The Advantages to Building a Niche Market - Reaching Your Target Audience
How does your marketing speak to those you're trying to reach? Is it all over the place trying to meet the needs of the many or designed to reach a specific targeted group?
The defintion of a niche market as defined by Entrepreneur.com is "A portion of a market that you've identified as having some special characteristic and that's worth marketing to".
What reason is there to establish a target or niche market? We can't be all things to all people using a broad brush method of marketing so when you can identify a specific group or segment of the population that is looking for your particular services and/or products you can build a much stronger business and differentiate yourself from the mainstream in becoming recognized as the specialist in that given target or niche market.
With the large concentration of condominiums in one of the towns I service, my goal was to find both buyers and sellers and develop a specific marketing plan designed to target the needs of each group.
In order to target buyers who might be interested in purchasing a condo I designed a Condo Guide with pictures and price ranges along with a brief description and features of over 50+ complexes in the area.
The next step was to find an inexpensive way to find those buyers. There's nothing better than free marketing so I put together an ad with a link to the Guide to Branford Condos and a recording to a free 24 hr. toll free number to capture the information of those interested in the guide. The ad was posted 2-3 times a week on Craiglist to test out what kind of response it would achieve.
The first ad was posted in January of 2008 and to date just from the posting of this ad to Craiglist over 90 buyers raised their hands to request the guide. Using a specialized follow up plan with these buyers, I've had three closed sales and have two buyers from this group that I'm currently working with. A great number were just curiousity seekers, working with another agent or not yet qualified to purchase. The remainder continue to receive updates from me on a quarterly basis until they either decide buy or tell me to stop contacting them.
On the seller side, I targeted just one complex that had a good turnover rate and in January 2008 started mailing every homeowner in the complex a postcard each month asking if they'd be interested in knowing what their condo was worth by sending them a report each month of the currently listed and recently sold units in the complex. These monthly mailings have resulted in 22 sellers raising their hands with an interest to sell and I've had two listing appointments with sellers not yet in a position to sell due to the current value of their units and one appointment that turned into an listing. Other than the unit that is listed each homeowner continues to receive a monthly update with the most current information on market activity in the complex.
To further implement my strategy in this niche market, I have been writing posts to my AR blog about the Branford CT condo market and the complex I chose as my initial target. This week I received a referral from an agent in Las Vegas who came across one of the condo market reports I wrote and has a client relocating to Las Vegas who needs to sell a condo in Branford CT.
Another great advantage I see from blogging in Active Rain to target your niche market is to make sure you insert the proper keywords and relavent links in your post to either your website or a specific landing page that can be created within your website to draw the people you are looking to reach when they search online. In addition you have the added benefit from Active Rain to create a specific outside blog for each niche and submit the posts you write to that outside blog. Last but not least is to sumbit those posts to Localism for that extra Google juice.
With a little creativity and out of the box thinking there is no limit to the different niche markets you can work once you have designed the market plan and focus consistently with your marketing and follow up.
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If you're thinking about buying a home in Branford CT there are plenty of great buys in today's market and now is one of the best times to buy while interest rates remain low. For more information on Branford CT real estate homes or condos, see Branford CT real estate or sign up today to get access the hottest new listings here Branford CT homes and condos.
Disclaimer: All information provided by this author is strictly an opinion, is not guaranteed, may be based on information collected from several sources, which may or may not be deemed reliable at the time of researching this article and may be time sensitive.
Copyright © 2008 by Donna Bigda, All Rights Reserved ...*The Advantages to Building a Niche Market - Reaching Your Target Audience*
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