Using Online Lead Generation to Carve Your Niche and Create Your Buzz

Sometimes you get a product which sells itself. However, a lot of the time you will have a product that only suits a fraction of the population. So how can online lead generation work when your product is niche and your target market is small?

Brands that perfect their inbound lead generation strategy see falling marketing costs, better quality leads, greater client engagement and other benefits that outbound methods simply can’t provide. If you want to know more about inbound lead generation, read our guide “Everything you need to know about Inbound lead generation”

If you have a niche product, then there might not be a lot of traffic floating about for you to advertise to. However, if the internet has taught us anything, it’s that a niche is normally bigger than we expect.

The amount of people searching for a product like tartan paint is going to be pretty low, but the interest will still be there. So how do you get around this?

You need to discover and create the traffic yourself.

This may seem like a rudimental answer, but yes, you can and should be creating your own traffic without spam marketing. By researching your audience, creating personas and matching these to your channels and targeting, you can create a lot of interest before you even go in for the sell.

However, doing this requires time and effort, and if you aren’t experts (unlike us) you may struggle. So, we’ve outlined the key focus areas to online lead generation for a niche product.

Use the right tools for online lead generation

Using the wrong tools for any job is just pretty stupid. “Here’s a spoon, now, go kill that bear” said nobody ever.

It’s fundamental to match your channels to your funnel. However, it’s shocking how often we see the exact opposite of this happening. When starting online lead generation for any niche product, first look at where your client will be. Then, match your channel to that.

If you are selling tartan paint for example, LinkedIn advertising coupled with some longtail Adwords activity won’t cut it. To create awareness, you need to use more visual and social mediums such as Facebook, the GD, Instagram and Pinterest.

Humans process visual information much faster than text. To create awareness of your product, you want to get in into peoples’ minds quickly and subtly. You can’t do this with all channels (i.e. google text ads), so creating beautifully engaging visuals is your best method for success.

This way, you are generating awareness of your product in the mind of your consumer, finding out data to stay relevant to them – and best of all, catching them in retargeting lists.

The importance of being relevant

Relevance is key to low CPLs and better conversions. Google has its quality score and Facebook has relevance scores, but what they both have in common is the ability to significantly drop your costs.

There’s a lot of noise out there on how to improve quality scores and your relevance, but really it just comes down to tight personas and strong relatable creatives.

Look at your product from the eye of the consumer. Is it relevant to them? What are its key functions? What will it solve for them? Take this information, and make it the key focus  not only of your creative but also of your targeting.

In all of your campaigns, cross-matching demographics against interests and behaviour is key to achieving high relevance.  Once you get past the initial stages of online lead generation, some structured targeting development will boost your performance quickly.

This isn’t 2010. Just bidding on *generic term* and praying isn’t going to bring you in leads.

Watch out for the long tails

Once you’ve chosen your channel and your online lead generation is firing, the desire to go straight for the kill is tempting. Many advertisers often forget that:

Just because a consumer has some awareness of the product and its value doesn’t mean they are going to come running.

You need to bridge the gap from your awareness campaign to your online lead generation campaign. To do this, you will need to take the insight from your awareness campaign. Then, use some broad match modifier terms to capture some decent volume and guide your prospective customers.

Once you have good search term traffic, you can start to build out exact match longtail lists, but start too early and you’ll shoot yourself in the foot

We took over one account which was a PPC nerd’s mecca. Layers upon layers of long tail keywords were organised in a phalanx of ad groups and campaigns. This initially looked great and very thorough, but in reality it was more of a Jenga board than St Peter’s. Nothing was converting, and the CPL was around £200 (not kidding). The reason? The previous manager had massive lists of what he thought consumers would search for, but had no broad or BMM keywords. He was missing out on a lot of key traffic by overcomplicating his account.

Don’t get me wrong, longtail keywords are great. However, sometimes a good broad match modifier with a solid negatives list will generate abundant traffic at acceptable CPCs.

Re-target, re-target, re-target

We love retargeting . In fact, if you’ve read this far down, expect at least 100 GIF based ads on your Facebook and Instagram feed… I’m not kidding.

As we mentioned earlier, the best thing about display ads and brand awareness campaigns is that they get people into your retargeting lists. Too often, people just retarget blindly. Recently, we have been applying the inbound methodology to our remarketing. As I’m sure we’ve explained, we’re big fans of HubSpot and its workflow automation. When you pair this with targeted remarketing, you get a powerful method for engagement.

If Suzie goes onto your page advertising blue tartan paint for example, she can then be sent ads for blue tartan paint. Simple. But what if she is also sent an email with a blog discussing the best types of blue tartan paint? Once she opens this email, she can be sent another a few days later detailing the best places to buy tartan paint. All the while, your CRM is taking snippets of information from each interaction. When she finally calls to buy some paint, your sales team enjoys the simplest of transactions.

This is what smart remarketing with a logical workflow process can do. How do we know this works? Well, we implemented this exact process for one client with a niche product. Within six months, their revenue went up 500% and they made 3000% ROI.

So to conclude – being niche may mean that you face a bit of an uphill struggle, but very often you will have an audience ready and willing to buy. You just need to put more work into your online lead generation strategy to find and nurture those customers.

Brands that perfect their inbound lead generation strategy see falling marketing costs, better quality leads, greater client engagement and other benefits that outbound methods simply can’t provide. If you want to know more about inbound lead generation, read our guide “Everything you need to know about Inbound lead generation”