I’m Not Sure of My Niche – What Should I Do? | Marketing Q&A

Like I told Keven, this type of posting paralysis is very common among entrepreneurs who are at the stage of business building where his own business is currently.

My recommendation is to post anything. 

With all businesses, and therefore all marketing, you start where you start, and doing almost anything is better than doing nothing at all.

Plus … like I mentioned before … during all of my formal marketing education (MBA in Marketing), and my decades of experience in marketing, we never talked about niches. It’s one of those new “buzz words” in marketing, that frankly a lot of people who are giving you advice get wrong.

An important aspect of social media marketing is consistency. One thing that a lot of busy entrepreneurs who are working to grow their business do is post cyclically – they get some free time and post a LOT all at once, which is then followed with a dry spell when they’re too busy and post next to nothing.  

Best strategy #1 for social media marketing is to have a fairly consistent schedule, and this means during those times you are able to create a lot of content, you don’t post it all at once … spread it out and pre-schedule that content for the future when you’re bound to have another spell with no extra time to create this stuff. This is one of the best things you can do for your social media marketing (the best would actually be to let our team do your social media marketing for you … but that consistency is still key!)

As I also told Keven, one of the worst things you can do is to assume you know what your niche is or should be. It’s possible that you can take what you believe is one of the most interesting aspects of whatever you do, things that you think your audience would be interested in as well, and share that a lot, yet it isn’t what resonates with your audience or maybe it’s not what can actually drive sales. (Even those two things are different!)

By posting consistently, you will have a good, solid stream of data that will help you determine where all of those things intersect. You can see what types of content generate the most interest. And you will see what content drives the most traffic and sales to your website (at least, if you’re setting up things to track that data right!).

Without this data, your choice is a total crap shoot. As with all products and services, you can’t simply choose to sell something without knowing the magic marketing formula for your target audience:

1. Is the product or service something that your audience actually needs or wants;
2. And they know they need or want it (or you’ll need to build in separate campaigns entirely around educating them to that level of awareness);
3. And a product or service that they are willing to pay for;
4. And out of that audience who is interested and willing to pay, have numbers large enough to support a business.

It’s similar with finding your “niche” on social media or in your overall marketing. Sometimes you will need to use trial and error, and post content to find out what works. Even when we think we know our audience, testing can provide insight that clarifies some of the information that we need to market to them most effectively.

So don’t worry if you don’t have it exactly right, right now. Just do, and the information you need will likely rise to the surface as you go.  And then, after you’ve started collecting data, you will be ready to take your efforts to the next level, either on your own or with the help of an agency like ours 😉

Vicky

*Keven’s name was changed to protect confidentiality of a current client.