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By Professional Academy Guest Blogger, Elliot Mark
It’s always been challenging to get a new business off the ground. Lacking an established brand makes it extremely difficult to convince people to believe in you, and startup resources are far too limited to support exhaustive marketing. You need to be smart and selective with your approach, and that means keeping a strict focus on a narrow audience comprising only those most likely to be interested in whatever you’re offering.
If you can impress those people, you can win them over, resulting in opportunities to exceed their expectations and start building a positive reputation through social proof. But what do you do once you’ve cornered that limited market? If you do an excellent job, you’ll eventually run out of new prospects within that narrow audience, making further growth seem impossible.
At that point, of course, your future lies in expanding your audience. While working to retain the customers you’ve already collected, you must look farther afield to find new opportunities. The question, though, is how you can reach those people. In this post, we’ll set out four ways in which you can adapt your digital marketing to reach new audiences. Let’s get to them.
When you fixate on impressing a niche audience, you inevitably adapt your marketing materials to suit their specific needs and preferences. You know what technical terms they’ll understand, how they’ll want problems and solutions to be framed, and how they like to be addressed. When you open up your marketing approach, then, it’s essential that you dial this back.
Take out the technical terms that may be misunderstood. Research what messaging is likely to resonate most clearly, and make the necessary adjustments. Keep in mind that you won’t be able to win over your new audience in a single step, so don’t even try: your goal with your initial marketing should be to lay the groundwork for future materials. One you’ve made people familiar with your core concepts, you’ll have the chance to make a complete pitch.
If you’re eager for new prospects, one of the best ways to find untapped potential is to look overseas. After all, there are huge numbers of people out there who don’t speak your language or simply prefer to use sites that address them in their native tongues. If you can cater to them by offering content in their languages, you can achieve remarkable business growth.
If you want to do this, though, you’ll need to start by localizing all content on your website. Yes, that includes everything from the blog copy to the navigational elements, and it requires not only translation but also an appreciation of how references and tones can work well in one language but fall totally flat in another. Accounting for cultural differences is far from easy, but it’s time well spent given the revenue you stand to collect as a result.
Every narrow marketing audience has a social media preference, making it perfectly sensible for a budding business to pick one or two platforms and disregard all others. If all your customers use Facebook, for instance, you can handle all your social promotion through that and forget about other platforms. So when you’re trying to reach new people, those new platforms are key.
In this situation, it will markedly benefit you to leave your comfort zone. If you’ve never tried marketing on TikTok, for instance, you should seriously consider giving it a try. You might just find that there are many potential customers on there who don’t really engage with other social media platforms. And if it doesn’t work out, you’ll at least have learned from the experience.
Sometimes there’s fairly little you can do to win people over directly. No matter how carefully you tweak your content and spread your message, they’ll either ignore your brand or disregard it for some unclear reason. When that happens, you need to take an indirect approach and look for ways to reach them without your history getting in the way. That’s where influencers come in.
Social media influencers hold a lot of power, even when they don’t have vast audiences. Their followers highly value their opinions and will pay close attention to their recommendations. If you can partner with some influencers in untapped niches and give them the creative freedom to adapt your marketing messages to suit their followers, you can pick up some fresh qualified leads with shockingly-little effort. Why not attempt it?