Niching Down As A Marketer: 8 Specialisms To Consider

Intro

When establishing a career in marketing, you can either be a generalist or a specialist. A generalist is a person who has many different skills, whereas a specialist aims to focus on one specific area.

Spoiler alert: niching down as a marketer can fast-track your status and increase your earning potential. In this article, we share three benefits of choosing a marketing niche and provide you with eight marketing specialisms to consider in 2022.

3 advantages of niching down as a marketer

In the marketing context, a niche refers to an area of interest originating from your passions. It involves doing a job or offering a particular service that aligns well with your skillset. Niching down as a marketer brings along the three key benefits discussed below.

1. You know your ideal clients better

If you’re marketing your services to everyone, then your message will be too generic that you’re not engaging with anyone. Niching down enables your efforts to be more focused so that your message resonates perfectly with your ideal clients.

2. You establish yourself as an expert

Which would you rather become: “master of one” or “Jack of all trades”? By choosing one specific area of interest, you will become a go-to marketer in your industry. You’ll spend less time trying to perform excellently at everything you used to do.

3. You limit your competition

Two principal benefits of finding your niche are instantly reducing your competition and re-establishing marketplace leadership in a crowded market. You won't have to compete with tens of thousands of other businesses for the top spot.

8 specialisms to consider

Marketing is a broad umbrella term that involves various specialisms with plentiful opportunities. If you’re looking to build a skill set that will be sought after by employers globally, you’d need to niche down as a marketer. Here are eight marketing specialisms that are up-and-coming in 2022.

SEO specialist

A Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialist implements changes to a website to optimize it for search engines and increase the number of visitors to a website. It means bringing more traffic to a website by improving page rank within search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. An SEO specialist performs page optimization to ensure the search results are relevant and develop the best user experience.

SEO is a specific field, so there aren’t many university programs that will provide you with the skills you need. But we share with you 4 main characteristics that a successful SEO specialist must possess to thrive:

• a savvy mind for marketing
• ability to find high-volume and low-competition keywords
• understanding of how technical SEO affects rankings & other SEO metrics
• ability to build backlinks to key webpages

Do you still ask yourself why niching down as an SEO specialist is a great idea? Because SEO is a dynamic field where you’d constantly study changes to the Google algorithm. The fact that you never know what changes will occur makes this career path more exciting.

PPC specialist

Pay-per-click (PPC) is a fast-growing marketing strategy that shows immediate results. A PPC specialist manages PPC campaigns, their strategy, design, implementation, and ad performance analysis. PPC specialists usually manage several campaigns and work with data on a daily basis, analyzing trends and thinking about improvements to optimize the campaigns.

An effectively run PPC campaign leads to return-on-invest from early on. Unlike SEO, PPC campaigns generate quicker website traffic - to be exact, twice the number of visitors compared to SEO. The good news is that entry to the specialism without a specific degree is possible. Besides a passion for trying new things, the skill set of a PPC specialist includes possessing superior analytical abilities, the ability to think creatively, and an understanding of HTML and JavaScript.

Social media marketer

A social media marketer is the person who is in charge of every aspect of a company’s social media presence. In the most basic sense, social media marketers use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, TikTok, and more, to reach new customers, engage with current ones, and announce new product/service launches.

Some of the responsibilities you may take on as a social media marketer include writing long- and short-form social media messages that attract new users, using data to analyze what’s working, and re-focus key messages accordingly.

By using social media, businesses build awareness and authenticity, drive thought leadership, grow an audience, build a community, and generate leads. Obviously, companies can’t afford to miss the power of social media. There will surely be a growing demand from employers for social media marketers. So, if you’re naturally inclined to immerse yourself in the social media world fully, this is the ideal position to consider.

Influencer marketer

Influencer marketing blends old and modern marketing tactics to reach a larger audience with a brand message. It incorporates the concept of celebrity endorsement into a modern content-driven marketing strategy that may include product placements in creative content, giveaways on the influencer’s platforms, and co-branded products.

One of the fastest-growing channels in the digital marketing ecosystem is indeed influencer marketing. Experts predict that businesses will collectively spend more than 4.5 billion US dollars on influencers by 2023.

The essential skill for influencer marketers is people skills because they build relationships with other parties and find ways to establish connections to brand executives so that everyone benefits from the campaigns. Although a degree in marketing and communications isn’t compulsory to become an influencer marketer, you still need to have knowledge of social media platforms and the available advertising options these platforms have.

If you want to be an influencer marketer, you should get familiar with influencer marketing platforms like Upfluence, Grin, Modash, Hypeauditor, and similar alternatives.

Chatbot specialist

While entering a website, you should have probably noticed a pop-up window that interacts with you or welcomes you. More organizations are now using chatbots to automate aspects of the customer experience. The person who develops chatbots is a chatbot specialist. A chatbot specialist designs flow using artificial intelligence (AI) to communicate with website visitors via text or audio to optimize the customer service experience in a variety of scenarios.

As a marketer, you don’t necessarily need to have a deep understanding of AI and coding to be a chatbot specialist. There are no-code and low-code tools like Botsify that let you build complex chatbot experiences using a drag-and-drop UI. Botsify even has the infrastructure in place to help you start a chatbot agency using their platform.

That said, if you do want to build a career as a chatbot developer, the key qualifications you’d need are a degree or equivalent experience with AI and machine learning and knowledge of computer programming languages such as Python, C++, and JavaScript. It’s predicted that chatbots will save companies 2.5 billion hours by 2023. That’s a huge number, so it’s the perfect time to niche down as a chatbot specialist.

Content writer

If you’re a creative thinker with an inquisitive mind and superb writing skills, becoming a Content Writer can be a rewarding career path. Content writers develop several types of writing, such as blog posts, ebooks, press releases, product descriptions, web content, etc.

There’s no one set path towards becoming a content writer. But, having an online portfolio of your work is an important first step for attracting employers or clients. Some people begin with a university degree in English or Journalism, while others come from a business background. That said, what’s more important than qualifications is the experience and proven ability to write well.

Link builder

The practice of getting backlinks to a website in order to boost search engine exposure is known as link building. A link builder must convince another company why a web page is worth linking to, so this job requires contacting various companies regularly, following up, and then reaching out to even more.

The main skills to become a link builder are general knowledge of SEO, communication skills, and strategic thinking. Companies hire link builders to get high-quality backlinks to their websites and influence the position of their resources in the search results. Hence, this specialism is in high demand.

Affiliate marketer

Affiliate marketing refers to how an affiliate receives a commission for marketing another person’s or company’s products. Referring a product or service through a blog, social media platform, video, podcast, or website is what affiliate marketing is all about.

Every affiliate marketer has a niche where they try to influence their audience. We recommend not being too greedy and trying to speak to too many niches because you could risk making your efforts less effective. What comes next for you is to test market demand, analyze the competition, research affiliate programs, and affiliate tracking software that helps you track and report results from any affiliate network.

The global market size of affiliate marketing in 2020 was over $17 billion - up from $13 billion in 2016. This number clearly shows that affiliate marketing is on the upswing, and that’s unlikely to stop anytime soon. If you have a website that generates decent traffic or influence in your field, you should consider niching down as an affiliate marketer.

Final take

You need to be clear about what you offer in terms of marketing expertise and then package your knowledge as solutions to real-world marketing challenges. Believe us: being a generalist isn’t the most exciting and profitable path. Instead, niching down will allow you to become more valuable in your area and establish yourself as an expert in the longer term.