Social networking websites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc., are used by billions of people around the world. The leading social media sites let marketers connect and engage with their target audience. But it isn’t easy to stand out from the crowd. The popular social networks are crowded and people are now looking for niche social networks where they can only connect and engage with like-minded people — instead of the masses.
These niche social networking platforms are a goldmine for marketers. You can target your ideal customers with extreme accuracy.
How?
Let’s find out…
What Is a Niche Social Network?
A niche social site (also known as a vertical social media platform) is a social media site that targets a specific group of people with a particular interest. It doesn’t include all types of people, rather a closed community with similar interests.
For example, Stack Overflow is a community of developers where they ask and answer coding-related questions. If you want to target developers, coders, and IT experts, Stack Overflow is one of the best places.
Imagine you have a SaaS product for programmers. You can run an expensive ad campaign on Facebook reaching a million users, and you'll be lucky if a handful convert. Or you can run a campaign on Stack Overflow where you'll reach 500 highly targeted people.
It makes more sense to use Stack Overflow as it will have a high conversion rate as compared to Facebook, irrespective of reach. With Facebook, you might reach thousands of people but the audience isn’t relevant and targeted.
Niche social media plays a crucial role in your brand’s marketing strategy. Here is how…
Why Does Your Brand Need Buyer Personas?
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customers. It is a document that shows you visually everything about your ideal customers, including interests, demographics, challenges, motivations, life goals, etc.
It is a data-driven document that has all the information you need to improve targeting. For example, you can add details about the types of social networks your ideal customers use, their hobbies, interests, and more.
This will help you identify marketing channels and touchpoints they're most likely to use. And you can connect with them on these marketing channels.
Here are the key variables that you must include in your buyer persona:
- A fictional name with a photo or avatar of your ideal customer
- Demographics
- Key challenges
- Hobbies and interests
- Behavioral traits
- How he/she finds you
- What marketing channels he/she uses
- What types of products/services does he/she buy from us?
The more details you add, the better. This helps you better understand your ideal customers and their needs and significantly improves targeting.
Steps to Creating a Niche Social Marketing Strategy
One of the key things you must add to your buyer personas is niche social media sites. You need to ask your customers: What niche social media sites do they use?
Update your buyer personas with niche social media details.
This will help you reach and connect with your ideal customers on the most appropriate niche social media sites. Even if you don’t have any info available in buyer personas related to these sites, you can identify sites based on the persona’s interests and hobbies.
For example, let's say a buyer persona has a key interest in baking. You can target it by creating social media accounts on baking-related niche sites such as BakeSpace and Group Recipes. This is a great way to reach and target a similar audience.
Using niche social media sites to reach specific buyer personas requires a strategy. You can’t do it randomly without a plan. Follow these steps to create and execute a niche social media strategy for your brand:
Step #1: Define Goals
The first step, as you know, is to set clear objectives and goals for your niche marketing strategy. What do you want to achieve with niche social media marketing?
You can use it for brand awareness, traffic generation, lead generation, building connections, etc. Whatever your goal is, it must be clearly defined. The SMART goal is the best technique to create goals:
Your goal must be specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound. This will help you define, communicate, achieve, and measure it easily.
Step #2: Identify a Buyer Persona
Most businesses have more than one buyer personas. So, you need to pick the buyer persona you want to target. This must be relevant to the goal(s).
When you pick a buyer persona, it means you need to look at the persona’s interests and hobbies (so you can identify relevant niche social media sites).
If your goal is to generate leads from a niche social media site, you'll need to identify a relevant buyer persona based on historical data such as conversion rate, pain points, social media usage, etc.
Step #3: Identify Niche Social Media Sites
If you have incorporated niche social media sites into your buyer personas, that will make your job even easier because you'll then just have to pick a persona. If this isn’t the case, it is time to identify niche social media sites.
You need to look at two key variables when identifying platforms:
- It must be relevant to the buyer persona’s interests. This means your ideal customers must hang out or spend ample time on the selected social media platform.
- It must be relevant to the goal. If your goal is to generate leads, the social media site must allow external links. Generating leads or sending traffic to an external page shouldn’t be against the site’s terms.
How many niche social media sites to target?
It depends.
Ideally, you must stick with one site per campaign. It makes tracking and management easier. However, let’s say you're running a banner ad campaign; you can pick multiple sites and run banner ads across all of them simultaneously.
Step #4: Create Campaigns
This is the crux.
What marketing technique do you intend to use to achieve your goals?
You can run an ad campaign, create an account on the social media site and engage with your audience organically, or you can hire influencers on niche social media sites, and so on.
There are several ways to leverage niche social sites. It all comes down to your objective and budget.
You can create multiple campaigns for a single platform or you can just stick with a single campaign. Running one campaign at a time simplifies monitoring, budgeting, and tracking.
Step #5: Optimize
Once your campaign is running, it requires monitoring, tracking, and tweaking. Don’t expect it to deliver results immediately. You'll need to optimize it with constant data analysis, experimentation, and A/B testing.
Treat these campaigns like other marketing campaigns that require constant monitoring and tweaking.
Niche Social Media Platforms and Buyer Personas: The Growth Duo
Niche social media sites help you connect and reach your buyer personas with extreme accuracy. It doesn’t matter what industry and sector you are in; you'll always find tons of niche social media platforms. A quick Google search will reveal hundreds of platforms.
However, identifying social media sites is one part of the puzzle. How you leverage them to reach and connect with your ideal customers is the key. The campaign you create and execute is the key to success. And this is where we can help you.
