Niche is the New Viral and Why Hypertargeting is Everything

An old saying goes that when you're talking to everyone, you're talking to no one. This quote means you are better off creating content for a small, targeted, and passionate audience than trying to please a large, generic one. This works because you are more likely to reach a small and highly engaged audience than a broad and generic one. This is known as niching down. 

When niching down, you create content that targets a small audience with a common preference or interest. While you might feel like you're excluding some potential clients when you hyper-target or niche down, the benefits of niche marketing outweigh the drawbacks.

What is Niching Down?

When you focus on a small sub-niche, you are niching down into what is also known as a sub-niche. That means a sub-niche is a niche within a niche. Instead of being general, you focus on a particular thing within the niche. While you might still encounter competition in a sub-niche, you get better chances of success. 

For instance, if your niche is green tea, you can have a sub-niche, such as green tea for acne. You can still break this further down into green tea for acne marks. By now, you already have a sub-niche with a particular audience. Similarly, it may be hard to get noticed if you're in a niche like weight loss, which is already a vast category. 

You can, therefore, niche down to a sub-niche like “weight loss for women”. The niche may still be broad so that you can break it further into weight loss for pregnant women. That is how to get into your sub-niche. We will provide a detailed guide on finding your sub-niche later.

Unlike traditional targeting, which focuses on a niche, hyper-targeting focuses on a hyper-specific sub-niche. This helps you deliver personalized messages to a small group of people based on their interests, demographics, and even the actions they take, such as when they are mostly online. This can be an effective strategy for turning followers into buyers without being pushy.

What is Hyper-Targeting?

Closely related to niching down is hyper-targeting, a marketing strategy that arises from the fact that today’s customer is bombarded with data from various sources, including social media campaigns, web pop-ups, and email marketing. This saturated environment means that the generic one-size-fits-all content is now equivalent to noise. The good news is that businesses can cut through the noise by creating highly relevant and personalized campaigns that meet their customers' needs.

What sets hyper-targeting apart is the granularity. You can leverage data from social media, purchase patterns, and locations to create personalized content and ads. This strategy is effective because the message is relevant to the target audience and may drive engagement and conversion.

Understanding the Mechanics of Hyper-Targeting

Hyper-targeting leverages data collected from customers’ browsing history, demographic information, purchasing behavior, and social media interactions to create comprehensive profiles and segment audiences into small micro-targets. Then, they tailor their messaging to their audience’s needs, preferences, and pain points. 

For instance, if your business is an online fashion store, you can use the hyper-targeting data to personalize the products you recommend to visitors. This can include information such as their browsing history, the weather in their location, and the current season. 

With such a high level of personalization, you can enhance the customer shopping experience and make them feel valued and understood, thereby increasing their chances of making a purchase.

Example of Hyper-Targeting

A good example of hyper-targeting in action can be seen in how retail stores like Amazon or Spotify recommend products to us. For instance, Spotify will not create for you a random library of podcasts and songs. Instead, the platform will curate the music, enabling personalized listening for its millions of listeners, thanks to its hyper-targeting.

The platform utilizes a sophisticated algorithm that takes into account user data, including the types of songs they listen to and share. It then uses the data to create the Discover weekly playlist, which is usually made to meet the different users' needs. Through the personalized content, users on the app can engage deeply with it. Such a personalization level can result in a higher sense of loyalty or connection, encouraging users to stay on the platform longer.

On the other hand, Amazon is also a hyper-targeting giant, as it uses customer data such as past purchases, product ratings, and the types of products customers with similar behavior are shopping for. When these data are processed, it becomes easier for the social media giant to offer more highly personalized recommendations of products.

Benefits of Niching Down in Social Media Marketing

If you're wondering whether to target a broad social media audience or niche down, here are the benefits of niching down that you should know:

Stand Out From the Competition

Let's assume you are a dieting expert. If your audience includes everyone looking for a diet, you'll compete with other dieting experts. However, if you hyper-target a niche like dieting for diabetics, you are more likely to stand out. This is the same principle we use to hire someone specializing in a particular area rather than a jack-of-all-trades. 

Additionally, the more you niche down, the more likely you are to attract an audience interested in your products and services, as you narrow the number of people who may not be interested in your specific offering. 

Boost Relevance

If you sell premium running shoes, you are better off creating content or ads targeting marathoners than anyone interested in athletics. With such precision, you can easily cut out the noise. This can be helpful, especially in today's crowded digital landscape. 

Higher ROI

When you create a hyper-targeted ad, you easily exclude people not interested in your product. On the other hand, you focus on a small and highly qualified audience. This will ensure that you don't waste your ad spend without enough returns. 

