Get the Right Match

Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about niche marketing, and how a narrow focused, laser targeting marketing effort gives you a huge advantage over your competition. To see where we started, visit the first post here at my blog. So see the last post, visit this one.

Today we’ll wrap up our discussion on the topic with the last of the marketing advantages niche marketing gives you, plus a great example, one of the best I’ve seen. Again, Thanks to Dan Kennedy for allowing me to share some of his thoughts on this topic. To get two free issues of Dan’s newsletter, plus a ton of other freebies, visit this link.

The movement of a product or service from generic to niche link to one of the most fundamental but also one of the most powerful strategies we talk about often: Message to market match. We’ve talked about this in the past, so I’ll only briefly cover it here. For more, visit this post. The basis is Dan Kennedy’s famous triangle connecting message with market with media:
The broader, looser and sloppier the match of message to market, the less it resonates, the harder it is to command attention and create interest. The narrow, tighter, more precise and comprehensive the match, the easier it is to secure attention and interest.

Alright, so how about a real world example? Here’s a link to a PDF you’ll want to check out. (I apologize in advance for the quality. It’s a scan of a copy, but it’s really good) This is an ad from a National Rifle Association publication. In reality, it’s an ad for a relatively common, widely available type of nutritional supplement intended to improve eyesight. You can find this and other supplements just like it in many vitamin retail stores, online and in catalogs.

BUT, in this case, a unique ‘wrapper’ was put around the product to make it specifically for the hunters who use rifles and a scope. Doing so makes this ad and the use of the publication possible. Merely running a generic ad for a generic product that does exactly the same thing would be a failure. When you study the ad you should also note how few words are about the product vs. how many are about the customer.