It’s a common belief among many niche business owners that telemarketing isn’t effective within highly specialised, niche markets. This belief often stems from past experiences with low-quality telemarketing agencies that don’t take the time to fully understand the offering they are trying to promote nor the markets they are attempting to penetrate.
Telemarketing usually ends up taking the fall for the lack of results when most of the time, a few simple changes to the campaign approach and targeting can be all that’s needed to yield great results.
So, what are the areas you need to focus on when employing a telemarketing strategy within a niche industry?
The Target Market
The first step in developing your telemarketing strategy for a niche market is to take a deeper look at who within the market, is your ideal customer. Similarly, to when you are establishing your lead qualification criteria, you will want to look at factors like the size, location, annual turnover, and the number of employees of the businesses you want to target.
This step is vital for not only knowing who you want to target but also for tailoring your campaign approach and pitch to these specific businesses.
A small business in Southampton, with 10 employees and brought in £250,000 in annual turnover last year will have very different needs and problems to a company in London, with over 100 employees, and saw upwards of £2.5million in annual turnover last year.
Establishing who you are targeting, their needs and pain points, and how you can tailor your campaign approach to your target market is essential for telemarketing success within a niche industry.
The Data
One of the main snags of running a telemarketing campaign within niche industries is identifying, and building a database of prospects to target.
Due to many niches’ narrow target markets, it becomes more challenging to build a good-sized data list of relevant contacts to approach. Unfortunately, this is where many inexperienced telemarketing agencies go wrong. They see that the size of their data list is much lower than that of the typical campaigns that they run, and they then cut corners on the quality of the data by broadening the target criteria to increase the size of the list.
While this gives them a larger data list, it compromises the quality of the data and means they are wasting your time and money pursuing potential leads that don’t fit your qualification criteria.
The good news is if you’ve taken the first step in identifying your target market as mentioned in the previous point, that’s half the battle. You can then give this information, along with your list of customers and businesses you’ve already spoken to, to a reputable, compliant data house (or to your telemarketing agency) and they will supply you with a database of fresh, relevant prospects that fit your ideal customer’s criteria.
Compromising the quality of your campaign data to increase your pool of contacts could cost you time, money, and the success of your campaign.
The Pitch
When attempting to generate business opportunities within a niche industry, you need to develop a compelling, relevant, and tailored pitch to your prospects.
Niche offerings can often be quite complex, and therefore your pitch can naturally be quite complex as well. Quite often, using complex wording and jargon that your prospects may not fully understand can be disengaging and make it more difficult to convince them that your offering is something that they need and will benefit them.
When promoting a complex offering, simplifying your pitch can result in more resonation with your target audience. It’s all about getting the right information across, in an easy to understand and compelling way.
Oftentimes, your pitch is adapted and optimised over time as you learn what works with your prospects and what doesn’t – this means if you’re struggling to keep the conversation going, put together a few variations of your pitch, and see which is the most effective.
Nurturing Your Leads
In complex, niche industries some deals aren’t going to be closed easily or quickly. This is why lead nurturing is essential within niche markets.
Whether the prospect is having to wait for approval to go ahead with the deal, or if they’re currently in a contract and you waiting for the right time to re-engage, keep a level of contact, whether it be over the phone, email or on social media platforms like LinkedIn, it helps to maintain your relationships with your prospects and their familiarity with you and your business.
Overview
Despite the complex nature of many niche markets, telemarketing still remains a valuable method of penetrating the market and providing the much-needed human interaction into your prospecting strategy.
Taking the time to fully refine and understand your target audience, acquiring quality, targeted data, and developing an engaging and relevant way to approach your prospects are key to seeing telemarketing success within your niche.
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