By now everyone has heard that a great way to increase your marketing's effectiveness is to choose a specific segment of the market (i.e. a niche) to go after. In this series we'll go into detail about how to choose the best niche for you personally. Part 1 is all about picking a niche that is "actionable."

Note: we won't go into the strategic decision of deciding if you should narrow your focus to a niche or not. If you want to read more about that topic, you can read more on that here.

When working through this decision with our clients, we use Tango's straightforward "R.P.A." framework. In essence, the best niche for you is one that is Relevant, Profitable, and Actionable. Today's post is on what I think is arguably the most important factor: picking a segment that is Actionable.

Let's use an example to illustrate what we mean by actionable. Let's say you are very knowledgeable about wine and enjoy it as a hobby in general. Maybe you have a wine cellar, own a collection, and are very plugged into the wine community. As a result you also know that the community is affluent in general and most likely would be attractive wealth management clients. So now you're thinking to yourself… maybe I should be "the financial advisor for wine lovers!"

You can picture what you'd pitch to all of your contacts in the wine community, how creative your marketing could be, and generally how fun it could be for you.

The question you really need to ask yourself is this: "after I reach out to my immediate community and that channel is completely exhausted, how will I find, prospect to, and ultimately retain more clients in this niche?"

If your main source of clients is referrals, then you already know the dreaded feeling of not knowing how to attract new prospects. You're posting on social media but nothing is coming from it? You're not alone…

The first step in this thought experiment, figuring out how to actually find new people in this niche, is crucial. The name of the game in modern digital marketing is using unique data to target your outreach, and there are hundreds (if not thousands) of data providers that you can use to find people in your niche. Whether you're using email, LinkedIn, cold calls or carrier pigeons as your channel, you need reliable data sources to identify and reach your target audience.

Within these data providers you can use basic demographic filters (e.g. age, location, gender, income…) professional filters (e.g. company name, job type, tenure…), financial filters (e.g. recently bought or sold a home or business, recently changed jobs), and thousands of other data points. The hard part is uncovering which data brokers are most useful to you (btw at Tango we do all of this for you…), but when choosing a niche to target, this is the lens you need to be thinking it through.

Back to wine lovers… it would be very difficult to find people in this segment at scale. Nothing is impossible (maybe you find lists of people that bought certain wines, or get access to lists of people that are members of certain vineyards or clubs…) but it definitely wouldn't be straightforward. Sometimes the juice is worth the squeeze, but you need to take into consideration your skillsets and if you're planning on building your marketing system yourself (and you aren't a data expert), you might want to reconsider wine lovers as your target.

There are other reasons why wine lovers is probably not a great choice for a niche, and we'll get into those in parts 2 and 3. If you want to learn more, follow our LinkedIn page where we'll post our new blogs. Thanks for reading!