Better Personalization

Hyper-targeting is a great personalization tool. According to studies, personalization is one of the factors that 80% of customers consider when buying a product. With a hyper-targeting strategy, you can create a message that resonates with your audience. This isn't just about marketing, but also about the conversation.

Position Yourself as a Thought Leader

Hyper-targeting helps you improve at whatever you do and be seen as an industry expert. You don't have to spend much time researching and trying to excel in different things. Instead, the more you specialize in a niche, the more knowledge you gain and the better you can serve your clients. That enables you to connect more easily with your target audience. Once your audience starts to see you as an expert in the niche, you will get more referrals and remain at the top of their minds.

Higher Level of Visibility

Niching down means selecting specific keywords that are less competitive. That makes it easier for you to rank your content on social media feeds and search engines. When you appear on the First page of the Google search results, you will get more traffic to your site.

Enjoy Your Work

While social media creators choose a niche that will bring money, selecting a niche you are passionate about is always a good idea. Otherwise, you may feel unfulfilled, which can lead to less success. However, when you choose a niche you love to work in, you will love your work and find the time to do more of what you enjoy.

Faster Growth

A highly focused marketing strategy with a niche that serves your specific audience can result in clear and concise content creation. When you are confident, you are more likely to be consistent in your content creation, which leads to higher sales. 

A Guide on Hyper-Targeting For a Brand

To determine if hyper-targeting will work for you, follow these steps:

Define Your Goals

Before you focus on a particular area to serve, you must determine your goal. This could be brand awareness or driving sales. There are specific goals when hyper-targeting will work better than others, such as selling to a small group. 

On the other hand, it might not be suitable for a goal such as reaching the mass market. Therefore, write down your key performance indicators (KPIs), such as click-through rate, cost per acquisition, or conversion rate. This is what will guide your decision.

Check Your Audience Data

You will need to dig deeper into the data you already have on your audience, such as online behavior, demographics, purchase history, and more. You can find this data on social media analytics, website analytics, CRM, and more. Then, you can leverage AI to understand your audience. Unless you understand your customers well, segmenting them into small niches can be hard.

Audit your current data collection methods to determine the type of data you are collecting, how it is stored, and how it is utilized. The data can be behavioral, demographic, customer interaction, and purchase history across the different touchpoints. After that, you can now invest in a comprehensive data collection method to provide you with a good understanding of your customers. 

After segmenting the audience, you can create personalized campaigns and content for the micro-targets. You can achieve this by experimenting with different messaging and content and tracking the results.

Evaluate Your Product or Service

Consider whether your product or service falls into a broad or narrow niche. The best products to hyper-target are those with specialized audiences and distinct characteristics. Otherwise, if you sell something universal like toothpaste, you should cast your net wider. 

Ensure that you also understand the customer’s buying journey. You can retarget your prospects if it's a high-consideration purchase, such as a car. However, you cannot deal with impulse buyers.

Analyze Past Campaigns

Check your last few campaigns and consider where you were successful. If you created a broad ad that didn't perform well and resulted in a high bounce or low engagement rate, this was a sign that your audience wasn't connected. 

However, if one of your campaigns could effectively reach a specific marketing segment and result in a good conversion, it's a sign that hyper-targeting will work for you. Compare the cost per click and the conversion across different segments. By looking at data, you can determine where precision will likely pay off.

Budget Testing and Optimization

If not well thought out, hyper-targeting can be quite expensive. Therefore, you must consider your budget and whether you can afford the platforms with advanced hyper-targeting options. Consider also your resources and whether you have the necessary tools and resources.

If you are running a small campaign, it might not be worth testing. However, if you have a large ad budget, you can conduct tests. Remember that platforms like Meta Ads or Google Ads may require setup, and you must decide if you can handle that. 

If testing is worth it, start small. You can launch a $50 campaign and track results after two weeks. Check for metrics such as the cost per acquisition, clicks, and conversion. If you find that it outperforms your baseline by at least 20%, you will already have a proof of concept. But if it doesn't work, tweak the segment before reconsidering.

Upscale or Pivot

After receiving your test results and determining if your hyper-targeting is working, it's time to scale. You can now target more segments with a larger budget and more refined messaging. You can pivot the camping and scale back if it doesn't work. The most important thing is iteration and to keep learning as you adapt.

How to Find Your Social Media Sub-Niche

If you are thinking about a social media niche to get into, you are already too late. Most niches are already covered on social media. That's why you need to narrow down to a sub-niche. If you feel like you are all over the place with the social media niche, follow the following tips:

Consider Your Interests, Skills, and Passions 

When people join social media, their first goal is often to post what they love and enjoy. However, it's still possible to have too many interests, making your social media account seem disjointed. To determine what to focus on, you can start by writing all your interests on a piece of paper. You might have a list of interests, such as travel, beauty, food, nature, fashion, and home decor. 

