The fact that you are researching how to start niche marketing business itself shows you are on the right track to be on an online marketing journey. Niche marketing business is one of the best online internet business models. If executed correctly, niche marketing business provides you great potential to establish yourself as an authority in online internet business.
What is a niche?
A niche is a specific market segment with buyers willing to pay for products or services with strict specifications. Niche products or services are normally not supplied by the wider market that sells more generic products and services. This leaves a void space in the market where there is demand for niche products and services but nobody offers them.
To start niche marketing business, you need to discover such void or gap in the market and address it. This means you need to discover an opportunity for business where there are buyers with specific need, wants or taste etc. but no sellers to meet such strict specifications. It all starts with a business idea.
Why niche marketing business?
Niche marketing business has many advantages over other online internet business models. Before we look closely at how to start niche marketing business, let us look at the advantages of niche marketing.
- By focusing on supplying goods and services to meet strict requirements of a specific market segment, you will forge ahead of your competition in sales and revenues very quickly. Other businesses normally try to supply generic goods and services to a wider market segment. While they may be successful in making sales to buyers with generic requirements, they can never come anywhere near you in your niche. You ultimately lead the market as only you sell those specific products or services and no one else. In a way, the buyers will have no option than to buy from you if you discover the right niche and grow your business around your niche.
- The beauty of niche marketing business is that the more you narrow down your niche, the less competition you will have. As you narrow down your niche, your target market will become smaller and you will rule that small market all by yourself.
- With niche marketing business model, you only focus on a small targeted market segment. This means you do not need to spend lots of money on your marketing and branding campaigns as other generic businesses do. So you avoid lots of expenses when you start niche marketing business and grow it than any other online internet business.
- It is a lot easier to build a loyal customer base with niche marketing business than any other online internet business model. This is because you focus on a small market segment and always supply them with products and services that exactly meet their specifications. Your customers will connect very well with your niche marketing business.
- As your market segment is small and you know every small detail of their requirements and specifications, you will have great amount of clarity about your target market segment. This detailed knowledge about your market segment makes it very easy for you to target your marketing campaigns unlike other generic online internet business models.
This is why niche marketing is great.
How to start niche marketing business?
Now that we have covered the basics of what niche marketing is all about and why niche marketing is so great, let us look into how to start niche marketing business.
Research and understand customers
In niche marketing business, you need to craft your niche by researching and understanding your buyers. So niche marketing business starts with gaining a clear understanding of who you want to sell to.
You need to understand who you want to sell to very well and come up with buyer avatars that you want to target. Once you understand who you want to sell to, you will find it easier to decide on what you want to sell and how you can sell to them. So in niche marketing business, it is easier to start with buyers and then come up with ideas for products or services, niche marketing strategy or tactics and marketing campaigns etc.
Create customer avatar
Creating a buyer’s avatar makes it a lot clearer and easier for you to target your potential buyers. Buyer’s avatar tells you details about the age, gender, habits, social background etc. of your potential buyers. With these you can identify potential niche products or services that you can sell to them.
These demographics from buyer’s avatar also help you in targeting your potential buyers with your marketing campaigns. To understand and target your buyers more accurately, you must research and understand your potential buyers as good as you can.
You may find it helpful to study the lives, interests and passions of your ideal customers while you discover your niche market segment and come up with your ideal buyer avatar. You can start with any of the interests or passions or needs or wants of your ideal buyers. There is nothing limiting your imagination and creativity.
Craft your niche
Once you have clear understanding of who your customers will be, you need to move forward in evaluating scope to do business with them. This is when you start to craft your niche. This means, you need to do some research and create your niche by identifying a market gap with lots of demand but limited or no supply.
When you identify such unique gap between demand and supply, you can define your niche and start niche marketing business. You need to establish what it is that your customers are eager to buy but can’t find anyone that can supply. That becomes your niche.
