3 tips for mastering niche-community marketing, according to small-business founders who used private Facebook groups to drive sales

• Small businesses may reach prospective customers better in niche communities like Facebook groups.
• These customers are high-intent, and it's often easier to build relationships with them.
• When using this approach, focus on providing value before promoting your business.
• This article is part of "Marketing for Small Business," a series exploring the basics of marketing strategy for SBOs to earn new customers and grow their business. 

When Danish Soomro started building Visadb.io — a platform that helps people looking to move abroad hire visa and immigration experts — he struggled to find his target customers through standard digital marketing.

"I couldn't just run ads for it — I don't know when somebody's looking to move," Soomro told Insider. 

He knew that Facebook groups were a common place for people to ask questions and get recommendations, so he started joining groups for people looking to move to new countries, contributing to conversations, and sharing his product when it made sense. 

This approach helped Soomro not only get in front of customers who were further along the funnel but also find suppliers, tech grants, and mentors through connections he made in the group. 

In fact, he found niche-community marketing so valuable that it inspired his next business: Devi, an artificial-intelligence assistant that helps business owners monitor leads in Facebook groups and other social communities. Soomro grew Devi to a six-figure business in 15 months and grew his business 22% month over month from September to October by marketing primarily via private communities.

Similarly, Laura Gatsos Young, a copywriting consultant, felt like she was screaming into a void when trying to find customers on more far-reaching marketing channels. 

"With the algorithms, you never know who's seeing what, and you don't know if you're actually interacting with someone who could potentially be a peer, a collaborator, a client, because you don't have that personal connection with them," Gatsos Young told Insider.

For the past five years, she has focused her marketing on networking in private communities, where she has found clients, referrers, and collaboration opportunities such as guest teaching, podcast interviews, and LinkedIn Lives. 

Insider talked to Soomro and Gatsos Young for advice on how other small-business owners could successfully market in smaller online communities.

Focus on quality of members over quantity

Soomro's first piece of advice: "If you're not in the right groups, this tactic doesn't work."

The right groups, he added, don't necessarily mean the biggest ones. Instead, Soomro recommends seeking out communities where the majority of the members are your target audience. 

Sometimes this is very straightforward — for instance, when marketing Devi, Soomro joined several entrepreneurship groups, since those include his target audience. He also looked for groups tangentially related to his products. For Visadb, he found success in digital-nomad communities, since moving internationally is often part of the lifestyle.

"If you're in a huge community, you might not even get noticed," Gatsos Young said. But if you're active in smaller communities, you can position yourself as the go-to person for your area of expertise. She also prefers paid communities — including the Expert Up Club and The Upside — because the members are often more vetted and engaged than those in a free network. 

To find the right groups, Soomro said, you can search Facebook by keyword or look online for top groups for your audience segment (e.g., "top groups for female entrepreneurs"). Gatsos Young also asks her clients which communities they're a part of.

Look for people asking for what you offer

The last thing you want to do once you join a group, Soomro said, is start publishing random posts promoting your product. For one, this may be against the guidelines of the community. But it will likely also come across as spammy and is less likely to be effective.

Instead, he monitors the groups he's in to look for conversations where it makes sense to insert expertise related to his brand or plug his product. For instance, if someone asks for recommendations on lead-generation software, Soomro feels he adds value by sharing information about Devi, he said. 

You can do this by regularly scrolling through group posts and looking for conversations related to your work, or using the search function within groups to look for relevant keywords. Soomro used to have his virtual assistant monitor groups and identify opportunities to do outreach. Now he uses his own tool, Devi, to automatically track keywords and flag relevant conversations. 

This approach may be a big time investment, but participating in one conversation can easily lead to more than one lead, Soomro said. "That person will get my product, but also other people in that group will learn about my services," he said. When searching for test users for Devi, Soomro said that 64 comments in a Facebook group about his product led to 600 leads. 

Be helpful instead of promotional

Soomro's rule of thumb when engaging in any group is to offer more value than he's taking. Most of his comments involve more of a soft pitch, offering general advice about the question being asked and then gently pushing his products at the end when it makes sense.

Gatsos Young treads lighter, rarely selling herself directly. Instead, she focuses on providing value and building relationships in the groups, such as by hopping on quick calls with members who are struggling with a copywriting task. "Just by showing up and giving my advice, it's led to me either working with them later on down the line or them referring me to someone," she said.

Sales is an inherent benefit of being part of these communities, but you shouldn't approach them with the intention of getting business, Gatsos Young said.

Customers are diligent and discerning about whom they work with, she said: "When you show up in a community and you show up without expectation other than to have a meaningful conversation, I think it's a refresher for people."