Successful marketing was used to be known as getting the right message at the right time to the right audience. But in the current fast paced world, there are many others that is doing the same thing, competing with you to get attention. As a balance, to get a better marketing, you also need to reach you customers and make them engage with your brand.
Better marketing strategies usually translate to better sales, more customer engagement, and more brand establishment. To make it perform better, you must get attention to spread the awareness.
Dominating your niche on the internet can be a very profitable strategy. This is because the internet has become one of the most widely used medium of communication where businesses and customers connect. And on the internet, the best and easiest way to drive engagement to your brand is by blogging, social media and aiming for search engines' credibility.
Determine Your Niche
To dominate you niche you should first know what your niche is. The more specific your niche is, the better. Your business may offer different kind of products and/or services, but what is the thing that describes your business most? Decide one before going any step further.
Depending on the competition and your available resources, it can be very difficult and sometimes impossible to dominate multiple niches at the same time. As a start, you need to focus on one niche before thinking about others.
Find Your Market
People likes to gather in places the feel they belong the most. This also happens on the internet. There are countless of communities and places on the internet where you can choose which describes your best market.
To find out where your audience is, you can use the search engines or social networking sites as your starting point. There are many more ways to uncover your market online, but those should get you started fast and easy.
Building Your Base and Brand
Before interacting with the community or producing any type of content, you need something to distinguish you from others. You can start by having a website and a fine logo to mark you first step on the ground.
After building an identity on the internet, you can then create a "character" as humanly possible. With this, you can go online and try to extract information from people and gain their trust at the same time. The more trust you build, the more chances that they will engage with your brand.
If you think a website and a logo are not yet in need, you can always create an avatar or a nickname. This will be a simple message that differentiate you from others. Take this representation of yours anywhere you go on the internet because people are far more likely to remember you if you have an "identity".
Define your online brand to mark your authority on the web.
Marking Your Territory
All niches go through various phases of evolution. Brand new and mature niches will evolve as the audience grows "older", opening the door to new people with fresh ideas and unique voices with unique styles.
New people with fresh ideas that approach the niche doesn't always threaten the existing players or communities. This allows you to develop an audience by sharing with existing players, not necessarily competing with them.
As a new player on the field, you have to quickly distinguish yourself to be seen. To do this, you need to do something more, or differently, or maybe even better than the existing players. You need to understand where the niche is currently, and position your content in a way that benefits all parties.
Find Your Influencers
Influencers are people behind most blogs, forums, content creators, and others that keep a community active and living. These influencers are putting their time and effort to "influence" others by differentiating themselves from others.
Ideally, five to then influencers are enough. But the actual number depends on your niche and your method in attracting engagement. If you have less influencers than you need, you won't get enough engagement back from them, and if you choose more than you can handle, it will be difficult for you to keep all the communications active. Approach you influencers and know where else they're active online. The more places you can connect with them, the better.
Look for Gaps and Innovate
Nothing is perfect. Despite in the fast moving world where everything is fixed in no time, there will always be new weaknesses found. After you know you niche, you market, and everything that hold it all up, your task is to be different. Being different doesn't always mean doing something radical, but to differ from others but still giving people what they want.
For example, if there are many available and active blogs on your niche, do you actually need to create a forum to gather the voices up? Or if your niche is crowded with short contents shared on social networks, do people need to have longer and more detailed articles to provide value?
If you’ve done the last two steps properly, this one should be fairly easy. By now you should have a good idea of where your market spends their time online and what type of websites they like to visit. Your task now is to see if there is some way you can differ from the competition and still give people what they want.
All you have to do is find a gap in your niche or differ from whatever is already out there. After you find what you're looking for, you put your ideas there and innovate. The easiest and fastest way to find a gap in your niche is by using Google's Keywords tool. With the tool, you can start collecting the necessary information about key phrases people search in Google.
Start Your Work
After you have all the necessary things you need to proceed, you can now start the work for marketing your product/service/brand/identity in your selected niche. Start creating contents and articles in forms that is plausible and within your ability. Text, audio, video, e-book and so forth.
Each and every contents and articles you make should be worth your time in creating, and worth you audiences' time in consuming. By finding the weakness in you niche, you can find the gap where you can fill in. If you can't create something new that no one else have thought about creating, you can always contribute by creating something that add beneficial value to existing information created by others. This can also ease you in building links that will hold your foundation.
Authenticity can be your innovation. Put a standard on your work, and keep that standard as you progress you marketing efforts.
The next step is to engage with others. If you want others to engage with your brand, you should do the same to them. After creating valuable information that you think is worth the time and effort, you might start thinking about sharing it to the world. Approach your market in the places they are expecting you the most. Connect with them at the right time to maximize their engagement.
After you have done all that, you have at least successful in building your brand. The rest is what people are expecting: consistency. Beside than just appreciating your audience, consistency is what further build your character on the web.