Everything I needed to learn about niche marketing I learned from the porn industry.

I just found out my twitter feed (@jizzchronicles) is being followed by an account named @FemboyFeet. The fact that he’s following me isn’t really a surprise, but what fascinates me about his account is how specific its focus is. Not only is this account and video feed focused on shemales/femboys, it’s also sub-focused on shemale feet.

I’m a marketing professional by day, so allow me to go a little “industry-geek” on you. One mantra that keeps being said is that companies should focus on target clients and prospects. If you try to be all things to all people and market every angle, you’re going to fail. Very, very few companies can manage a very broad customer base and even fewer can market more than one angle point at a time. (For example, trying to convince potential customers that you’re both the highest quality AND the cheapest price.) It just doesn’t work in most cases in the business world.

The porn industry can teach us a lot of lessons about marketing, sales and product development. There are some who go so far as to say every recent technological advance has been pushed forward thanks to porn. Why is this? It’s because porn is the perfect way to get customers to spend large amounts of money on a fringe technology that offers a new experience.

This isn’t such a crazy idea. I’m barely old enough to remember when VCRs were $500+ and VHS cassettes were $100. This was in the early 80s and this price point was actually quite a drop from how high VCR prices used to be. Being able to purchase a video player for $500 made the technology available for the average person. However, $100 is still a lot to pay for a copy of the Wizard of Oz that you can watch in the comfort of your own home. Video production companies understood this and the vast majority of commercial VHS tapes first available to the public were XXX, adult videos.

DVDs follow a similar, but much faster path. Now that we have Blu-ray, we take a lot of current features, like perfect pause and super, slow-motion, for granted. I’ll admit, these features are pretty neat, but completely unnecessary for watching Eat, Pray, Love. However, if you’re a connoisseur of pornography, things like perfect pause and 10x zoom could be huge selling point.

If you’ve spent more than ten minutes online (and used search terms that brought you to this blog), you know the internet is just brimming with adult material. So much that it’s estimated that 83% of ALL internet traffic is related to pornography (thanks Straight Dope.) In this case, I’m not saying that the internet was created specifically for the sole purpose of distributing porn, but if the average person is using four-fifths of their time online looking at sex, you can be certain it was one of the defining factors in pushing the expansion of internet service throughout the world. (If you’re tempted to argue against these statistics, take a quick look through your internet browsing history and then cower your head in shame.)

Now that so many people have access to the internet and you can find pretty much ANYTHING online, what can this teach us about making money?

The main lesson the adult industry teaches us is, “Know your audience.” Yes, marketing naked women to horny men is like shooting fish in a barrel, but if you look at the niche products offered by even the largest adult entertainment companies (Playboy and Larry Flynt Publishing), it’s obvious there’s money to be made by streamlining your product to a specific audience.

Hustler has a variety of niche magazines and videos that focus on subjects that used to be small sections of their magazine (Barely Legal, Hometown Honeys, Asian Fever, Leg World, etc.) Playboy realized that more and more men weren’t willing to pay $10 for a monthly men’s periodical that only contained three pictorials per issue, so they started publishing special magazines that were chock full of masturbation material. Walking through the magazine rack at your local adult retailer (or even Borders) can show you how specific some adult publications have become. But these magazines are often owned by a larger, well known publishing company. There is no Elderly Amputee Strap-on Burlesque Inc.

Adult websites can get incredibly niche with their content and who they’re marketing too. My assumption is that many of these sites, like the magazines, are owned and managed by a larger organization that owns many different, very specific sites.

What’s the lesson here? First of all, the takeaway is to learn what your audience wants and then offer a high-quality (or incredibly cheap) version of this product. If you already have a core customer-base, don’t change your product without knowing this is what your existing customers want. Don’t expand your product line unless you know there’s a market for this product and you can afford to expend as much energy to this new product as your current product.

We’re used to a lot of one-stop-shops. A visit to the closest gas-station can also be a grocery, bank and video rental stop. Logging on to Amazon.com will allow you to purchase anything you can imagine. Target and Walmart are now grocery stores in addition to household goods and general merchandise stores. But not many organizations can run a business offering this many products and/or services.

If you want to start a small business, first pick something you enjoy (because you’ll be spending a lot of time focusing, managing and obsessing over this product.) Secondly, research the market (are you creating something new or do you have to steal existing customers from another vendor?) Third, make sure the product you’re offering is specific enough that you can streamline and target your marketing to this audience. (It also helps to offer an incredibly high-quality or incredibly cheap product.)

If you can accomplish this, you can make money. You may not be profitable (that’s a much longer blog entry), but you will have customers willing to pay for your product.

Even if they happen to like shemale feet.