Scaling the Niche

By its very definition a niche means a distinct segment of a market. And it's a great place to be in business. It should mean that competition is low and that your consumers are very loyal. The trade off is that your available market segment can be relatively small and hard to reach. So then how do you look to grow and scale whilst trying to protect the advantage that your niche gives you?

If you're selling access to niche video content or using video to facilitate the sale of your niche service and/or products then you know how very difficult it can be to reach new audiences and grow your business. Or at least that's what you may think... here are four strategies that can help you overcome the inherent paradox of growing a niche business using online video.

Growth Strategy 1: Deploy online video to allow anyone, pretty much anywhere to access your offerings

The Internet has broken down traditional boundaries based on taste, gender, age, location, income to name but a few definers. Now anyone, pretty much anywhere can access your content on Golf Lessons, Wine Tasting or Magic Tricks. So by just embracing the use of online media like Brightcove Video you've gone a long way to help building scale for your product.

Growth Strategy 2: Turn your users into your sales force with tools to shower you with praise and recommend you

Now that you're out there in front of the consumers you can now look to leverage them as your own sales force. Give them the tools to show their appreciation and recommend you to others. Deploy the Facebook Like button on your videos, allow users to Tweet your videos, send them via email, blog about them, comment on them, rate them. People befriend like-minded people and if your business speaks to a specific profile, chances are groups of this type of individual already exist as sub networks in the great digital social network. Plug in where you can and encourage growth of them if they don't exist already (with your brand as the central node of course!)

Growth Strategy 3: Streamline conversion for your product

If your primary product is your video then it can be as easy as plugging in an ad network to start getting revenue based on consumption. However for niche video content you may have already found that traditional ad-support models don't work on lower volume content (remember we're trying to grow the volume here, it's not there yet!). So you may have added in a payment gateway in a PayPerView strategy.

This can be a very powerful first step if you keep in mind that you need to be careful with how you deploy this. Getting money from someone before they can sample the goods is a poor and effectively dead-end strategy. Think about it as being in a shop. You can pick up and, to a certain degree, sample the goods before being charged for them. This experience should be no different to your online presence and access to your videos.

On the other hand if you're using videos to facilitate the sale of a product/service then consider the user journey from the end of the video to the check out of a purchase. It should flow and have as little steps as possible to avoid the consumer abandoning the transaction. The video should do the selling by imparting an emotive impulsive into the viewer. This impluse can be translated into a sale if the conversion can happen before the impulse dissipates. So getting the user from the video to the checkout in the quickest time will be good for continued conversion and growth of your bottom line.

Growth Strategy 4: React to and internalize how your users consume your video

We all like to think we're experts in our areas. Especially when we're serving up niche content and/or product and services. And in truth we probably are. What we're most likely NOT experts in is human consumption behaviour. There is a real science (and art) to creating engaging video experiences irrespective of the content type or the message contain within.

Video is about telling the story, and a master story tell can make the phone book sound exciting! So it's incredibly important that you are reviewing how your content is going down with your users, and reacting to any trends you identify.  This doesn't need to be over complicated with a million and one reports all blazing at you in real time. You're not sitting in NASA's command center controlling the shuttle lift off for crying out loud. But it does mean looking at what is the hallmark of video creation success: engagement. Are your users dropping off? If so where? And most importantly, if they are dropping off are they leaving before the best bits of your content?!

Use the built-in analytics to assess video engagement performance, make some decisions around the trends in the data, those decisions should then reflect back into your video creation and editorial processes. Not hard at all.

Score Yourself

Why not score yourself out of 10 against the following list to see where you're sitting currently and to help give you some ideas of how you can improve your chances to grow?

--Cameron Church
@cameronchurch