A niche market allows you to define who you’re marketing to. When your Sales and Marketing employees know what that is, it will be easy to determine how to most efficiently apply time and budget to drive new business.
The more narrowly you can define your target market, the better. A good niche may be obvious (families in a particular neighborhood if you’re a dentist, or sports car owners in a large zip code if you handle auto repair), or it may take time to research your potential market to become better focused.
Here are some tips to find a niche that will be viable, profitable, and crucial to your business:
- Explore marketing. When you look at everything from a marketing point of view you will be amazed on much you will learn about niches. Take special interest on all commercials, ads, social media sites, and even your daily conversations. Take note on how target markets are getting reached in each type of marketing. Look into existing markets, trends, and products/services to see how they can relate to your business.
- Check out your competition. Either you need a unique angle within the niche that no one else is focusing on, or to be able to do things better than current competition. Inspect what they do well, what they are failing to do, whether you have any fresh new angles or insights that they aren’t covering. If you are not out-performing competitors in your niche, how will you get noticed first?
- Test your niche. If you’ve determined your niche idea is one that has demand for your product or service, run a small test first to see if your niche will be profitable. Start by writing blogs, simple advertisements on social media sites, and build/use an email list. You’re not just testing your marketing ideas, but letting people try your product to prove its value.
Doing the right homework by spending time researching and analyzing, entering the market will be a calculated risk, not just a gamble. The ultimate goal is to enter a niche and compete with your competitors, becoming profitable by knowing how you did it and how you will keep good things going.
