Niche Platforms Thought Paper
Humans have always desired to belong to a niche community that shares the same interests and beliefs. We fall into categories based on what we incorporate into our lifestyles that stem from our cultures, hobbies, and jobs. The same can go for businesses offering a specific product or service as they are established for a niche group of people. It’s figuring out how to market that business that can be overwhelming when deciding which platforms are the best to execute niche marketing initiatives.
Why Niche Platforms Can Benefit Your Social Strategy:
Famous social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter cater to all audiences. In contrast, platforms such as Reddit, Dribble, and Meetup are structured to promote the formulation of niche groups. Utilizing each platform to appeal to your niche community is essential when considering your social media strategy. Each platform offers tools and structures to appeal to specific groups of people that consider your target audience’s age, gender, interests, and location. It will lead to more visibility through better search engine optimization (SEO), increased return on investment, strengthened business/customer networking, and less competition. Niche platforms act as a matchmaking tool by connecting businesses with their target audiences, resulting in evolution of customer to loyal patron.
Example:
When considering how I can apply niche platforms to my social media strategy, I think about my family’s restaurant business. I’ve always been familiar with the app Nextdoor, a neighborhood platform used to exchange helpful information, goods, and services by trusted local connections. I’ve used it personally to connect with my neighbors to return a lost dog or discuss events happening in my community and have seen the potential utilization from a business perspective. Since my family’s restaurant is located on the outskirts of a close-knit neighborhood that has supported our establishment for the last 15 years, I thought about how we could benefit from using this platform to develop a closer relationship with them.
Seeing that Nextdoor offers a free business page where you can share your services to the local community is an excellent way to close in on this neighborhood target audience. According to Nextdoor business, ⅓ of the conversations on Nextdoor are business recommendations, and 76% of members report that they’ve been influenced by a neighbor’s recommendation. Such a statistic is appealing to business owners in the food industry, such as ourselves, in attracting new customers through word-of-mouth growth. Utilizing Nextdoor to market our catering services for home parties or neighborhood events and even offering a neighborly rewards program or food promotion would increase engagement between our business and this community. Additionally, we can partake in local conversations such as speaking on our COVID-19 precautions or what we are doing in the event of a city-wide water contamination issue.
Example of Utilizing A Niche Platform Successfully:
Continuing to focus on our restaurant business, we have successfully utilized the niche platform Yelp, an app that compiles crowd-sourced reviews of local establishments from customers themselves. The app provides businesses with key statistics on their performance within the community and allows owners and staff to converse with their customers.
Utilizing this platform has helped our business forge relationships with our customers by thanking them for their reviews, answering their concerns, and recommending food items. Additionally, Yelp allowed us to customize our profile by adding links to our main website page and the ability to include a full menu with accompanying photos to make browsing food options easy. The platform also includes a feature where paid advertisements can be created that lists your business above the search results of your competitors’ pages, increasing reach by 3x. This has improved our business search engine optimization in leading customers who Google search “West Palm Beach Greek Food” right to our page. From the Yelp business website, customers can learn more about our establishment and even place a direct order online for pickup or delivery.
In 2019, our restaurant was awarded the “People Love Us On Yelp” award, which highlights businesses with an overwhelming amount of positive reviews on their Yelp page. This recognition is a helpful indicator to customers that this establishment receives high ratings and encourages future customers to leave a review of their experience. It also demonstrates to us, the business owner, that our Yelp page is sustaining traffic and engagement, which further promotes our reach. Utilizing this platform has increased our community exposure in focusing on our target audience’s needs and recommendations. It has also allowed us to see our competitor’s reviews in what we can do to improve our systems for better customer satisfaction. Overall, our restaurant business has reaped the benefits of utilizing niche platforms where we see the most engagement compared to other social media sites.
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