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The Niche Famous Framework is a new B2B Marketing Framework. The main objective behind the framework is to deprioritize short-term metrics. Instead, it encourages you to embrace a 'softer' goal: becoming famous in your niche.
This means you become the first association in your prospects' minds when they think of your category. For instance: when the average Marketer thinks of a CRM system they’ll think of Hubspot. They are famous in their niche and among their target audience. This is extremely valuable for Hubspot as it ensures they consistently have leads in their pipeline.
The idea of the Niche Famous Framework is simple. Firstly, you establish who your ideal customer is. Then, you consistently and frequently show this group of ideal customers valuable content. This content should help them understand that they have a problem that you can solve.
How do you implement the Niche Famous Framework?
Step 1. Define your ICP
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), is that group of people you can help best. They have a problem that you can solve. You should challenge yourself to ‘niche-down’.
Ideally, you should identify a small group of ideal customers that would benefit the most from your offer. Additionally, this group should contribute the most (in potential) to your revenue. Figure out the following things:
- Which companies?
- Which company size?
- Which job titles?
- Which countries?
You should aim to end up with a group between 20K and 100K people. If your budget and content creation resources are small, then try to get to a small group of ideal customers.
Step 2. Understand your ICP
Secondly, you need to understand what your ICP’s pains and gains are and how they relate to your offer, of course. Without this, you won’t be able to make good content that resonates with them.
Also, you need to understand where your ICP spends most of their time and attention. This should result in a list of media channels they use and the kind of content they are interested in.
Step 3. Define your core messaging
Define what you want to become famous for. For people to recognize and remember your brand, you must tell a consistent narrative that sets yourself apart. Your product isn’t your brand, your story is.
What are the values of your business? What vision and mission do you have? How are you going to formulate and communicate a unique point of view?
In practice, you create 3-5 categories that you consistently talk about in all your marketing communication, whether we are talking about posts, ads, newsletters, or landing pages.
Step 4. Create a content creation machine
The Niche Famous Framework is completely dependent on content. The quality and the frequency of creation are vital to success.
If you don’t ensure quality, your ICP will never read, watch, or listen to your content. Quality does not mean that it is of the highest production value. Instead, focus on creating content, that is interesting, funny or valuable to your audience.
If you don’t create frequently, you won’t be able to distribute frequently. You need to distribute frequently to build problem awareness, solution awareness, and top-of-mindness. That’s why the process for continued content production is key!
You can approach content creation in various ways. In this step, you decide the content creation type you'll commit to. This is usually dependent on your skills. If your strength is writing, or video production, make sure to keep this in mind.
Which form of content can you consistently produce?
Step 5. Distribution
You will never become famous if you’re audience doesn’t see you therefore, you need to get your content in front of your ICP’s eyes.
Based on the research you have conducted, decide on the channels that you are going to use to consistently and frequently reach your ICP. During step 2, you have defined the media channels your ICP is spending their time and attention on.
Before you begin posting, identify what is necessary for your campaigns to succeed. If time or money is a constraint, there should be a workaround. For example, focusing on one channel may be more efficient, rather than spreading resources across several.
How the Niche Famous Framework resulted in the success of Dapper
Step 1. Defining our Ideal Customer Profile.
Here is how we went about it:
- Which companies can we help best? Scale-ups offering a B2B product or service.
- Who in these companies do we need to speak to? Generally, the marketing leaders in bigger companies and founders in slightly smaller companies.
- What size companies can we serve best? B2B scale-ups, with an employee count somewhere between 20 - 200 FTE.
- Where can we best service companies? Preferably in the Netherlands or Belgium.
And just like that, we found the first iteration of our ICP: Marketing leaders or Founders in B2B companies of 20 - 200 FTE, in the Netherlands or Belgium.
This does not mean we don’t service companies outside of our ICP. This simply means that we channel our marketing efforts to grow in this specific market. As an example; If a B2B company from the USA with 300FTE approaches us to work together, we will. But, we won’t run our marketing campaigns on them in the first place.
Step 2. Understanding your ICP
To further understand our ICP, we started by asking ourselves: “What does my ICP do on a daily basis?”. They are probably tackling challenges on how to grow and/or market their company.
There are pains and gains for them here: “How do I stay on top of the fast-changing marketing landscape?” or “How do I make sure enough leads keep coming in to facilitate growth for the company?”.
These are questions we can help them with and can thus use as topics to educate them on in our content and ads. This shows we have the know-how that they need to solve their problem.
Step 3. Our Core Messaging
For Dapper, we defined the following core messages:
- Long-term growth strategy > Short-term Growth Hacks
- Marketing Qualified Lead Generation belongs to the past
- The Niche Famous Framework is the future of B2B marketing
Do you notice the strong opinions we vocalize? Having a strong viewpoint helps set yourself apart and get noticed. If you have the same opinion as everybody else, your voice will get lost in the crowd.
Step 4. Creating a content creation machine
As mentioned before, the quality and the frequency of creation are vital to success.
We can ensure quality content, as it’s our agency’s job to create it. Still, we push ourselves and each other to stay sharp and never become lackluster in our content.
We can create frequently because we have strict and well-structured processes in place for content creation. Having a process for content is vital if you want to create content consistently and frequently. We make these processes as easy and efficient as possible for ourselves so that frequency can never become a problem.
Step 5. Distribution
We found that LinkedIn has the right audience and the right targeting options for advertising to our ICP. For retargeting, we found that META and YouTube are great channels for this audience. So we dedicate all our resources to distributing our content on these channels!
The result?
We’re Niche Famous. The average Marketer or Founder in any given B2B scale-up in the Netherlands or Belgium knows us. This leads us to grow solely on inbound leads; companies in our ICP that approach us to ask if they can work together with us. Currently, 50% of our revenue can be attributed to our Niche Famous activities.
