How To Find Your Niche Audience
Among the many attributes of a successful business is the ability to sell a clearly defined product or service to a clearly defined market; establishing a niche is critical to achieving this goal. Having a niche isn’t confining but allows a business to establish a market while refining processes that can lead to the expansion of this market or expansion into other markets. Read on to learn how to find your niche audience.
Before all that happens, every business needs to be able to find its niche audience. Whether you’re a startup preparing your business plan or an established entity looking to refine and grow operations, knowing how to find your niche audience with these 5 top tips can help you separate yourself as the best from the rest.
See what competitors are doing
The first and most important component to finding a niche audience is knowing what your competitors are doing. Overlooking this core of due diligence is akin to reinventing the wheel. Knowing what your competitors are doing takes many forms:
- . you should be aware of the exact products and services they are providing.
- . You should be aware of how these products are packaged, presented, and delivered.
- . You should be aware of the price points, materials used, and manufacturing processes involved.
- . You should be aware of the demographic your competitors are targeting.
Although many businesses try to attract customers from competing businesses, the reality is that any other business can do the same to you at some point.
When you know what your competitors are doing, you can begin to establish a niche that allows you to differentiate your services and products to maintain a competitive edge.
Explore unexploited markets with improved marketing
Sometimes, the simplest way to identify the optimal business niche is to find the right market that is undersaturated. Identifying the ideal market for your product and service takes into consideration a variety of factors:
- How is this product or service being used?
- Who is using this product or service?
- How often and in what environments is this product or service being used?
Finding an unexploited or divergent market can be as easy as physical marketing in a different region (Ex. going from an urban setting to a suburban setting to sell sports equipment), using online marketing and shipping discounts to reach customers across the country, or marketing products to an entirely new demographic, such as promoting exercise memberships to older rather than younger adults.
A variety of marketing techniques, including social media ads, informative blogs, and tailored emails to the clients you are trying to attract are all excellent ways of increasing exposure and gaining support from a niche or unexploited market.
Conduct a survey and interview potential clients
Finding a niche audience may require a slightly greater investment to identify what people want. How do you know what customers want? By asking them! Identifying customer needs and wants can be as simple as visiting competing businesses and interviewing customers.
You can also send email surveys to potential client lists and ask the simple question: “What do you want out of X product/service? What would make your life easier?
What would make your life better?” Feedback collected from this survey can then guide how you differentiate your product: product design, performance, packaging, or promotions.
Model your product or service for customer reviews
Another tried and true way, particularly for established businesses looking to introduce a new product or expand to a new, niche audience is to model a specific product or service.
A free trial or sample can go a long way when it comes to actual research and development costs. If people like the product, then they will probably ask for more of it and you can continue production. If they’re not satisfied, you can always get feedback on what can be improved.
A free trial or sample often requires a minimal investment of time and energy once production is already in place but can save considerable long-term costs if demand, or consumer demands, don’t meet production capacities.
In the end, having customers provide instant feedback helps to develop more of a rapport with your potential niche audience, especially if they like the product!
Create or innovate technology
The last and most challenging method for developing a niche audience is to literally design a product or service that is not in use.
This is in many ways a synthesis of the above strategies but takes it one step further given that there can be an incredible risk involved in creating something that no one else is doing (Ex. Amazon).
At the same time, rather than building off of the efforts of others to create a slight distinction, you can create a whole new field or category of goods that defines how your customers and audience respond to your goods and services.
Innovating a new product requires a great deal of collaboration, research, development, and patience to get the right product.
Asking the simple question, “What can make the world/field/marketplace better?” is often the simple motive for developing better products and processes that can generate innovation while attracting a niche audience capable of being grown.
These are just some of the many ways that you can explore to develop a niche audience for your growing business.
For many businesses, focusing on a niche audience can be a foot in the door to entering a competitive market and beginning to recruit customers, while other businesses use niche audiences to expand or introduce new products or services.
Regardless of how you are using a niche audience, knowing what you are trying to sell, to whom you are trying to sell, and how this can impact their lives is at the core of any market development strategy.
Using the above strategies can help you and your business capitalize on the potential of a niche audience to make that market keep coming back.
