A large mistake many business owners make, whether they are new to the game or seeking to expand, is attempting to market their service or product to too large of a general market instead of focusing on a smaller niche market. The reasoning behind this is the belief that niches limit a desired market and cause fewer sales. However, it is often case that the exact opposite occurs. By focusing your business and marketing on serving a more specialized niche market, you are able to better stand out amongst today’s over-advertised and hyper-competitive market space.
To better understand how this works, it is helpful first to decide what it is that makes your business unique. For instance, let’s say you sell fancy, quality dog food that is fairly expensive. What makes you unique is not just that you sell dog food, but that you do so to dog owners who earn a more sizable income and are more sensitive to quality products. If you however tried to market your product to everyone in the United States who owned a dog, you would be spending a lot of money on marketing to a huge general market, the majority of which would have no need or interest in buying expensive dog food.
Of course, depending on your business, it might not be so simple to deduce what your most profitable niche market is. To develop a profitable niche marketing strategy, consider the following steps:
- Choose a segment of your market or customer base that has a collective special need.
- Implement market research to determine whether this niche is small enough to be unique but large enough to attract customers and clients.
- Be sure that you can obtain branding, trademarks, etc. that would set you apart from potential competitors.
- Construct a promotional and marketing plan to reach the desired niche market.
- Put the plan into action.
- Carefully monitor the market to determine the success of your plan at garnering attention in the desired niche market, and that the market remains profitable.
Developing a sustainable niche marketing strategy must be based around your customers needs and wants. This is most successful when a similar mass-market product is unable to completely fulfill a market niche. It thus becomes up to you to determine why that product or service fails, and what your business can do to better fulfill the needs and desires of customers.