One of the purposes of marketing is to understand the needs of your target audience, establish rapport with them, and provide value for them. Influencer marketing has been an effective strategy to accomplish these, especially in building relationships with customers and prompting them to take action through these connections.
Yet, what if I tell you that not all influencers and audiences are created equal? Even if you analyze your target audience well and know how to approach them, there are still additional tactics that can increase your success.
All brands have target audiences. They are the ideal customers, users, or subscribers who can benefit from their services or buy their products. However, some companies can differentiate several sub-groups or niche markets within their target audiences. They are called niche audiences and yes, you guessed it, the best way to reach them is with relevant niche influencers.
If you want to refine your influencer marketing tactics, then you came to the right place. Our article will help you understand how a niche audience differs from general target audiences, and why more and more brands target smaller consumer groups instead of large masses. We will provide you with insights into how niche influencers can help you in your marketing venture and learn numerous methods to search for them.
Ready to fine-tune your strategy? Then, read on!
The Difference Between Target Audiences and Niche Audiences
Even if you think the two are the same, we can assure you they are not. Let us break down the two concepts for you.
Target audience
It is a broader customer group that a business intends to reach through its brand and influencer content. A target audience is defined by general demographic and psychographic traits, such as age, gender, location, language, and main interests. For example, a sportswear company may target men and women aged 18-35 who regularly exercise.
A target audience is large in size and broad in scope. It is based on basic audience characteristics, hence it includes numerous subgroups.
Niche audience
A niche audience, however, is a more specific subset of a target audience. They are defined very narrowly, in terms of demographics, needs, habits, and interests. Staying with the sportswear company example, a niche audience would be ultra-marathon runners with particular footwear requirements.
As you can see, they still fit the target audience's requirements, yet they make up a smaller part of the original audience. Once a brand learns about these nuances and details related to its audience, they’ll be able to create marketing campaigns tailored to their needs.
Your new athletic shoe model developed for long-distance runs will pique the interest of marathon runners, but they won’t excite tennis players, hikers, or aerobic fans. To maximize the efficiency of your marketing efforts, when advertising the new footwear, you must concentrate on that smaller subgroup, instead of a larger but general audience.
How to Identify Niche Audiences?
Examine their interests, preferences, and habits
The first step in identifying niche segments is knowing what they like and how they behave. You can learn a lot about their interests and lifestyles through surveys and polls. Using social media analytics tools can reveal their engagement patterns, such as what content they share or like. Study your customers’ purchase history, product choices, and the frequency they buy something.
Understand their pain points
Analyze what users say about your products and services. Identify unmet requirements or issues with your product. Explore online reviews and social media conversations by tracking industry, brand, and product-specific hashtags and mentions. Simultaneously, you can monitor their sentiments toward your competitors. Complaints and negative feedback about their services are an opportunity for you to improve yours.
Segment your audience
Once you gathered enough information, you can segment your audience by several aspects. First, classify them by demographics, such as age groups, gender, location, income, and education level. Next, you can further divide them by purchase history and behavior. Lastly, create groups based on their interests, values, and lifestyles.
Create buyer personas
Your research will enable you to create buyer personas. For example, if you offer VPN services you may create one segment for senior IT professionals between 44 and 54 working from home with a high priority for cybersecurity. Another group can be young travelers and vloggers, aged 25-34 who often upload videos in foreign countries and are worried about data security.
These various buyer personas are present on various platforms and have diverse personalities and interests, yet they are all connected by the importance of protecting their data. If you want to reach them successfully, you will need to use a different approach for each of them. This entails distinct channels, content formats, storytelling, captions, and CTAs. A good choice is to partner with someone who has a similar background and had to tackle identical problems. And this is exactly why niche influencers are so important.
What Is a Niche Influencer?
A niche influencer is a content creator or social media personality who specializes in a particular - usually narrow - topic or interest area within an industry. For example, many beauty influencers focus on a definitive product category, such as skincare, haircare, makeup, or nails. These are already niches. However, in industries like beauty, they can narrow down their interest further. There are skincare influencers who specialize in face creams, while others in organic products.
How do they differ from general influencers?
Content focus: Influencers in general concentrate on a broader theme or cover a range of topics and can endorse various products. Being a lifestyle influencer, for example, can entail creating posts about fashion, beauty, and wellness. Niche influencers share in-depth content about a particular subject matter or a hobby.
Audience size: General influencers have a wider audience since they can touch on a variety of areas. The number can reach from a few ten thousand to millions. Niche influencers usually have a smaller, but very dedicated audience, ranging from a few thousand to a few hundred thousand.
Credibility, authority, and trust: General influencers can be inspirational, but their generic interest makes them less authoritative. Niche influencers are perceived as highly knowledgeable figures or trusted advisors in their fields making them more credible.
