audience Evolves
It’s important to re-evaluate your niche marketing strategy on a regular basis. Niche audiences evolve based on various factors, and so it’s important to check back often.
For example, the messaging that will resonate with audiences in the automotive industry might evolve based on seasonal weather. Messaging for that audience will vary depending on if it’s a snowy winter, or humid summer.
Getting Started With Programmatic Advertising
For agencies that have clients who have traditionally used channels like search and social, it’s important to be able to educate them on the benefits of programmatic. A team that’s going in front of the client should have a thorough understanding of the industry, current technology, and benefits.
There are tons of great resources out there that teams can use to grow their knowledge (like StackAdapt’s webinars). It’s worth investing in your knowledge of programmatic, because knowledge will result in confident clients.
It’s also important to remember you’re not going it alone when you leverage a programmatic platform for your niche marketing campaigns. When you partner with a platform, you have access to expert knowledge.
Your partners of choice have insight into media buying, strategy and how to best optimize your campaigns within their platform. This is immensely helpful for providing guidance in terms of what you’re doing well and what can be done better.
Want to run exceptional programmatic campaigns? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.
