You’ve tried hard to market your business and even went to great lengths with your marketing strategy. Yet, nothing seems to work as well as you had hoped.
A young lady once asked an Ivy League admissions representative, “What do you look for in an applicant?”
One of them answered, “The candidate should be well-rounded or well-angled.”
Simply put, you’re either a jack-of-all-trades or a master of one. For most, it’s probably easier to find one’s strength and build on it.
In today’s blog, we’ll talk about niche marketing. What is it and what does it mean to be well-rounded or well-angled in your business segmentation? Will it help your marketing strategy and build your business more?
What Is Niche Marketing?
According to the Business Dictionary, “Niche marketing is concentrating all marketing efforts on a small but specific and well-defined segment of the population. Niches do not ‘exist’ but are ‘created’ by identifying needs, wants, and requirements that are being addressed poorly or not at all by other firms, and developing and delivering goods or services to satisfy them. As a strategy, niche marketing is aimed at being a big fish in a small pond instead of being a small fish in a big pond. Also called micromarketing.”
So, if you want to tread the road less traveled or the narrow path that leads to a thriving business, then you have to find your niche, that particular void in the industry that only you can fill.
What Are the Advantages of Niche Marketing?
Based on the definition above, you could deduct the advantages of finding your niche and building your brand in that niche:
1. Focused efforts
With a niche, you can become an expert or authority on something. You eliminate hap-hazard efforts and avoid spreading yourself too thin. You get one thing done right, in terms of goods and services, and focus on what unique thing you have to offer those seeking a solution.
2. Reduced competition
If you are uniquely you, and you have become an expert in what you do, you have occupied a space where no one else is present. With reduced competition, you gain a loyal customer base and need not worry about lower rankings and customers not finding you. And with focused efforts, your target audience will then serve you with reviews, referrals and high ratings to attract new prospects.
3. Addressed needs
The greatest fulfillment you could achieve with niche marketing is being able to address an unmet need. If you’re the only company that can solve a specific problem, then you’ve become the solution to what people have been clamoring for. Finding your niche audience will be easy.
4. Lead innovation
Finding your niche means breaking through a particular door that nobody else succeeded in opening. Being the leader in that segment of the industry gives you the ability to innovate and express your creativity. You create the box and even have the freedom to think outside the box. This could easily streamline your marketing efforts.
5. Controlled pricing
In a given niche, the law of supply and demand can work for you all the time. Even though there may be a low demand for your service or commodity and you cater to a small market, but because you’re the only supplier, you can still control the pricing of your goods.
Take a pharmaceutical company, for instance, which manufactures orphan drugs for rare diseases. They can dictate the price and even lobby for it so that the patients could have access to the medications at no cost or reduced cost.
How Do You Find Your Niche?
Because you wanted to build your business uniquely, you have to answer the following questions:
1) What are you good at?
2) What do you love to do?
3) What problem confronts you and others that no one else out there has come up with the solution for?
The process of finding your niche will require a lot of self-knowledge, introspection, and extrapolation.
What are you good at?
What talent or skill comes intuitively for you? You may or may not have the training for it. But being good at something means having the fundamentals needed to become an expert in that given field given the proper training. There are fundamental building blocks that you can refine to just the right skill your audience needs to help them.
What do you love to do?
Finding a niche is embracing something personal and thriving in that sphere. It’s not enough that you’re good at something if you don’t love what you’re doing. Passion fuels purpose. When you love what you do, you tend to do more of it, and therefore, you become better at it. When you’re passionate about your product or service, you won’t hesitate using social media or content marketing to talk about your product or service.
Sometimes, what you love comes from a need.
Take Sarah Blakely, for instance, as the inventor of Spanx. At 27, she became a self-made millionaire, and now a billionaire. Was she looking for a business? Did she even have a business degree or experience in fashion or retail? Did she have a marketing plan or a niche marketing strategy? No. She used to sell fax machines door to door.
In this regard, she did have experience with cold calling and sales. You need tenacity for that kind of job. But at that time, she was simply looking for a way to solve her womanly woes of ill-fitting clothes. The serendipitous idea came when she converted a pantyhose with a pair of scissors into a shortie undergarment for her cream pants. She loved the idea so much that she patented it. Her tenacity and persistence came into play when she struggled with finding a patent attorney and a hosiery mill who would believe in her product. But once she got through the numerous roadblocks, she made more than a million in a year.
And this leads us to the next factor in identifying your niche.
What problem hounds you and no one else out there could address it?
A viable business is not only something you are good at or love to do, but there must be a demand for it. Finding that need can take a while to happen for some. It can mean trying out many small businesses until you find the right fit. While for others, it can come as a eureka moment like in the case of Sarah Blakely with Spanx.
When developing your marketing strategy, look at the broader market. Listen to potential customers, and then target a specific and defined segment whose needs resonate with yours.
To differentiate your business from the rest, it must be a natural extension of your body, mind, and heart. Because when you genuinely believe in something, your message will come across in your marketing campaign.
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References:
http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/niche-marketing.html
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/definition/niche-marketing
https://www.inc.com/sara-blakely/how-sara-blakley-started-spanx.html
