niche market – Nicole Munoz Consulting

Here we get down to the nitty-gritty. You have an idea of what a niche market is but not such a clear picture of how to find it. That is the million dollar question. Keep reading and you will gain insight that will help you find as many niche markets as you have time for. They all might not lead to a pot of gold but useful information can be gleaned from a dud as well.

Market Research

Don’t be afraid to ask questions. The dumbest question is the one that never gets asked. If your website has a forum or blog attached, you can ask questions in your daily blog posts and evaluate the responses. People love to state their opinion of things and if you ask the right questions you will receive the right answers.

While you are at it, ask a few questions of yourself? You will have to sell this product that you believe in to a group of people you want to buy it. To do that, you must have an intimate knowledge of the product and what it can do for your customers. What market will the product satisfy? Is the product expensive or affordable? Do they need it or want it?

Use opt-ins to build niche lists. Ask visitors to register with your site. You can offer a discount or free item for doing so. Customers can leave the name and email address of family and friends in exchange for earning a referral fee.

There are several ways to gain this information without necessarily paying for it from a third party. Including a disclaimer statement about the use of the information will put visitors at ease. They won’t sign up if they are going to receive a boatload of SPAM in their Inbox every day.

Use the lists to separate potential customers into different markets. Depending on the target market for your idea, you will have someplace to start with your marketing campaign. Email marketing is more profitable when you know who is more likely to respond to your messages.

Keyword Research

For any product or service, people use search engines to compile the information for them. They type certain words, called keywords, into the search box and await the results. In the top right hand corner of the computer screen, the search engine lists how many results were returned. No one is going to wade through thousands of pages of results. They will look at the first two or three pages if you are lucky.

Discovering which keywords people are most likely to use has now become your job. There are keyword tools available on the Internet to assist you with this task. If you are selling lawnmowers, you want all possible combinations of keywords someone would use to find a lawnmower.

Some of these keywords will return millions of results. What you are looking for are keywords that have not been exploited by other lawnmower websites. Don’t just write down single keywords but also keyword phrases. It’s easier to rank well for phrases and they provide much more targeted traffic.

Long tail niche marketing is the use of longer three or four word phrases that can be used on your website to draw more traffic. People enter single words but just as many will use several words to narrow their search results. Matching these phrases can land you on the first page of the search results which is where you want to be.

Trial and Error – The Fun Begins

Now that you have polled your customers and found ways to zero in on your target market, it’s time to put your niche idea to the test. The first step here is setting up a website to advertise your product.

Resist showcasing more than one niche product on a website. Each product has a different target market. If you have two products for the same target group, it is acceptable to use one website. But, using one product in two different ways to appeal to more than one group will require more than one website.

Niche marketers have been known to set up mini sites. Each website is used to market to a different target audience. Weekend warriors might like a more active site to buy their mountain climbing gear. The items will be in the low to middle of the road price range.

For a higher class of clientele that are experienced mountain climbers, they will be looking for the best of the best at any price. Since they know what to buy, a more relaxed site might suit their tastes better. That’s why it’s so important to know your target and learn about your customers’ needs.

It was stated earlier in the report that all niches won’t be goldmines. Some will flop. Niche marketing is not an exact science but then neither is any other type of marketing. Doing your homework and using that knowledge to convince a group of people that they need your product is the way to increase sales. How many sales depend on the product and the audience.

If one niche doesn’t pan out, focus on the other ones that are doing well. When you have time, revisit the poorly performing niche and diagnose the problem. Maybe you need to cast the net just a little bit wider to find a more suitable audience for the product or service. Try to salvage the niche market before calling it quits.

Don’t be afraid to experiment with niche markets. The more you identify successfully, the greater your earning potential.

What is a Niche Market?

Have you ever perused a store looking for something to solve a problem? It could have been a stubborn stain in your carpet or a bothersome cold. You know what you need but have a hard time finding it. Sometimes you simply wish someone would create exactly what you are looking for. You’d even invent it yourself if you could. That is where niche marketing can be of great help to the customer. What if someone were to provide what you needed?

A niche market is a smaller group of individuals that have a specific need for a product or service that hasn’t been met. To take advantage of the opportunity to reach this specialized group of customers is the goal of niche marketing. But, you must identify what the group needs before you can strive to provide it.

While there are many niches that remain untapped, all of them are not profitable. You can promote a stain remover for stubborn carpet stains but if only 100 people need that remover, you won’t make much money. So, simply identifying the niche is not the end, but the beginning. Studying its viability is also important.

This group of individuals can be linked in many ways. How they are linked is the key to discovering a new niche market. The want of the product is not the niche but social class, race, economic level, background, gender and religion to name a few.

Once you have found the customers, it is your job to provide a quality product or service to them. Meet their expectations and you’ll begin building a solid customer base. What any business wants are customers who will stick with them through thick and thin. A loyal customer is a customer for life.

Why do niche markets go untapped? Part of the reason has to do with perception. Niche markets are small and well defined. When most business owners think of small they envision shrinking profits and that is not the way they want to go.

The thought here is akin to how old fashioned fishing boats would cast their nets. If you cast a large net over a wide enough space, you have the opportunity to catch more fish. A product that appeals to a broad market is more feasible than putting time and effort into pinpointing the exact location of one school of fish. Do you get the idea?

A larger business might not see the logic of going after a more specialized market. That is great news for you as a small business owner because what falls through the net is free for the taking. A small business owner could do quite nicely on a million in sales from a newly discovered niche market.