To niche or not to niche? That IS the question isn’t it?
“But my product is for everyone so I don’t need to niche” I hear you say. “Bollocks” I reply. Successful businesses need to determine their niche and market directly to them. As we discussed in the 7 Steps Towards Successful Marketing, a key component of a successful business is a good marketing strategy. A crucial part of building a good marketing strategy is to know your customer well.
How well you ask? Intimately…you need to get inside their head and think like they think, feel like they feel, but no, we don’t mean stalk them!
Elements Of Your Niche
- Age (within a 10 year range)
- Sex
- Relationship status (married, single, other…)
- Number of children (if any)
- Where they live
- Home ownership (own/rent)
- Occupation
- Annual income
- What TV shows they watch and magazines they read
- What radio stations they listen to
- Where they shop
- Where they go on holiday (if they take holidays)
- or anything else that relates to your product (directly and indirectly).
If you’re still not sure how to define your niche then think about your favourite customers, you know – the ones who seem to buy your product without you having to try and “sell” it to them. Now write down some of their characteristics, this is the basis of defining a niche.
For example, you sell TVs. We know that everyone watches TV so everyone is potentially within our market however, not everyone buys TVs. So how do we encourage our market to buy? By defining niches within the broader market and speaking directly to that niche in a language they understand.
The newest big screen LED TVs currently on the market are usually purchased by “trendsetters”, they are predominantly men aged 25-35 years, they may be single or married but usually do not have children, they watch a lot of evening TV and are more likely to watch sports, they have a disposable income, and social status is important to them.
Using Your Niche For Marketing
Now that we have a better understanding of our niche market we can begin to develop a marketing strategy to engage that niche. For this particular niche a suitable advertising campaign might include TV advertising during a sporting event, not during children’s mid-afternoon programs.
So are 25-35 year old men who watch sport the only people who we want to sell TVs to? Obviously not, so we define another niche and then develop a marketing strategy that talks directly to that niche.
More Than A Niche
Knowing what your niche is in demographic and psychographic terms is a great first step but you need more than that if you want dominate a niche. When choosing a niche for your business you need to ensure there is a market for it and you aren’t picking a niche already dominated by someone else.
You must be unique within your niche to succeed. If you choose the same niche as another company and you offer the same value the only thing you can compete on is price and that is always a losing game. But we shall cover this in a later article.
So how clearly defined is your niche market?
Photo by nathanmac87
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