Now that you've settled on one or two niches that fit well with your preferences, your passions, and your abilities, we need to narrow that focus even more. Hopefully all the way down to a microniche: the true secret to a powerful Content Marketing Hurricane!
A simple example: Local Search
To give you a simple example of how narrowing your focus will lead to a more powerful content marketing strategy, consider the example of Distinctive Landscaping.
As reported by Hubspot{7} the company's president, Jason Scott, recognized that his competitors were not taking advantage of online search. Many of them didn't even have a website.
Now, at this point, Distinctive Landscaping could have put up a site and started loading it up with tons of fantastic content about lawn care, planting and trimming, fertilizing, and a host of other topics of interest to their target audience: people who needed their property cared for.
But there was a very important narrowing of the focus that was required first.
You see, like most small businesses that offer physical services (such as landscapers, construction firms, cleaning companies, etc.) Distinctive Landscaping has a limited geographic area that they service. They're located in North Attleboro, Massachusetts.
What would have been the use of Distinctive Landscaping becoming known as landscaping experts all across the internet if 99.9% of their traffic was coming from Alaska or Singapore?
What they needed was to become known as landscaping experts in the towns surrounding North Attleboro, Massachusetts, where their actual target audience resided!
In comparison to the broad subject of “landscaping”, there are a number niche topics they could have chosen. But instead of focusing on “pruning your perennials”, what made the most sense for their unique target audience was to focus on “landscaping in and around North Attleboro”.
And at this point, they're the undisputed go-to source, dominating search results for towns in that vicinity.
That's the power of narrowing the focus as you're creating your content marketing strategy.
The fish and the pond
Remember the old adage, "he's a big fish in a little pond"? Well the idea of identifying a microniche can be explained by picturing that fish and that pond.
For example, if your subject is Marketing, you’re diving into a virtual ocean of information. There’s room in that ocean for thousands of world-renown experts, many of which will never even meet each other.
But, if you were to narrow that subject down to the subtopic of Social Media Marketing, you’re starting to get somewhere. Now you’re in a large lake, but at least you can see the land nearby.
To narrow the field even farther, you could decide to limit your expertise to Mastering Facebook for Business.
Now that’s a niche. You're swimming in a narrow channel where the water is calm and there’s only room for a few folks to really enjoy themselves.
If there’s enough water there, you may even be able to settle on a microniche. In our example above, that might be something like Helping Self-help Authors Master Facebook to Boost Book Sales and Build a Platform.
Whew! That’s a serious microniche! If you can narrow your topic down that far, you’re standing in a very deep puddle, with room for just one world-renown expert, and you've got some serious profit-building and reputation-boosting potential in your hands!
As long as your microniche will still provide you with a large number of interested audience members, you’re still passionate enough about it to make it a prime focus of your life, and you can still have fun with it…
Your Content Marketing Hurricane is going to dramatically speed up with the laser-focused guidance of that microniche!
Combining microniches
Can you combine more than one microniche?
I'm glad you asked that.
You certainly can, and most content marketers who have narrowed their focus do market to more than one microniche at a time. However, it's important to realize that, to be truly effective, each microniche has to be treated as its own project that will only tangentially connect to other complementary microniches.
For example, the marketer who makes a success of the microniche used in our example above could very well use many of the same principles (and therefore, content) to help authors of other kinds of non-fiction books master Facebook, but the target audience will be very different.
So, although the individual may know more than enough to make a success of that microniche as well, it's not going to be automatic. It's going to require a reworking of the strategy and massaging of the content to make it applicable to the new audience, and therefore have a chance at the same level of success.
So, work on one microniche at a time and don't sacrifice quality for convenience if and when you decide to expand into new areas.
Exercise #12 – Brainstorming: Narrowing the Focus
1. Using the results of Exercise #11, determine how narrowly your niche topic(s) can be sliced while still maintaining a viable audience, and keeping your interest.
2. Read the next chapter.