What are the advantages of tribal marketing?
There’s quite a few, and they’re quite powerful.
So, if you’re considering building a tribe of your own, or you have done so and are considering going broader with your target market or not, then you have to keep these in mind…
What Are The Advantages of Tribal Marketing?
The advantages of tribal marketing are quite straightforward and focus on aligning your message with the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of your niche.
Tribal marketing allows you to more tightly focus your product or service around a known target group, understand that group in much more detail, and better resonate with your niche so that you increase conversion, and reduce marketing expenses.
First, let’s get back to our definition of tribal marketing. Tribal marketing is essentially marketing that focuses on an identifiable social group that is distinguished by its shared beliefs, affinities, and interests. In plain language, we’re talking about focusing your marketing on a social group that’s tightly bound around some topic of interest, such as a rock band, taking landscape photographs, or wearing anime costumes.
As mentioned, there are some very powerful advantages to this style of marketing:
Tightly Focus Your Product or Service
Tribal marketing allows you to craft a product or service that is focused on an identifiable group of potential buyers. Rather than developing a product that you hope will appeal to a large group of people, you focus your product or service on a known group of people with key similarities around interests, behaviors, etc. The result is a product that resonates more with your target buyer.
The advantage here is obvious. By focusing a product or service more tightly on a specific group, your product or service will appeal to them a lot more and you will – if done well – get a lot more sales than you would creating a more general product that may not appeal to anybody.
You Will Understand Your Target Audience in A Lot More Detail
When you focus your marketing around a tribe, you can conduct focused research on members of that tribe to really understand how they think, behave, feel, etc. By understanding your target market to a much more granular level, you can better understand the sorts of challenges that they face, why those are challenges, how they feel about those challenges, what they would want in a potential solution to those challenges, and what objections they may have to possible solutions.
The result is that your product or service is much more able to target pain points – points of emotional distress over problems in your niche – in a way that offers a compelling solution without much in the way of objections.
Better Resonate With Your Niche to Increase Conversion
When you target a tribe, and you dig into that tribe to really understand how they think, speak, feel, and understand the world, you can speak to them in a way that resonates with them.
Compare this to mass marketing, where you’re putting out ads in the hope that something will resonate well with someone. Without identifying a tightly knit tribe and taking the time to dig into their world, you can’t speak to your target customer in a way that appeals to their thoughts, concerns, frustrations, etc.
It gets even better if you yourself is a member of the tribe since your experience in that particular area of focus (photojournalism, knitting, vintage sneakers, etc) is likely to be shared by others in that community and you will therefore have a much better understanding of your target market and can communicate with them in a way that resonates much more with them.
Reduce Marketing Expense
This is a big one for new businesses. By focusing on a tribe, you can target that tribe through marketing with much more precision and at a much lower cost.
To reach members of a tribe, you basically have to know where they spend their time, where they hang out, where they tend to gravitate to, and be there. For example, moms interested in knitting may spend time on YouTube or on particular knitting websites. To reach them, then, you could place ads on knitting YouTube videos or on specific knitting sites. Doing so would be much cheaper, and probably reach more knitters, than would running ads in your city’s newspaper.
Getting your toe into those spaces where your target customers tend to congregate allows you to concentrate your marketing spend on those areas where you’re likely to reach more interested prospects. There’s less marketing waste, and you end up with a much better return on your money, time, and effort.
Overall, tribal marketing is a great way for small businesses to maximize their marketing impact. It’s even more effective for online businesses since you can target your niche so much more effectively online than you can offline. If you’re considering broadening your marketing efforts, I would advise you to explore other ways to research prospects in your niche rather than taking a more mainstream marketing approach.
Read next: What is the Difference Between a Brand Tribe and a Brand Community?
