The phrases “target marketing and “niche marketing” get tossed around quite a bit, often used interchangeably — yet the two are not quite the same thing.
Both target marketing and niche marketing rely on looking at the entire potential audience for their products and services and breaking that huge group down into small, manageable pieces. Understanding the people who make up each group allows you, as the business owner, to create highly specific marketing campaigns that will resonate with customers and inspire them to buy — usually at much higher rates than more generalized, mass market marketing campaigns.
One of the primary differences between target marketing and niche marketing is the size of the market segment you approach. If the entire marketplace is a pie, target marketers cut that pie into eight pieces. A niche marketer, on the other hand, cuts that pie into sixteen pieces. Or thirty-two. Or, in some exceptional cases, sixty-four.
You can cut that pie until you have no more than the merest idea of filling and crust remaining, and still have a lucrative niche. Niche marketing is targeted marketing distilled, reduced to its purest essence: connecting the business owner directly with those customers, and only those customers who are interested in exactly what the business owner offers.
It’s a great strategy, but it’s not for everyone. Target marketing offers business owners the ability to be efficient, connecting with a clearly defined audience, without confronting the sometimes self-limiting nature of niche marketing.
Excerpt from my upcoming book The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Target Marketing – August, 2009.
For over 25 years, Susan Friedmann, CSP, has traveled the world helping companies put their best foot forward at trade shows and events. Working with organizations who want to grow their target marketing strategies, Susan offers programs to increase results and focus on building better relationships with customers, prospects and advocates in the marketplace.