In the search engine marketing world, effective online marketing comes down to surfacing keyword opportunities that reflect a demand for solutions (products/services). Content about those products is created and optimized to attract search traffic for popular and relevant keywords.
Niche products often suffer from a universe of keywords that have low popularity counts and that creates a challenge. Because in the world of SEO, accountability starts with driving more organic, non-branded search traffic to a company website. If there’s very little demand for the keyword phrases identified, it can be frustrating for all.
A common reaction to that frustration is to accuse the products, company or industry as being “boring”. But here’s the thing:
Challenges with marketing low popularity products isn’t an issue with the products being boring. It’s a problem with the marketers’ understanding of customers and the problems those product solve.
If there’s a market for a product that solves a problem, then selling that product, as niche and “boring” as it may be, through SEO, content marketing or social media marketing has to do with better understanding the people and problems relevant to the product.
“One man’s junk is another man’s treasure” as the saying goes. What’s important is to understand the product and market well enough to know why a specific audience has value for it, what the end benefits are and the context for how prospects come to need and purchase it.
Here are 5 tips to help find ways to make marketing niche and low demand products more effective:
1. Who has bought the product in the past and why? Current customers can tell you a lot that’s not revealed in analytics. Survey customers, sales people and customer service reps for the company to identify the company’s perception of their unique selling proposition and the actual reasons customers buy.
2. Segment buyers by common characteristics, pain points, goals and behaviors. Get in the mind of the customer and understand why, how and where they buy.
3. Map the buyer sales cycle from Awareness to Interest to Consideration and Purchase. What kind of content, search keywords and social topics are relevant to guide the buyer through the sales cycle (or better yet, attract them from other companies selling the same thing).
4. Optimize for a quantity of niche. Go horizontal and get creative with a wide variety of variations on keywords. A keyword with a really low popularity count that is very high on relevancy only needs one sale to be profitable in many cases. Think about that and go wide for every situation there might be for buying the product.
5. Create a cycle of continuous monitoring, measurement and refinement that allows you to adapt and scale successes.
If you can think past keywords and get into the mind of the customer, their problem to be solved and the sales cycle they go through, you can develop an effective content marketing program that leverages search and social media to attract traffic, engage prospects and inspire both sales and social shares. That’s the Optimized way of online marketing.
What are some of the tactics or situations you’ve solved with “boring” products or services?
