Generating Leads in Niche B2B Markets
It can be quite advantageous to dominate a niche market as it helps to reduce competition, relaxed price pressure and helps you maintain a distinct differentiation! If properly executed you can build a loyal customer base that you understand and that understands you. So that leaves us asking the questions, why are their so few companies successfully building a niche?
What is a niche?
A B2B niche is a clearly defined segment of a larger market. Typically, these niche prospects have particular needs that the majority of the market does not have. These needs are also not widely available or accessible to the market. However, to be a niche and not just a custom application it must be both of sufficient size and growing at a rate fast enough to sustain sales growth.
Niche Market Lead Generation
Minimal competition and loyal clients is the golden goose of the business world however it is not always that simple. In order to achieve that coveted spot that means you need to build your base through your marketing efforts and niche marketing has its own unique set of challenges.
Common problems include:
- Reduced prospects
- Fewer total opportunities
- Deliverability
One of the largest obstacles to overcome in terms of niche marketing is the relatively small number of potential clients. In larger markets, there are typically thousands of prospects. The bigger buckets you have to play in the more traction you create with even the minimum response rates.
Because of the lower number of prospects you will obviously have fewer total opportunities. However, the inverse of this is once you have secured a niche customer, the lifetime value or ltv can be exponentially larger.
Build a Marketing Foundation
It is important that you always practice the fundamentals even when competing in niche categories. Understanding what your company truly offers in term of net experience, who needs your product and/or service and why do they need it. Understanding your USP or Unique Selling Proposition and how it is not being offered by the competition. Knowing these things will help you begin identify a go-to-market strategy and identify challenges with your plan.
Hopefully, you have already managed to acquire a customer list or at a minimum you have began identifying potential prospects through your market research. Having a good sense of the potential market opportunity is crucial to knowing if your niche market is large enough to sustain growth.
The Objective
Now that you have the fundamentals in place, it is time to start thinking about the objective. For instance you have say 300 customers that you want to increase awareness, generate interest, create desire and inspire action. This is where you identify the niche market challenges and strategize how to overcome them. When you analyze your CRM we will assume you have maybe two or three contacts per company. Perhaps its an engineer and a buyer but are those the only decision makers within the organization? Most likely no. Having contact depth at your limited prospects is crucial to the success of your niche marketing campaign objectives. Understanding who the decision makers and more important the influencers are within an organization is priceless. The more relevant your contacts are the better chances you have of closing an opportunity.
Marketing Mix
Now it’s time to determine what tactics you to deploy to begin building your marketing and sales funnel. Do you do outbound? inbound? The answer is you need to do both. You need to increase the number of contacts and touch points as much as possible to increase your chances of developing good prospects and converting them to customers.
Let’s assume you have 300 companies within your segment but only two contacts in each company. As an example let’s say you deploy an outbound strategy. You call 300 companies and with persistent effort you reach 75% (best case) of that the available contacts. Let’s assume your message is to ask the prospect for some sort of immediate decision then I suggest you will be lucky if 10% respond positively.
You may try some conventional advertising in carefully selected publications. What’s the response rate likely to be 2%? You could try some direct mail, again at what response rate? Maybe 3%. You may try a promotional email and achieve a 20% open rate and 5% of those click through.
Even if you employ all of these tactics and assume the results are cumulative then you have 51 positive responses. What about the other 549, what do you do with them? Are you going to call, email and direct mail again? How is your message going to change? If so, you will see increasingly diminished returns not to mention your total cost of sales is skyrocketing and your customer acquisition costs are going through the roof!
When pushing your message out there, you are competing for brain share on a project with those supplying other products or services to a project that can potentially distribute their message much better than you. A way needs to be found to bring prospects to you at the point they are ready to consider your product or service.
The answer then is inbound, inbound marketing is the key to creating ready to purchase customers through the deployment of audience relevant and valuable content.
Interested in creating an inbound content marketing strategy? Contact us now!
The moral of the story is that you need a well planned, well executed marketing plan that delivers as many touch points as possible to generate awareness, create interest, drive demand and promotes action.
