Marketer Crew - Lessons from $1B+ Niches 🚀

Hey 👋🏼 Chris here…

Happy Monday to the thousands of motivated marketing professionals, startup founders, and business owners who are a part of this community.

I recently watched a fascinating interview on the My First Million podcast with the CEO of ProfitWell. The company just sold to Paddle for $200M but what is even more interesting is the data that Patrick, the CEO, collected on various market categories over the years.

This got me thinking about what lessons we can take away from “sleeper” categories that are generating over $1B+ in revenue annually.

Today’s issue takes around 2 minute to read. As always, if you have any feedback or questions I would love to hear. Feel free to send me a text or a DM on TikTok.

Enjoy!

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Marketing Lessons from $1B+ Niches

What do quilts, woodworking tools, and survival gear have in common? They each represent industries with over $1B+ in market size and have generated multiple businesses with over $100M in ARR. I was surprised to learn that there’s even a “Quilt-Con” annual event each year… 😳

These billion dollar niches have experienced a wave of growth fueled primarily by the maturation of social media platforms, e-commerce, and smart business owners who understand the power in going deep into a single category.

So what lessons can marketers take away from this?

✅ There is power in having strong customer profiles

The survival gear niche is a great example of how dialing in a persona can lay a strong foundation for growth. This goes beyond demographics. We need to understand our customer like we understand our best friend.

Where do they hang out? What are their goals, fears, and problems? What key opinion leaders, influencers, and publications do they engage with?

Here’s a fantastic breakdown of questions to answer to help us as we craft this living doc. Each year we can review this document and update as the market shifts and evolves.

Not only is this going to help us know who we’re selling to it helps us understand:

• Channels we can find our customer
• How to craft product messaging
• The market opportunity

Use a tool like SparkToro to identify these things and document them.

✅ The go-to-market roadmap is simple and clear

One thing that is consistent with each of these Billion dollar categories is that the brands understand how to reach their market. Primarily through content & advertising.

This quilting brand has a YouTube channel with over 800k subscribers… What?

These market leaders know their customer. Research shows that the “average quilter is a retired woman who is approximately 65 years old with a household income of $60,000”.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook and Pinterest became the most popular channels for advertising to this demographic. And because this audience prefers to shop in person several small businesses have also opened local stores that act as distribution centers for online sales.

Simple. Straightforward. Asana put together a great step-by-step to help us craft this.

✅ There is an existing focus on community

One thing I noticed about each of these categories is the strength of the community ecosystem that surrounds them. Subreddits, Discords, social media channels, and live events are all thriving in these markets.

As we’re crafting our marketing plans we should not discount the importance of getting involved in these communities.

We’ve all heard that community building is the “new” marketing. We’re hearing this because communities are driving entire industries forward and creating new opportunities for brands to achieve organic word of mouth distribution within them. Here are a little more of my thoughts on that subject.

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They say the “Riches in the Niches”. After spending an absurd amount of time learning about the quilting industry I can say that statement remains true… As always, if you have any feedback or questions I would love to hear. Feel free to send me a text or a DM on TikTok.

Cheers

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