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Many business owners find it difficult to come up with a highly specific marketing strategy that fills a specific niche. Niche marketing, however, is much more effective for the needs of your business, especially if you focus on online marketing.

Internet provides one great advantage – a target audience. Only people holding specific interest in a topic will pay attention to your message. Discovering the right marketing niche is the best way to make sure that the right audience for your business message is approached.

Do you know how to find out the best business marketing niche?

Finding Your Inbound Marketing Niche

You probably have various products and services for sale. Niche marketing focuses on one of them or a specific group of products. Niche marketing allows you to occupy a smaller sub-sector within a larger segment. Discovering the right niche will help you beat competition and position yourself better on the respective market.

It may seem like a difficult task but discovering the best business marketing niche is a relatively simple task.

Simple website analysis will help you determine the right business marketing niche for your promotional needs. Which are the pages that attract the biggest number of visits? What is the product or service that website visitors spend the longest time looking at?

The behavior of potential customers is the first type of indication you need to use when choosing a niche for corporate promotional purposes. Website visitors will let you know what interests them and what they will be willing to purchase.

Go for a business marketing niche that features relatively limited competition. It will be difficult to achieve popularity in a niche that already benefits from the presence of several important players.

A simple online search will let you know which niches generate the most intense competition. You will then need to start looking for the niches that only feature several websites competing against each other. This is the business marketing niche that you should be making use of.

Competition research plays an important role in your marketing strategy. Knowing what others are doing and how to dominate the sector is of vital importance for the success of a business marketing niche campaign.

Selecting the right niche for your online promotional efforts is a smart way to quickly establish your positions and to increase your website traffic. Higher traffic will naturally mean more potential sales. Take the time and know how to choose the correct marketing sector. A good strategy is a guarantee of success in the intense and dynamic online business world.

(image credit: Fieldstone Alliance)

When the holidays roll around, most professional business owners know that business is going to slow down. However, that doesn’t have to be the case, and the holidays can be the perfect time to start turning prospects into customers. In this article we look at how you can use inbound marketing for your holiday business marketing efforts, to increase sales now, and in future.

Create a Holiday Discount

One great way to leverage your inbound marketing plan for holiday business marketing is to create a seasonal holiday discount or special offer. If you already have an email marketing list thanks to your inbound marketing activities, you can send that offer out to your list. If you don’t, you can integrate the offer in your other marketing activities.

Create a Free Gift

The holidays are the time for giving, right? So why not incorporate that in your inbound marketing plan, and your holiday business marketing plan.

Create a free report, ebook or trial offer that you incorporate into your marketing. It’ll ensure that you’re growing your list over the holidays, and it’ll keep your existing clients and prospects happy. There’s nothing people like more than a gift, so give your clients one – you’ll be very glad you did!

Let People Know You’re Working

One of the reasons business tends to slow down over the holidays is that most people just assume that you won’t be working. If you aren’t, that’s fine, but if you are, you could find that being available when your competitors aren’t is a great way to gain new customers!

Use your existing inbound marketing channels to create awareness that you’ll be available over the holidays, and you might be surprised at how many people get hold of you!

Automate

Even if you’re not working over the holidays, that doesn’t mean that your inbound marketing plan has to stop working, just because you do.

If you don’t already have one working for you, now is the time to get an autoresponder, and write a series of holiday messages for the people who do respond to your inbound marketing strategies. That way, even if you’re not working, your holiday business marketing will be – working hard to build relationships with prospects!

Never Too Late

Even if you’ve never considered inbound marketing as a viable strategy, you should remember that it’s never too late to start. You still have time to incorporate inbound marketing into your holiday business marketing plan, and to make sure that even while you’re taking time off, your marketing network is working for you.

Start today, and you should find that while you’re enjoying some time off, your inbound marketing plan is hard at work, capturing leads and prospects, and that when you get back, you have a long list of people who are just waiting to buy from you.

(photo credit: Jeremy)

There are few things that keep business owners awake at night more than their sales results. Over time, however, the cost of sales becomes as much of a factor as the turnover their businesses are doing, and they start looking for ways to reduce their sales costs, while maintaining or growing their sales figures.

One of the very best ways to do that is to use inbound marketing sales as a core factor in their sales and marketing plan, but let’s look at that in more detail.

Quick and Easy to Set Up

Finding a great sales representative can take time – months of reading resumes, interviewing candidates, and making offers might, if you are very lucky, result in a rock star sales representative for your team.

Inbound marketing sales, however, are driven by the internet, and by technologies and platforms that already exist – from your website to article directories and more.

That means that unlike hiring a rock star sales professional, creating and implementing an inbound marketing sales campaign can take a matter of days or weeks, and because it’s cumulative, it allows you to build on what you’ve already done, for months and years after the initial setup.

Never Takes a Day Off

Because your inbound marketing sales plan will use technology, rather than human beings, to work it’s sales magic, there’s never a day (or a minute of any day for that matter) that it’s not working for you.

It’s like having a vast sales network that never sleeps, never takes lunch, and never gets poached by your competitors working for you, and the best part is that the network costs a fraction of what it would to hire a sales team that achieved the same results!

Sell to People Who Want to Buy From You

The best inbound marketing sales plans are based on strategies like long tail keywords, list building and other clever technological tricks, that firstly allow you to market to people who already want what you’re selling, and secondly allows you to build a relationship with the people who do connect with you.

