Niche Audience: Your Ticket to Higher Conversion

In every job I’ve had in product positioning (and beyond), my first priority was getting to know my audience. And it makes sense, right? Whether you’re improving products, creating a media strategy, or even selling lemonade, you need a deep understanding of your target audience.

Lately, I’ve been honing this approach. Audience analysis is typically all about understanding, attracting, and better serving the biggest and best audience for your business.

While it’s important to know on a large scale who’s visiting your website or buying your product, focusing on niche audiences can generate more buzz (and revenue) for your business. 

When added up, these smaller viable markets in your industry can have a huge impact on your audience loyalty, engagement rate, and growth.

Read on to find out how to target your niche audience and convert them into permanent users with long-term impact.

First off, what is a niche audience?

A niche market is a subgroup of your business’s main target audience. This unique group of people has their own specific wants, expectations, and pain points more than the broader market.

Just like with the process of market segmentation, splitting your market into niche audiences makes them more approachable. You can create more curated media and product strategies for a specific group rather than appealing to the masses. If you define more than one niche in your audience, you can personalize your messaging for each in order to create more chances of success.

Once you’ve found out what separates your niche from the rest of the potential audiences online, that should be your focus. This allows you to offer unique value to address their specific needs and pain points, which may be neglected in the wider market. Keep this at the forefront of your niche audience development.

From targeted content to products and services, with niche targeting you can become the go-to company in your market for that specific audience, building expertise and credibility. Take a look at some of the ways you could separate a general audience from a niche one:

The benefits of niche marketing

A niche strategy will be more effective than mass marketing when done right because you’re giving your audience exactly what they want. But there are a lot more benefits beyond customer satisfaction. Generally, they fall into two buckets: better brand awareness and increased revenue. Who would say no to that?

Building your brand influence

One of the main benefits of catering to a niche market audience is less competition. That’s because most of your competitors are casting a wide net in a large pool of potential users and seeing what they catch. However, by using different types of market segmentation, you’ll get more bites in the end.

You’ll also build brand loyalty and build customer retention. With the right audience, you can provide more focused customer service, actually responding to feedback and making adjustments as necessary. With a larger audience, you can’t possibly please everyone.

Word of mouth with niche audiences can increase your influence. If your niche is particularly vocal or opinionated, think millennials on social media, you’ll have the added benefits of active engagement.

Increasing revenue

Niche audiences will cut marketing costs in the long run. Not only will you have to spend less on advertising as your brand grows within your niche, but you can also create more targeted PPC campaigns with better returns. 

The “casting a wide net” metaphor applies here as well. Rather than dividing your budget across multiple potential audiences, spend the same amount on a more targeted group. You’ll get more clicks and more conversions, increasing your ROI in the long run, especially if you go after an underserved niche audience.

If you’re providing your niche market with something specific, not offered anywhere else in the market, you have the opportunity to increase your prices within reason.

Pitfalls to watch out for

Although there are multiple benefits to targeting your niche audience, there are some roadblocks to be aware of before you dive right in:

• There’s less competition for a reason – Make sure that the niche you’re targeting is big enough to benefit your business. While chances of success go up the more targeted your campaigns and products are, there are inherently fewer people to reach. You need to monitor the cost of targeted vs. potential returns and opportunities.
• Less growth potential – If you focus too many of your resources on niche audiences, you might miss out on larger growth opportunities. Remember to monitor your entire market.
• Strong ROI isn’t guaranteed – A new digital strategy always involves some risk. Be strategic about how much you invest in targeted niche audiences and monitor your ROI closely.

How to find your niche audience

You’re now an expert in the benefits of niche audiences, but how do you find yours? There are a variety of tools out there, including Google Analytics, that help you hone in on your audience.

However, the best way to get a complete picture of what’s happening online is with audience analysis tools from Similarweb Research Intelligence. I’ll take you through an example.

Your mission: Define and nurture a niche market

Imagine you are VP of Audience Development at a global cycling company and your job is to launch an urban e-bike into a new market. You may have some assumptions about your target audience, but to successfully launch this new product and build awareness, you’ll need to know:

• What characteristics define this niche market? (for example, bikers in a city who prefer electric modes of transportation over traditional)
• How are your competitors approaching them?
• Which channels work best for them?
• When is the right time to engage with them?

Step 1: Identify the audience

The first step is to identify the ideal customer profile of your target audience that you want to capture. If you’re launching an e-bike, you’ll want to engage with people who cycle or have a need to cycle; for example, they commute to work by bike or enjoy cycling as a hobby outside of work.

Other criteria could be around lifestyle, such as they want to make more eco-friendly options. You can identify your audience in different ways, such as what they search for online or what they post on social media.

For example, using the keyword research tool, you can build a list of search terms around ‘healthy snack’ and group these keywords to essentially build a profile of your audience.

With this list, you can then identify the types of sites that engage with your target audience, and also identify the total addressable market based on search volume and spot trends over time.

Step 2: Qualify the audience

The next step is to qualify this audience by looking at your competitors. Dive into the websites that also target “healthy snack” consumers and explore the website’s demographics of that publication to see the demographics distribution. You can also expand this list by looking at which similar sites the audiences cross-browse to build a richer view of their online media consumption and habits.

Step 3: Monitor your niche audience over time

Finally, you can bring it all together and build a dashboard to monitor the “healthy snack” audience over time, while at the same time building out other audience profiles.

Here’s a niche audience example of a “healthy snacks” tracking dashboard within Similarweb. You can see the total search volume (which is your total addressable market potential), traffic share total (which shows traffic and engagement changes over time), and audience demographics. Plus you can monitor your competitor’s audience to see if it changes.

Want more pro tips on how to define your niche audience? Watch our webinar with the social media gurus from Mention, or try Similarweb’s free audience analysis tools.

Niche audience FAQ

What is a niche audience?

A niche market is a subgroup of your business’s main target audience. This unique group of people has their own wants, expectations, pain points, and interests.

How can I define my niche audience?

Conduct audience analysis to first define your main target audience. From there, see how you can segment the market further based on specific characteristics, demographics, preferences, or needs. Dive deeper into the data using Digital Intelligence to add more metrics to the mix, including audience loyalty, search interests, and browsing behavior.

What are the benefits of targeting a niche audience?

A good niche audience marketing strategy can lead to increased brand recognition and higher profits in the long run.

by Molly Winik

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Molly has 8+ years of experience in marketing, content creation, and PR. Her work has been featured on Mention, The Times of Israel, and Culture Trip.