How do you handle specialised or local marketing if you have a brick-and-mortar business? Your options are limited if you do not have many funds available. The best routes could be direct mail marketing or telemarketing, if you have a list of people that you know would be interested in your product or service. Of course, this is all well and fine if you want to adhere to the ‘old’ ways of marketing. But if you want to catch up to other successful businesses, you will want to consider using online promotion to advertise your products to niche markets.
Okay… at this point you might be like, “I know what online promotion is, but what the heck are niche markets?” That would be a good question for a beginner in online promotion. Basically, niche markets are nothing more than a specific group of people whose buying needs for a particular product or service aren’t being met by mainstream businesses. For example, taxicabs are a general market that are widely accessible. However, people that need to transport their pets cannot use regular taxicabs… these individuals would make up a niche market. A good businessperson would see this niche market and form a business around it, creating a pet taxicab service. If they want to expose potential customers to it they would use online promotion along with offline marketing means. If they use online promotion, they would try to advertise on search engine keywords relating to ‘pet taxi’.
With that being said, what’s the best way to determine the niche markets you should use online promotion for? First, keep in mind that when you are using online promotion, you are going to be advertising to both a global and local market. If your product or service cannot reach a global market, you will want to consider online promotion through niches found in your local market. The best way to find niche markets locally is to get an atlas of all the cities you have physical access to. Use a keyword evaluator program such as the one found on Overture or Google and type in the name of the city plus the name of the service or a product you are selling. Look at the number of searches that were made for those keywords. Although this number won’t matter if you’re the only one cornering the market, you will want to have something come up.
Type the keyword into Google and take a look at the advertisements that show up on the right side of the listings, (these are known as Adsense pay-per-click ads). If there aren’t any ads, that’s a good sign. But you’re not done yet. After this, take a look at the first listing in the search engine results. Copy and paste the URL into the search engine and place link: in front of it. This will show you how many sites are linking to this website. If the number is less than 50, then consider revolving your website around this keyword. This is because not only will you be able to get affordable Adsense advertisements for this niche, but you also have a good chance of getting to the top of the search engine results if you have enough sites link to you, (which you can do through link exchanges, buying advertising space or writing articles to free article directories).
