Smaller Regional Marketing Need to Focus on Niches

One of the things that I’ve never understood about smaller regions and how they market tech sectors is the fact that they don’t play to their strengths. They take a nationally well-known topic and try to compete in the same sector. It’s not that it’s impossible, but it’s more of the fact that when someone has more resources and you know they can out-gun you, you don’t take them head on.

Thus, I’ve personally always felt that niche markets are the place to be when you’re the smaller player in the marketing field. Most of the big league people around the States are all doing biotechnology. Biotech this, biotech that, and the same goes for the Piedmont Triad. Now, I’m not saying that it’s bad to compete on this level, but you put yourself at a disadvantage because of location (smaller cities), and less resourcing (bigger cities have bigger VCs). Yet choosing a niche within biotech such as prosthetics or skin regeneration, would be able to take much of the current degradation of furniture and textiles and shift them into a suitable marketing position.

Niches have always been the bread and butter of small businesses. Even my own business focuses on the niche of small business accounting. This is because the competition at the larger markets (Walmarts and Targets) is so vast that they don’t need to target ethnic variety as much. Yet, these businesses that fill in the cracks of the spectrum are the ones that keep things going. A small mom & pop store doesn’t want to compete on the scale of Walmart, and nor should they. The same reasoning goes for regional marketing.