Niche Marketing Matters

Let me restate that. Have you tried “affinity marketing” yet?

Affinity marketing is marketing and promoting to a group of customers that have common interests. It usually involves getting other people or other firms to help you sell and promote your business. It can be as simple as an endorsement from one firm for another firm’s products. In exchange for this effort, the other party gets compensation or value. The effort or campaign to get other party to help is often called an “affinity program”.

An example of an affinity program would be an automobile mortgage company which markets its financial products with the endorsement of a thrift lender, which does not offer auto loans. The customers are shared and have common interests. In this relationship, the two firms promote each other’s products to a shared audience. The relationship is reciprocal.

Similar affinity programs can be created for most any business, entrepreneurial or not. Here are a few tips for setting up an affinity program:

• Establish the rules of engagement: determine who does what, what you get for doing it, and how to measure success.
• Designate a champion at your firm and at the other firm to be responsible for the success of the program.
• Treat the other firm like a customer or a member of a special team. Communicate regularly to maintain and create mind-share. Share success stories. Be generous with kudos and rewards.
• Brand the program by giving it a “mantra”, a three to four letter name. Make it easy say and spell. Make it clever and memorable. Blanket the earth with the mantra.
• Avoid affinity partners which directly compete with your firm; this can be trickier than it sounds. The risk is that the partner might decide to enter the business with you. Instead, establish non-compete agreements which discourage this behavior.
• The pay off has to be mutual or the affinity program won’t work; you need to address the question: what is in it for me?

Affinity marketing can be a very powerful method to ramp your brand awareness and sales. It can be like having two sales forces.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2006 All rights reserved.
Please visit my website at www.firstbestordifferent.com

A few days ago I wrote about the “New Millennium Marketing Mega Trends” (i.e., October 27th, 2006). I wrote, “The following changes will rock your marketing world: Hispanic Revolution- Hispanics accounted for about half the growth in the U.S. population since 2000, according to a recent US Census Bureau report. The nation’s largest minority group is increasing its presence even faster than in the previous decade. Contrary to popular belief, births have overtaken immigration as the largest source of Hispanic growth. If you are not marketing your products with this “minority” in mind, you are making a big mistake amigo”.

Well guess what? It appears that iTunes read my blog because today they announced “iTunes Latino”, which is an area on their online store which is dedicated to Latin music, videos, audio books, and podcasts. The iTunes store is the world’s leading digitial music outlet with 1.5 billion songs sold since its launch.

Rather than just a knee jerk reaction to my blog, iTunes says that this expansion was a response to the growing market for this genre of Latin digital products. They believe that half of Hispanics are internet users and that this number is increasing. I think they smell the money.

The biggest minority in the US has muscle. Are you marketing to Hispanics? You had better consider this market pronto, amigo.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2006 All rights reserved.
Please visit my website at www.firstbestordifferent.com