In my early years of business, I first viewed marketing as a seasonal process and quickly realized that a successful business doesn’t stop marketing. It is a continuous cycle.

My solution was print ads. Let’s faces it that is one of the easy ways to market a business. Pay a graphic designer to make a pretty picture with your product, toss in some well-crafted text, and let the ad run for several months.

I’ve tried this and failed. The world of print media is much more complicated than tossing an advertisement in a paper. You have to know the readers’ demographics, the location of the ad, and you need a call to action that generates leads or sales.

I questioned myself. If advertising needs to be done continuously, how does a small business achieve its marketing goals with limited resources?

Several years later I found that to be successful in advertising you need to have a marketing plan.  Define who is your target audience. Is this a seasonal product? What are my customer demographics? Once I learned about my customer’s background demographics, a picture of who my target markets were developed.

Targeting a demographic creates a single target to go after. No longer are buckshot flying all over the target. You now are actively targeting a niche.

After carefully analyzing my entertainment business, I learned that I needed to niche market my business for entertaining at private events to birthday parties. I needed to go further. So I looked at the data. Where are my customers coming from? What is the age segment I am serving? Which gives me the greatest joy? Scanning my Google calendar, I realized that 1st birthday parties were the largest segment of my clients. I had found my niche – 1st birthday parties.

I learned that niche marketing is beneficial and profitable for small business.  I find that my website, copy, and marketing material are more comfortable with producing just because I can be particular on what I say.   I found that I spent a full day trying to make one advertisement work in multiple situations. I have seen that spaghetti web page that has no focus, and I struggle to figure out who is the demographic that they are trying to serve. I found my marketing, but apparently, they didn’t find their niche market.

Things I did to improve my niche marketing

1. defined my audience
2. defined my niche market
3. became an expert and active in that niche market
4. establish whether I could make a living off that niche financially
5. I surrounded myself with other experts in that niche market
6. committed resource/money to that niche industry
7. made sure I addressed the niche’s core conflict