Niche Marketing Lessons, Or If You Love It, Put A Toe Ring On It

And Now For Something Completely Stupid

In my 15 years in online marketing and advertising, I have been fortunate enough to work for several high throughput providers that have also provided creative services.

Some of those clients were among the largest advertising plays in the world, in major consumer categories. These resulted in online ads that you have probably seen at one time or another, for brands that you have definitely heard of.

Others? Not so much.

This is what happens when it comes to new technologies. Sometimes, you get clients that are more bleeding edge than leading edge. If they are willing to spend, you do the business. Preferably by getting the money up front.

Looking back, I think my favorite was an outfit called Timmy Toes. They sold toe rings, and the merchandise was not, shall we say, subtle. So the SKUs ran into thousands of dollars, or tens of thousands of dollars, for stuff that just looked like it made walking or standing impossible.

The site sold just toe rings mind you, nothing else – and this was not a retargeting campaign, it was a broad jewelry placement. To users who were not just shopping for toe rings, since that select would have been a distribution set of next to nothing.

I am quite confident in saying that the team and I made the finest toe ring ads... that you have never seen.

And I am also confident in saying that you will be shocked, shocked, to learn that neither the campaign nor the business turned out to be a long-term success…

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So what do you learn from doing this kind of work? Plenty, actually.

• Niche plays can be big winners, but usually aren't.

Toe rings notwithstanding, there has been a sizable percentage of winners that looked like oddballs at the start of a campaign. New plays to market always are more likely to fail, but as always with marketing, list and offer matter a lot more than creative. And when they get the right mix, it’s magic. Magic, you might know by now, is only magic because it's unexpected.

• Competitive analysis is higher.

In niche markets, the players are all working in a very small space, and are much more aware of what the other players are doing – especially the lead dog. From price points to language and execution, speed to duplicate or enhance is just higher when there are only a handful of players to monitor. It also means that your niche provider might have competition for your interest soon, so make sure you've got your policies on category exclusivity set up ahead of time.

• Your client contact is either a lifer or a transient.

If you have deep knowledge of a niche consumer category, you either love it and want to keep working with it for the rest of your days… or it is just a means to an end, and you will move along as soon as you can to avoid the business equivalent of type casting. (Which means this pro deserves your best service, since they are likely to find you again in some bigger category later. But I digress.)

• Approval to innovate is generally all or nothing.

Legal or brand compliance is usually what is cited for why a new version cannot look or read very different from the control, but the real reasons are probably more idiosyncratic than that. Your best move is to ask for all past work, and see if execution moved off the control before.

• Egos will not match market share.

The smallest fish in my career have had some of the most exact standards and stringent branding needs. Especially if you are dealing with a dominant market leader, you can find yourself with a client that is harder to please than someone with 100X budget. They will also fight you over what should be mentioned in the selling copy, usually in the favor of some deep benefit that’s far more meaningful to the maker than the buyers.

• Their audience may not be as unique as they think.

Data-driven look-alike modeling proves this, but so does just general marketing common sense. Our toe ring vendor back in the day would have been better off compiling a young and affluent list who viewed non-traditional publishing sites. Instead he chose to test his work against people who spent similar amounts on traditional jewelry. (To be fair, when you have the idea of selling really expensive toe rings over the Web, how can you dial down your own genius long enough to listen to someone else's opinion or data?)

Please share your favorite niche client in the comments, and anything you have learned from the work. I would love to hear about something odder than mine!

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Connect with me personally on LinkedIn. I also welcome email at davidlmountain at gmail dot com.