In my last entry I talked about the common objection from small business owners that their business or industry cannot grow using online methods. We discussed a bit about geographically targeting traffic. Today we’re going to talk about another common objection.
This is the, “My business is too specialized. It will never do well online.”
I just love this argument, because it’s the easiest to solve. In fact, if you can make a solid argument to me as to why your business is too specialized to work on the Internet, then you’ve help me do my job.
What I mean is this. By telling me that your type of customer is not looking for you online (that’s hogwash by the way), you’ve done one of the most difficult tasks for a small business. That is identifying exactly who is buying your products. Those that buy your products now are clearly the easiest market for them in the future.
The bottom line is that the most specialized businesses are the ones that work best online. The reason is because you can target your prospects on specific “niche” web sites, and you can use very specific keywords (called long-tail keywords) to define the exact person who fits into your typical customer’s demographic and mindset.
So don’t worry that your business is too specialized. Worry instead that your business is not nearly specialized enough. This is a much more difficult problem, because it may require shifting the marketing strategy of the business to focus on one specific group. It’s often difficult to convince business owners to let go of certain demographics even if they are not producing the desired results.
In my last post I talked about how people tend to group themselves into geographical groups, but this is even more true for interest, lifestyle, and demographic groups in social media. If you can find the social groups for your niche online and learn to tap into them, you may need to hire more people to handle all the business you’ll suddenly get.
