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Standing out: the importance of having a niche

Standing out: the importance of having a niche

In today’s world we are no longer just bombarded with marketing messages in the form of adverts, we are now completely bombarded with content from all angles, be that blog posts, news feeds, social media notifications, or the plethora of emails hitting our inbox on a daily basis.

With each piece of content vying for your attention and us being in a state of reaction akin to Pavlov’s Dogs, each time we hear a ding or beep from a text message, social media notification or email… it’s creating the social phenomenon known as information overload where we are all overstimulated to the point people are addicted to their mobile devices.

In such a frantic world where we are all bombarded with content, it means people are much more guarded and perhaps a little jaded in terms of what content they will actually give their attention to – particularly if it’s from a commercial organisation or someone they don’t know.

Our internal spam filters mean that very few pieces of content actually get absorbed, today, but there’s a magical ingredient that all content marketers and business people should no about.  

What is this elusive panacea for all content marketing challenges?

Relevance!

In a sentence, you need to make sure you are as relevant as possible to your audience – because it’s this relevance that will help you form a connection with your audience, in the long term, and stand out from the crowd of messages to be noticed and absorbed, in the short term.  

Whilst this website talks about mistakes that can ruin your content marketing, this article looks at the core principle that will set your content marketing strategy on fire.

When it comes to blogging and business, unless you have an insane marketing budget, the best advice is to be a big fish within a little pond – as this way you will be noticed by the people visiting your pond.  In contrast, if you’re a small fish in a big pond, people often just won’t see you as their attention is so overwhelmingly focused on the big fish.

If you want your product to have the wow factor, then the most important thing you need to do is make it relevant to your unique audience.  This is where the power of having a niche comes into play.

A niche is a focused subset of a particular market group; for instance, if you were to be writing a travel blog, a niche blog could be focused on business travel or even travelling with a disability.  It should be something relevant to who you are and be broad enough to attract enough traffic but niche enough for people to be drawn toward you, based on the feeling of your brand, content or product and service being relevant to their interests and lifestyle.

You essentially want something broad enough to have a decent sized customer base; but targeted enough so that you can grow into becoming the “go to” authority within that subsection.  

You don’t want to blend in and get lost in the crowd – you want to stand out – but at the same time, it’s important you stand out within an area that is at least profitable and attractive to buyers, for after all, a lot of the people in life that truly “stand out” aren’t standing out for good reasons.

You need to make sure you do stand out for a good reason, and the best reason is due to the relevance and value you create to a specific group of interested people.


Christine Buske is a former academic who left science at the bench, and now considers herself a woman in tech. She is a frequently invited speaker, and enjoys talking about career transformation (particularly leaving academia for the business world), tech, issues around women in tech, product management, agile, and outreach. She is a proud Canadian resident, and qualifies as a "serial expat".

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