Is Your Niche A Stadium or a Parade?
Is your niche a stadium or a parade? The answer should have a lot to do with how you market your product.
What do I mean by this question?
When most marketers think of their niche market, they unconsciously think of a stadium metaphor: a huge crowd of people they can potentially sell to.
But in fact, most niche markets are more similar to a parade metaphor. This means a constant stream of potential customers vs the one-shot deal of a stadium.
Parade marketing should be built for the long haul, whereas stadium marketing is typically limited by time or circumstances. You can do well with either, but there are some important differences.
For example: If you are selling an infoproduct on how to lose weight, that’s a parade. There are new people every day who realize they need to do something to drop some pounds. This new parade of people have never seen your offer, or your competitor’s offers before because they were never really looking.
In a case like that, you want to target where the new users are entering the market and get your message in front of them. You also need to remember that even though you may be sick of your ad, banners, etc – the parade hasn’t seen them yet so it’s all new to them. You never want to mention competition in parade marketing because the marchers may never have heard of them.
If you are selling or promoting something tied to a time-specific launch – that’s a stadium. If you are promoting something tied to a current event, or a flash-in-the-pan celebrity, that’s a stadium. Your marketing is time-limited, the awareness among prospects is higher, and you need to pull out all the stops in getting your message to the prospect immediately.
Here’s a recent example.
John Reese launched his Traffic Secrets 2.0 course in July. Many marketers treated this product like a stadium, with very heavy marketing and promotion surrounding the launch. They had bonuses for the first 20 customers who bought through their link, etc. They sent numerous emails to their lists, and made posts all over their blogs.
There was so much promotion of the product that there probably wasn’t anyone on more than a couple of internet marketing email lists who didn’t receive multiple messages about the product.
But then many of them stop marketing TS 2 and move on to the next shiny new thing.
But Traffic Secrets is not being pulled off the market.It will continue to be sold for a long time, just like the original version of the course.
That means you can treat the marketing of Traffic Secrets like a parade.
Consider this: the week after the Traffic Secrets 2.0 launch, when all the big hoopla and promotion has died down, thousands of new people entered the “internet marketing” niche for the first time. In fact, Google says 246,000 people searched for “internet marketing business” in June. A considerable percentage of those people are newbies.
These people don’t know what a John Reese is and never heard of Traffic Secrets. They need to learn how to drive traffic, and John’s course would be ideal for them.
These newbies are part of the parade. They weren’t sitting in the stadium during the launch, but they are marching towards making a purchase right now.
Stadium marketing is the email broadcast. Parade marketing is the email inserted into an autoresponder series that is constantly getting new subscribers as they join the parade.
Think about your niche and whether it’s a stadium or a parade. You can probably fine-tune your marketing to make it more effective depending on your answer.