Go through the list while crossing out the topics you don't regularly share on social media. While this will reduce the number of your interests, you will still be left with several categories. Consider the social posts that receive the highest engagement or the people who DM you. Go back to your list and cross out the topics that don't drive a lot of engagement, or that people don’t ask questions about. You should have a shorter list, depending on your interests.

Hyper-Target

Once you have found a niche, you can hyper-target it so that you don't face stiff competition and establish yourself as an authority. When niching down, ensure that you select something evergreen, meaning there is consistent search volume. This will help ensure consistent traffic to your page. You can use tools like Google Trends to help you determine the seasonality of the niche.

Consider the Niche Market Size

You might find a sub-niche with little to no competition. However, the reason the competition level is low is that there is no audience interested in it. That is why it is essential to conduct a market analysis to determine if there is a need in the niche and if people are interested in it. 

To help you choose the niche size, you'll need to create a picture of your ideal customer. Consider their appearance, age, gender, goals, and hobbies. Consider the audience demographic, interest, and behaviors. After identifying the specific audience you plan to appeal to, you can make your brand appeal to a target audience that is likely to buy from you.

Identify the Customer’s Needs

After determining the target audience, you need to select your target customers and explain how your business can address their specific needs and problems. After identifying your customers' issues, you can prepare to serve them better.

Conduct market research to determine the customer’s buying behavior. This will provide you with insights into the accounts they follow and their opinions on them. You can then use that information to position yourself as the solution your customers need.

Competition Research

Before you begin creating content for your niche, you need to research the competition. Since many businesses may be creating content in the same niche, you need to find out what kind of content they are making and if there are gaps. The competitor analysis will also help you evaluate where your account lies in comparison with the competition. It can help you identify opportunities and remain abreast with industry trends.

Consider Your USP

You need a unique selling point (USP) to show your industry standing and how you plan to differentiate yourself from the competition. The USP doesn't have to be something out of this world, but simply something that makes it unique. For example, you could use high-quality images and videos in your posts. The most important thing is to determine something in your industry that other players don't have.

How Brands Can Leverage Hyper-Targeting

While there are different ways in which brands can hyper-target, here are some of the most common methods:

Facebook Hyper-Targeting

One of the benefits of marketing on Facebook for brands is the numerous features that Facebook offers, making it ideal for hyper-targeting. You can, therefore, create several audience lists to hyper-target, such as:

• Customer list audience. You can create a list of the audience that matches your buyer's persona. You can create this list using different details, such as life events for those who have gotten married or buying activity.
• Saved audiences. You can now target the people on your text marketing or email list. Facebook ad targeting makes this easy, as you can match the user's information with your customer contact information to determine who sees the ads.
• Lookalike audiences. You can leverage your current data to find customers with similar data. Facebook will check the characteristics of your current audiences to create another list of audiences with similar characteristics.
• Remarketing to audiences. If there are audiences that previously interacted with your brand in different ways, such as liking its post or visiting your website, Facebook will retarget these groups in your ads.

Using Google Ads for Hyper-targeting

Another platform that makes it easy for brands to hyper-target their ideal customers through ads on the SERPs or third-party websites is Google. Through the display ads or Pay-Per-Click, brands can target users by:

• The search phrase used
• Current location (geofencing)
• Country, city, or Zip code
• Device used
• Previous page visits to your site
• Activity performed

Email Marketing Hyper-targeting

Brands can also use their customer database to hyper-target using email segmentation and CRM. You can do that through the following steps:

• Breaking your customer base or audiences into hyper-targeted groups based on activities or characteristics.
• Making content, marketing messages, and promotions that speak to the needs and wants of a particular segment.
• Using personalized text marketing and email campaigns to deliver the message.
• Track the results before continuing to refine and improve your strategy.

Balancing Between Hyper-Targeting and Data Privacy

Despite hyper-targeting's impressive results, concerns persist over its handling of data privacy. As noted earlier, it leverages customers' data, despite customers being increasingly aware of the risks associated with sharing their data or leaving digital footprints. Therefore, ensure that your hyper-targeting efforts aren't perceived as exploitative or intrusive.

One thing you need to do is be transparent about how you collect and use customers' data. You should provide customers with the option to opt in or out. You also need to ensure that you are complying with the relevant data laws.

Final Thoughts

In an era when customers are overwhelmed with information, reaching a niche market is the new viral, as they seek content that speaks directly to them. Instead of trying to get everyone, brands should talk to their niche market. They should even personalize the customer experience through hyper-targeting.