Expanding beyond your niche audience

Building up a niche audience can be a key to success for many brands. Sometimes, however, it’s important to expand your brand beyond its initial niche. Introducing your brand to a more global audience can grow your business and bring new customers to your brand. But how does a brand go about expanding beyond a niche audience? Learn how to expand beyond your niche audience below.

What is a niche audience?

A niche audience is a smaller, devoted base of readers that is interested in reading specialized content. What do we mean by specialized? Basically, you have to fill some sort of, well, niche. Where most magazines cover broad spectrums of topics, a niche publication zooms in on one thing. This can be one very specific thing, or it can be an interesting combination of things.

Issuu is a great place to build establish a niche publication. With the Issuu Story Cloud suite of products, we can help get interested eyes on your content. Furthermore, with Issuu’s detailed analytics, you can use audience data to build on trends in your readership.

Why build a niche audience?

They’re reliable. Niche audiences tend to read publications consistently. For creators starting their own publication, building a niche audience is a great way to build up a following and presence. But there often comes a point where a niche audience just isn’t enough. If you’re already successful within your niche, it’s an advisable strategy to expand your audience.

Broaden your niche

It’s very likely that if you expand the breadth of your content, you’ll draw in other interested readers. For example, if you’re a publication specializing in food from the Pacific Northwest, maybe try expanding your content to include midwestern or southwestern cuisine as well. This will attract more readers, who will not only get engaged with your future content but also your back issues. You can take advantage of this by setting up digital sales on all your publications if you haven’t already.

Stay authentic

When expanding your audience, it’s important to stay true to your roots. Keep your brand authentic to what it was built on. There are several ways to develop partnerships around your authentic brand to expand beyond your niche audience without compromising your content. Partnerships for brands and publishers can look like many different things. From social takeovers to event partnerships, figure out what’s best for your audience. It’s about what works best for you and your audience. Don’t be afraid to experiment and try out different fits.

Related Reading: Keeping paid partnerships authentic

Explore other related niches

The other main way to expand your niche audience is to dabble in other niches. If you’re that Pacific Northwestern food magazine, for instance, try featuring some editorial pieces about food from the eastern seaboard, or southwestern Canada. Or, dabble in environmentally conscious food content. Either way, make sure it’s something that your current audience would be interested in, but that explores other fields.

Issuu Stories are a great way to market content beyond your usual audience. By creating a story from a piece that dabbles into other content, you can share it across social media and broaden your audience.

Now that you know how to get started, show us what you’ve got! Follow and tag @Issuu in your Stories for a chance to be featured on our channels.