Niche Marketing

Niche marketing is often misunderstood. Niche marketing is a way of helping you focus on locating new clients, not a set of restrictions on your business offerings. Niche Marketing is not necessarily about gearing your entire business to a particular type of travel. It is about segmenting your marketing efforts to focus on particular groups of people.

Niche Marketing refers to the process of focusing a marketing effort on a particular theme or destination. Properly executed, niche marketing is a terrific way of locating and marketing to a group of potential clients in a highly effective and cost efficient manner.

It is important to be clear about the market you are addressing and to address that market clearly. This might require you to have one marketing brochure or presentation for adventure travel and another for senior escorted tours and yet another for golf travel. You do not have to devote your practice exclusively to any of these niches, but you can devote some of your marketing tactics to the niche. Then, choose the appropriate marketing tools and pitch for the market you are addressing.

One great advantage of a niche market is the way in which it helps you locate potential clients. When you are marketing general travel, everyone is your potential market and you lack focus. When your market is "adventure travelers", however, you know where to find them. When your market is "golfers", you know where to find them. Once you have located your market, it is much less costly to reach out to them as opposed to using much less efficient "shotgun" approaches.

Try this exercise: Choose a niche market for which you have some affinity. Spend an hour or so figuring out where the people who are in that niche market congregate. Then, decide how you might best approach them. Chances are, you will quickly realize that not far out of your reach is a group of potential clients just waiting for you to grace them with your presence.