Engagement and reach: Common influencers may have a large but diverse audience granting them a higher reach. However, due to the audience’s diversification, they have lower engagements. A niche influencer - because they cater to a subgroup’s preferences - has lower reach, yet higher engagement rates.
Brand collaborations: General influencers work with a variety of brands - sometimes across different sectors. Niche influencers, on the other hand, collaborate with businesses that are tightly aligned with their expertise and values.
Marketing goals: General influencers can effectively grow brand awareness and visibility because of their large audience size. While niche influencers impact engagement and sales in their area of expertise.
Tips for Finding Niche Influencers
1. Use a niche influencer discovery tool
Influencer marketing platforms offer a range of tools for discovering and analyzing creators. Most of them let you search for influencers by pre-determined categories and keywords. Although both methods can yield great results when looking for general influencers, they have their disadvantages when you want to find experts.
Content categories are too broad. When you search creators by them, you’ll get a long list of individuals who all fit that topic category. For example, in the Fashion and Accessories categories, you’ll find influencers who share content about casual streetwear, elegant or business attire, jewelry, and handbags. These are a wide range of topics attracting diverse users.
Keyword searches will reveal more precise hits. But here’s the problem with this discovery method. It lists influencers who mention the selected keyword in their bio or content. If you have to find experts in a very tight niche your search may turn up maybe a handful of these people.
If you want to find niche influencers, you must choose a platform that has a large influencer database and enables you to search by niche. Enter HypeAuditor’s AI Niche search tool.
HypeAuditor’s tool checks the bio, the posts, and the images when searching for a keyword. It identifies posts that use the same keyword but in another language and can search by synonyms. This ensures that you’re provided with numerous creators in a narrow niche making it easier to build a multi-influencer campaign.
2. Research hashtags and keywords on social media
Manually: All social media platforms allow you to search by keywords and hashtags. If they help users discover posts and videos they are interested in, they will help you find the individuals who created them.
Uncover major authoritative figures with industry-focused hashtags and keywords. As another option, you may search for your brand’s and product’s mentions. Keywords related to your core values can also unearth valuable results.
With social listening tools: All the above can be easily done with social listening tools. You have to set up selected hashtags and mentions and can detect the posts that include them across several social media channels.
3. Look around among your followers and customers
Find your most committed customers. We mean those who left 5-star reviews on review pages, created enthusiastic unboxing videos, or wrote testimonials on your product.
Examine your social media followers. Detect those who posted about your brand and services and shared their positive experience with their community.
These people are relatable and authentic and they can be potential niche influencers.
4. Analyze your competitors’ partnerships
You can discover niche influencers in your industry, by checking your competitors’ current and past collaborations. An analysis will let you know whether they worked with nano-, micro-, or mid-tier influencers. You’ll be able to see what content format and platform were involved in their campaigns and how they performed. With this information, you can find additional niche influencers, refine your strategy, and leverage missed opportunities.
5. Search industry-related blogs and forums
Identify community leaders and subject matter experts on blogs and forums. Niche groups on Facebook and forums like Reddit and Quora are a treasure trove for uncovering valuable influencers in your sector. These individuals already contribute to industry-specific discussions, and they are respected and trusted by users.
Next Steps: Influencer Analysis
To ensure your collaboration’s success, analyze the content creators thoroughly, especially:
Brand alignment: Make sure their content, tone, voice, and style fit your brand’s aesthetics and communication. Select influencers who share your brand’s ethos.
Engagement: Find out how actively users are engaging with their content and how often they participate in conversations. Measure likes, comments, shares, and saves and calculate the ER; or check it with a tool.
Audience: Examine whether their followers match your target customers. Are you trying to reach married couples in their late thirties and early forties who live in a big city and lead a busy lifestyle with your meal-kit service? Or gamers in their twenties who appreciate quality headphones.
Prices: Usually, smaller influencers charge less than larger ones. Yet, if you operate in a very narrow niche, you may not have an abundance of influencers to choose from. The unwritten rules of economics say that the less supply there is of something, the more expensive it will be. Be prepared that your niche micro-creator may charge a higher-than-average price for the collab.
ROI: It follows from the above that you should consider influencers’ rates from the point of view of return. If you see that a bit pricier yet highly trusted and credible individual delivers higher ROI than a more affordable one, then go for it.
Wrapping It Up
The competition is tough between brands and the influencer landscape is oversaturated. Those who want to stand out from the noise and increase their conversions and engagement have to classify their customers into smaller segments. This enables them to tailor their marketing efforts to their tastes leading to higher conversion rates and ROI.
Niche influencers ensure businesses reach highly engaged users with their content on various channels. They help precisely target and solidify the relationship and trust between brands and their audiences.
We encourage you to start identifying niche segments in your greater target audience and selecting the ideal influencers to connect with them. Use any - or better yet, a combination of - the methods we mentioned in the article and be the brand that knows its consumers’ desires and needs!