It’s like casting your net on a part of a lake that has guaranteed great fishing every time, rather than angling in an area that no fish ever visit!

Low Cost, High Impact

The truth is, inbound marketing takes a little time, effort and money to set up correctly. Once it is set up though, you’ll find that your cost of sales drops through the floor, and that potential clients find you – rather than you having to look for them.

It’s the marketing plan of the future, and it’s one that makes it possible to find new customers in your area (or around the world) quickly, easily and cheaply. There are strategies that allow you to capture prospects details voluntarily, and most good inbound marketing plans rely heavily on automating sales, which leaves you more time to focus on your business, and less time worrying about sales!

(photo credit: Tom Magliery)

If you thought inbound marketing was only for businesses looking to use the internet and other technologies to grow their global footprint, think again. Local inbound marketing, or local SEO, focuses on the geographical areas you operate in, and it’s a great way to find people or businesses in your area who are already looking for your products and services.

What Is Local Inbound Marketing?

Local inbound marketing uses the same principles as any inbound marketing, SEO or SEM strategy, but it adds a geographical element to the techniques. It helps to ensure that real world businesses get traffic and leads from people in the areas they operate in, who may actually buy from them. It’s a method of narrowing the funnel that inbound marketing creates even further, so that you’re focused on your exact target market. But how do you do that? There are several tried and tested strategies.

• Local site directories. These are internet directories that are geographically limited by country, state or province. They’re a great way to get links from locally focused sites, which not only increases your inbound marketing overall, but also your local presence.
• Google Places is another must for companies or individuals who are focused on local inbound marketing. It’s a cheap, easy and guaranteed way of ensuring that a brick and mortar business finds the customers they want, int he areas they want them.
• Adding geographical references to your keywords and phrases for SEO and SEM is another great local marketing idea. So instead of using words that are only related to what you do, use words that are related to where you are too!
• Local article directories are another great way to funnel people in your area to your page. They work exactly like the bigger article directories, but they’re limited geographically.

In a nutshell, local inbound marketing strategies use all the same principles, to achieve the same goal (getting people who already want what you’re selling to your site), but they add a geographical reference to all of those methods.

It’s a quick, easy, cost effective way to use inbound marketing strategies for businesses who have a limited geographical footprint, and like any other type of inbound marketing, it’s one of the most cost effective strategies out there.

Guest post by Darren Terpstra (author bio at end of post)

As you most certainly know, Halloween has come and gone. Ghosts, goblins, and other ghoulish figures were either at your door, or at your side as you knocked on doors. Bags upon bags of candy changed hands during the course of one night. One thing is for sure, at the end of the night, many kids and adults (you know who you are) were clutching their stomachs in what has become the traditional post-Halloween stomachache. This is the gut-wrenching pain where you know you have consumed more than you should have, and you think over your poorly made decisions. Hopefully, this pain has subsided by now. However, this entire experience creepily resembles outbound marketing.

1. Once you start you just can’t stop

The much awaited moment has arrived. Whether it’s a bag of leftover candy or your trick-or-treating treasure trove, once you take the first bite, the second comes that much easier, and the third. Soon, you’re surrounded by wrappers unaware of what has just occurred.

It is the same with outbound marketing. You start up with the expectation of “merely” boosting this one metric. A year later you look up and discover, you have poured Mounds (candy bar joke) of money into outbound marketing with no real clue of where it has all gone.

2. Costs just keep on rising

Was the scariest Halloween sight this year the prices of individually wrapped candy? Does it seem you said the last thing last year? It is not a localized trend; these prices have been creeping up progressively year after year with no end in sight (costs at Willy Wonka’s factory have to be passed on somehow).

Have you noticed the same trend with outbound marketing efforts? Ad spaces are getting increasingly expensive across the board. Whether it is internet, print, TV, or even (gasp) radio, the prices seem to be climbing with no end in sight. If only there was a way to invest in our own marketing…

3. People keep coming… till you run out

Have you ever wondered how kids discover you are out of candy? There has to be some audio or visual nationwide signal between kids, because once that candy bag runs out (and all you have left are popcorn balls) your visitor count plummets. Somehow they know, and you are now just a regular, old, boring neighbor.

Does “boring neighbor” describe your company once the fancy ads have run their course? Do you place another ad just to get some attention? This is the recurring cycle with outbound marketing. You are living the dream, until the ad dollars run out. Then you are left with only the memory to hold onto.

4. It is one way communication

Oh sure you try. You comment on the costumes or how big the kids have gotten since last year. However, you know there is only one thing on everyone’s mind, CANDY! No one really cares what you are saying, focusing instead on the sweet, chocolate treats you have in store for them.

Does this sound like your company? Do you feel like people only come for your store promotions or sales? Still, you talk at these customers instead of with the customers. You need to really learn about them. Do they have feedback which could lead to positive changes? How will you ever know if your communication merely spoon feeds them sugar rush after sugar rush.

That pain in your stomach may go away in time. But the costs of outbound marketing will continue until you make a conscious effort to make a change.

What other ways does this “Post-Halloween stomachache” resemble outbound marketing?

About the Author: Darren Terpstra is the lead marketing agent at Matrix Product Development. He runs the company’s inbound marketing efforts including a recent website optimization and redesign. You can follow MatrixPD on Twitter @KristieMatrixPD or on MatrixPD Facebook Page.