How can niche marketing help translators?

Photo credit: Dimitris Kalogeropoylos

One of the questions I’m always asked by mentees I work with is how to go about identifying prospects and – once identified – how to work out the best person to contact. As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a very big fan of specialization and this is always my starting point when answering this question. There are so many advantages of specializing as a translator, some of which I talk about here. In this post, however, I want to look at how specializing can help you with your marketing efforts and, more specifically, at the concept of niche marketing.

Concepts

• Target market = the entire market which you serve (i.e. (specific types of) businesses/private individuals who need translations in your language pair(s))
• Niche = the subset of your target market on which you focus your services

What is niche marketing?

An online business dictionary defines “niche marketing” as “concentrating all marketing efforts on a small but specific and well defined segment of the population. Niches to not ‘exist’ but are ‘created’ by identifying needs, wants and requirements that are being addressed poorly or not at all by other firms, and developing and delivering goods or services to satisfy them. As a strategy, niche marketing is aimed at being a big fish in a small point instead of being a small fish in a big pond.”

In niche marketing then, you take advantage of your specialization and your USP to determine your niche and target your marketing efforts directly to those members of your target market who require the specific services you offer.

What are the advantages of niche marketing?

As you drill down you will find that

the focus group is smaller meaning that it is

1. easier to identify prospects,
2. easier to identify suitable contact persons at the prospect,
3. easier to identify which client events, networks and activities will be the most productive for your marketing efforts.

All this makes marketing much less overwhelming and time-consuming and much more focussed and effective.