The niche (or the choice of their own unique niche) traditionally raises a lot of questions for entrepreneurs, because they think that they are missing out on great opportunities, focusing on a specific segment, rather than offering “everything for everyone.”
If you have a technology startup, you may not really need a niche. And if you work in a highly competitive market, where there are a lot of similar offers, niche is your only and least expensive way to become a leader.
Common niche types in popular segments are:
- Price segment (“save with us”, “best price-quality ratio”, “premium segment”).
- Socio-demographic characteristics (for adolescents, for students, for young parents, for active pensioners, for those who have a midlife crisis).
- Specialization in legal entities or individuals (for example, furniture for bedrooms or furniture for retail premises).
- Gender separation (barbershop for real men or spa for business women).
- Intentional narrowing of a segment (dentistry specializing in tooth whitening).
Niche can also use several elements, for example, segmentation by sex, age and price (thematic economic tours in the chicgo Region for families with children 5-8 years old).
When choosing a niche, you need to clearly understand who it is focused on and how it differs from those offers that are already on the market. What makes you special?
For example, you want to open a yoga room. Let’s see what niches there are in this business:
- Individual lessons, small groups – an expensive segment, can be located in a class “A” business center. Emphasis in promotion: “You want to remain super-efficient and energetic – we are with you, classes at any time convenient for you!”
- Different difficulty levels: you can work on volumes, a good partnership is large untwisted fitness clubs. And you can “take” such a business online and work on Instagram.
- Yoga as a way to awareness. In such a club there can also be meditations, meetings with masters who come to your city. The audience will be interested in thematic lectures, the community of interests will go well, group trips along yoga routes.
- Pro-medical orientation. Back pain, strengthening the overall tone of the body, recovery from injuries and surgeries – emphasis in positioning on clients with medical problems. The location of the room next to a medical institution of the appropriate profile, there are doctors who are ready to recommend this room to patients.
A narrow niche gives you advantages over your competitors:
- Expertise (to whom will a person who has back problems go to yoga: to the gym, where there are classes according to a special technique – or to a large fitness center?)
- Raising the average bill. You are a specialist in your field and you can sell related products and services (a yoga trainer, a group leader, can sell individual lessons, equipment for homework, clothes, nutrition advice, etc. to his students – because he knows everything about yoga and trust him);
- Increase trust and customer loyalty. The narrower your specialization, the more you know about your subject (“we are not just doing yoga, this is a whole community with our interests);
- It helps to remember you easier: you are “the very ones who do it better than anyone else” (“if you want to do real yoga, and not fitness gymnastics, you are here”).
When a niche is defined, you can simulate a portrait of the target audience.
Not so long ago, marketing operated mainly with socio-demographic characteristics in order to determine who these or those offers are designed for. Geek Web meet this approach with clients:
– Who is your main customer?
– A woman, 30-55 years old, living in a big city.
– Let’s see the analytics.
– Oh, here is our regular customer, she’s under 70, she usually buys granddaughters. Hmm, we have a lot of women over 55 actually.
– But what is this?
– Oh, yes, indeed, I remembered, but we send a lot in America to small cities.
It is obvious that there are a lot of socio-demographic characteristics. The choice is huge, and people of the same gender and age living in the same city can use completely different cosmetics, spend time differently and buy different SMM services. Even their income is not always a decisive factor. You probably saw expensive cars in not the best areas of the city, girls in diamonds on the subway and top managers flying in economy class.
That is, people can buy something that does not match their income or something that other people with the same income are not ready to spend money on. Someone spends a lot of money on travel, education, medicine (including cosmetology), and people with a similar and even higher income do not imagine how you can buy training for $ 3,000 and invest as much on a trip to America, where it passes. Or why pay a psychologist if you can talk with a girlfriend or read articles on the Internet.
To find the “magic key”, you need to expand the way you describe your customers.
So, to the standard items – gender, age, marital status, availability and number of children, place of residence – we add:
- Goals and values: what is important to him.
- Pain: what he wants to avoid, what he is afraid of.
- Objections: what may interfere with the purchase, who makes the purchase decision.
- How he seeks / receives information: where he is on the Internet, whether he reads books, magazines, what events he attends, who is the leader of opinions for him.
Communicate with customers, with those who sell your product, study analytics and trends – and adjust the portrait that turned out. The more detailed the description, the narrower the search area for your customers, which means less investment in promotion, less cost to attract in the structure of your pricing.
Knowing the goals and values, pains and objections of your audience, you can formulate your proposal in such a way that customers understand that this is what they were looking for. You can also generate demand that would not have arisen if you had not told your audience about some new opportunities. For example, I really like traveling and can not stand tourist groups at all. On the other hand, I can’t afford individual tours. But at the same time, I like to learn new things and do not like to prepare for travels, studying literature and making lists. Now it has become popular and affordable to take one-day and hourly individual excursions with local American-speaking guides. Internet + many Americans in different countries of the world (language and understanding of mentality, including what and why our tourist can be especially curious) = new service.
Narrow a niche, look for a client and offer him what he really needs!
Marketing is a system, and it works for absolutely everyone. It is these actions that will help you with optimal efforts to bring the business into new orbits.
