This is How to Do Content Marketing and Social Media for Your Niche

• Updated on: 2020-03-07
• Read original article here

For a business, producing niche-specific content is a surefire way to gain loyal followers and turn them into customers. This may limit a brand’s audience pool, but its benefits outweigh its limitations. The synergy of content marketing and social media, however, can help overcome these inherent limitations.

Niche-specific content brings targeted incoming visits to your website, thereby reducing the bounce rate and increasing the rate of conversion. Writing for your target audience has its benefits. Especially on social media, where niche-based content can do wonders for businesses. Through this kind of content, companies can identify qualified leads and approach them.

Just as too many cooks spoil the broth, too many social platforms make it difficult for brands to target their future customers. The majority of platforms are for miscellaneous content, and the marketing message often fails to reach the audiences.

Hence, brands need to adopt the two following approaches:

If the above strategies are correctly implemented, you don’t have to tinker with content much. That’s because these strategies let you connect to niche audiences directly.

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Some social networks are borderline niche platforms. Such platforms include Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn. YouTube is only for video hosting and sharing, LinkedIn is for professionals.

Content strategies for YouTube have to be different from LinkedIn. Product promotion on YouTube requires professional models or animated characters, on Pinterest, high-quality product photograph can do the trick. On LinkedIn, text content stands out.

The same product needs to be marketed in different ways, due to the social platforms being different. How does this relate to niche-specific content? The more information one has, the more niche-focused content they should create.

Not all types of information would be suitable for all platforms, especially the borderline niche platforms. The content producer may have to skip some info because it doesn’t suit the platform where they’re sharing the content.

Once a niche marketer connects to his audience, the next step is to engage with them. Social media is the de facto gateway leading to engagement. Every network has a unique selling point (USP) when it comes to engagement.

On Facebook, brands bombard their audiences with new announcements. On Pinterest and Instagram, they upload cool product pics. Thousands of DIY videos are uploaded on YouTube every day which are used to educate customers and non-customers alike.

Social media drives up engagement between brands and a niche audience. In niche marketing, the engagement rate is high because audiences are already drawn to the product or service. What role does social media play other than bridging the gulf between brands and target audience?

Social media makes room for communication. Niche-specific content is aimed at communication, which eventually triggers engagement. Social media offers niche-specific content a way to engage. A win-win for content marketing and social media.

Forums are critical to niche marketing. Oftentimes, brands create content for forum users because niche audiences are almost always found in forums. Forums are not social networks in the strict sense but can send quality traffic to a website.

The only condition that needs to be met is that the content must be high-quality and personalized. Forum members are anonymous. Does it create trust issues for other forum members? Not at all. Online review sites, the majority of which are forums get millions of visitors. People even make purchasing decisions after reading the reviews there.

Personalization is better than anonymity. Forum members cannot reveal their identity because most forums don’t allow that, but they can persuade other members to visit a site or show interest in a product by narrating their experience. What’s more is they can share such experience on mainstream social media, thereby increasing the reach of the content.

Some types of niche domains are a hit on social media. These include food and beverage, fashion and accessories, gadgets, cars, etc. Industries like healthcare, manufacturing, logistics and packaging, on the other hand, fail to turn the social tide in their favor.

Another way of putting it is B2C niche areas enjoy a higher success rate on social media whereas its B2B cousin stays behind. Content marketing, however, can change that. Recent studies show B2Bs expect personalized interaction too.

To promote humdrum niche areas, content marketers need to rely on visual and multimedia elements. There are several ways to use social media to promote visual content. The purpose is to spice up the pitch so the niche audiences receive it better. Here’s an example:

A B2B company giving a presentation to a prospect. Instead of introducing individual employees, the company can put animated avatars of them. This is just an example, but it shows content belonging to monotonous niche areas can also be made attractive if it has the right dose of audio-visual elements and shared on the right channel.

Traditionally, only bloggers used to write niche-based content. But localization, audience targeting, and other factors are pushing businesses of all scales and sizes to produce niche-specific content. Identifying the right social channels and create content that’s relevant both to the channel and to the audience is the only way to stand out in the crowd. That’s where the synergy of content marketing and social media can only help you stand out – everywhere.