Niche communities

Why discovering your ‘niche’ is essential for getting your message out to the right people.

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Part of your job as a leader of a business, a project or a team is to be clear about:

1.Why you do what you do
2.What you do 
3.Who you do it for

Answering these kinds of questions is essential and pays dividends further down the line so that why we invited Kimberley Stewart to come and speak at the recent Stronger 2022 event about Niche Communities, to help bring a bit of clarity for people who are seeking to answer that third question, ‘who you do it for’. 

This is about connecting with our target audience. The people who we are trying to serve and bring value to.

Kimberley is founder and director of a graphic design business called Coco Betty Creative Services. She started out doing little bits of design work for our church, but since then has worked with Big Lottery funded non-profit organisations, local and national faith based groups. Her aim is to empower CEOs, leaders and directors to take their business to the next level through smart strategic planning and effective execution.

We really enjoyed what Kimberley had to say and will release the recording of her talk soon, but in the meantime, I wanted to pull out a few elements of what she shared.

WHAT IS A NICHE COMMUNITY?

For those who aren’t very much in the marketing world, ‘Niche community’ is a term that you may not be familiar with. I wasn’t familiar either, I mean, as a vicar, why would I need to know about niche communities? But over the years I’ve come to discover how helpful this is.

As an aside, I have found that looking to other disciplines has been an incredible resource in my own leadership journey. Lots of times I have found an answer to an internal problem or sticking point by looking externally to other sectors. Somehow the fresh perspective brings a fresh injection of clarity.

Anyway, I was interested to learn from Kimberley what she had to say about niche communities. This is what she said:

‘The dictionary defines a niche community as a specialised segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service. So for example, the fashion industry is huge, and it can be broken down into different segments for example: wedding fashion, maternity fashion, children’s fashion etc … and even within those smaller markets we can actually even break it down even further. So, for instance, within the wedding industry, we could break it down to a smaller niches…’

Let’s stop there a moment. I was a vicar for more than a decade and even though I wasn’t in in marketing, this really applied to my own context.

Our vision was to love, serve and pray for our whole parish of 10,000 people in west London. We wanted people to encounter God’s love through Jesus by the Spirit, but we sought to do that in different ways for different groups of people. For example, we had a big focus on the youth and young people of our community. We connected with them through sport and basketball courts, which was very different to the way we connected with the older generation who we invited to high tea and classical music.

The point was that we needed to connect with different segments of our parish in different ways. There were particular groups of people represented in our wider community. We had the same purpose and vision behind why we were connecting with each segment, but the way we did it, the way we communicated and connected with different people changed. 

This will be the same for you too. You have a product, a service, or an idea that you hope will connect with a particular group of people. Does that group divide any further into ‘niche communities’? How does it affect the way you might communicate and talk about your product or service? 

You need to define your niche and I once heard someone say that it’s a good idea to try and identify three words that define the niche that you’re seeking to bring value to.

BENFITS OF THINKING ABOUT NICHE COMMUNITIES

Already then, it’s easy to see the value of working with your niche community and bringing value to that group, but the more niche you go, the smaller the group, but that’s ok. This is what Kimberley said on the matter:

‘It's easy to think that if you niche down within a larger market and focus on a particular target audience, then you would have more competition in that particular niche, but it's actually the opposite. The more you become specialised in your area in your field, then you actually begin to distinguish yourself from your neighbours’.

I heard someone else say: ‘The more niche you go the smaller the audience, but the more likely you will have a hits’

Using my example from the parish in West London. We could broadly try and connect with the 10,000 people and we did. But then we defined a group of about 500-1000 young people that we wanted to connect with. Were we more effective connecting with those young people by trying to connect with the 10,000 or the 1000? 

Exactly!

We had a smaller group, but we found engagement was a lot higher. It’s the same principle when we’re seeking to connect people with our products, services, ideas.

Kimberley went into a bit more detail about the benefits. She said this:

‘…Clarity is another benefit. Being in a niche gives you the opportunity to be more strategic in your approach to those you are targeting. Because you've cut down the amount of people you're actually trying to attract…which means they’re looking for what you offer…’

KEY POINTS WHEN WORKING WITH YOUR NICHE COMMUNITY

Kimberley then went on to describe a number of practical tips for people to takeaway when thinking about niche communities. I’m not going to include them all here because you can catch them in the video when we release it.

1.Try and define your niche community
2.You are more likely to see consistency and sustainability in focussing on your niche community
3.Define what success is when it comes to working with niche communities
4.Learn to measure and evaluate engagement in your niche community
5.Be courageous and step out seeking to engage your niche community

Listening to Kimberley reminded me of another session I tuned into  a while back about TikTok. In that session the speaker encouraged listeners to ‘identify which niche your brand will fit into and how you can stand out to bring value’. 

I think that’s exactly it. Your unique shape, business, idea, project, passion will be something that will enable you to bring something of God’s Kingdom to a particular group of people., or ‘niche community’. As you seek to define it, and work to bring value to those people, under God, I have every confidence that God will grant you favour as you commit it to him.

‘In our hearts we plan our course, but the Lord determines our steps’ - Prov 16.9.