The concept of using micro niches to grow your online shop is a marketing strategy that is vital for an ecommerce product shop. As more and more information is added to the vast collection already on the internet, it becomes more difficult to reach an audience and make a mark. It’s also more difficult to make a profit if you try to market to everyone.
Micro-niching can solve that problem. Instead of trying to appeal to everyone, you can drill down further like a mining company searching for gold, and micro niche to appeal to a specific segment of highly interested people.
What is a Micro Niche?
A micro niche is a very small subset segment of a larger market. The easiest way to explain this concept is to provide some examples. Let’s look at how we can niche down a large market like Furniture.
- Furniture is a very large and broad market
- Wooden furniture is a market niche.
- Wooden dining room tables are another example of a market niche.
- Wooden dining room tables made from sustainable materials is a micro niche.
Notice how the phrase becomes longer as it becomes narrower. The original keyword for market was one word. The market niche is four words and the smaller micro niche is eight words.
Micro niches are effective because people no longer type one-word searches into their search engine of choice. They know that if they type “Furniture” into Google they’re going to get several million results and most of them aren’t going to fit their needs. Instead, they type exactly what they’re looking for, which is often a long phrase, otherwise known as a long tail keyword phrase.
Another example of a competitive market is Linen and Bedding, which is fairly broad in the types of products and materials sold. But Australian brand Shhh Silk saw an opportunity in the market a few years ago to focus on a micro niche and sell only 100% silk pillowcases.
This allowed them to get very specific with their marketing messages and to focus on their ideal customer audience. The company has since expanded to sell other complementary silk sleep products such as silk eye masks, silk hair caps, scrunchies and is now a global success.
“ I don’t just sell pillowcases, I sell dreams”
– Olivia Carr (founder Shhh Silk)
Using Micro Niches to Grow Your Online Shop
If you already have a strong online presence and a thriving ecommerce store, you might consider using micro niches to grow your business and further segment your customer profiles.
Start by looking for micro niches within your main market niche. For example, if you have an online shop which sells organic tea products you might do some research and discover a micro niche in the green tea market with long tail keywords such as these:
* How does green tea benefit my health
* Where is organic green tea grown?
* Where do I find the healthiest green tea
* Can I grow my own green tea?
* Is organic green tea better
* Green tea oils
* How can I make green tea taste better?
* Green tea recipes
You’ll then evaluate the micro niches based on their supply, demand and profitability just like you would a larger market niche. Once you have a few micro niches that look profitable, you can create a Hub and Spoke content plan to support your SEO and marketing strategies for the micro niche.
Blog content can then be optimised for search engines, then repurposed and distributed across relevant social channels to help you drive traffic to your website. Even though a micro niche is targeting smaller audiences, it is still sitting inside your main market niche and core products focus.
By tapping into the micro niche concept you’re ensuring that your online authority and website traffic continues to grow, as you appeal to a more motivated target audience. You can continue to boost your profits by ensuring your marketing messages and product offers are tailored to the micro niche that is most interested in your product solutions and the value added information you provide.
If you are interested in learning more about market segmentation and niche marketing, register your interest in The Customer Discovery Project which is a ‘Done With You‘ project where I teach you step-by-step how to discover your ideal customers, define the best market niches based on your most profitable products and then we build an automated sales-getting funnel to take your business to the next level.