Uniqueness
The striking feature of a niche market that you craft is its uniqueness. Your niche market needs to unique with specific detail that sets your niche apart from rest of the market. This unique nature of your niche is what makes it easy for you to target your audience when you are ready to sell.
Clarity
You should be able to easily describe your niche so that you can identify your niche from the wider population. Normally demographics, interests and behaviour help to describe your niche clearly.
Scalability
You need to craft a niche that has enough scope to scale it in future. This means you should only get into such niche where you will be able to expand your business in future to gain larger market share in future though you start with a really tiny bit of market to begin with.
Brainstorm product and service ideas
During the above steps you will undoubtedly gain enough understanding about your potential buyers and niche to have a good idea of what you can sell to them. It is more common sense than business science to figure out what your potential buyers are desperate to buy but can’t find any suppliers.
During the process of understanding your customers and building customer avatars and afterwards, you obviously come across few product and service ideas. For this, you can focus on few pain points your customers may have or a clear gap in the market and start coming up with products and services accordingly. Then you need to conclude ideas for products and services with unique selling proposition that appeals directly to potential buyers in your niche market segment. You need to focus on producing such products and services with exact specifications as demanded by the niche market.
Prepare products and services and price them
Niche marketing business is all about focus on certain specific group of people and what you can sell to them. You can sell either physical products or online products like eBooks. In either case you need to get the products and services ready for sale. Once you have a clear idea about what you want to sell, you need to prepare your products and services that you want to sell and be ready for marketing. You can either make the products yourself or buy from another business and resell.
Once your products or services are ready, you need to price them well to make sure they remain marketable and get you your profits too.
Specialise not generalise
To start a niche marketing business, you need to specialise your products and services and never generalise them. You may feel tempted to start selling generic products and services thinking they may appeal to wider customer base. But if you are just about to start niche marketing business with generic products, you will soon find it difficult to compete with big and well established players in the market. On the other hand, if you focus on selling products and services to a specific niche market segment exactly as per their strict specifications, you can dominate your area of business very quickly.
Dare to be unique
To sell your niche products and services well, you need to be able to clearly state what is unique about them. When you state clearly the unique specifications that your products or services are made to, people begin to appreciate the unique nature of your business.
Your unique selling proposition sets your products and services apart from any other competitors. Your unique selling proposition determines why your customers should buy from you and what value you offer to customers that others cannot. In chalking out your unique selling proposition you need to apply your knowledge you gained about your customers and your niche market so far.
Create website, video, social media and marketing campaigns
Once your products and services are ready for sale, you need to start marketing campaigns to reach your potential customers. You will need a website that is built for SEO. You need to highlight your unique selling proposition that compels your customers to buy from you.
Sometimes your products may not appeal to majority of people but they can be the only thing that your niche customers would be desperate for. In niche marketing it is important to appreciate the fact that it is not possible to keep everyone happy with your products or services.
You may need to apply a combination of marketing models like eCommerce marketing, email marketing, SEO, SEM etc. to maximise your sales. A healthy niche marketing strategy and tactics from various online internet business models help immensely in boosting your sales.
Become an authority in your niche and scale your business
When you thus carve out a niche and start niche marketing business, you have the opportunity to quickly become an authority in your niche. You can soon establish yourself as an authority as a specialist in your niche and expand your customer base.
Specialisation and authority in a niche means you can scale your niche marketing business easily. When you establish yourself as an authority in your niche, people trust you more. This forms a strong fan base for your business. Huge and loyal customer groups are vital to grow your niche marketing business. Becoming authority in your niche needs to be main purpose of your niche marketing strategy.
Continue selling your products or services with targeted marketing campaigns. Once you make some money you need to look for options to scale your niche marketing business. This may involve starting marketing into more niche segments or gradually expanding your target market. Either way, once you start your niche marketing business with focus and see some success, you need to scale your niche marketing business to make more sales and more money online.
Your journey starts from how to start niche marketing business and progresses to how to dominate your niche and continues with scaling your niche marketing business.
