If you can get the process right, finding your ideal niche market has the potential to elevate your business, and even see your brand become an industry leader.
In an ever changing economic landscape, it can be difficult as a small business owner to know who their audience is – and if it’s the right one. Although every business ideally has a group of customers who most benefit and accept the product or service on offer, within these target audiences lie smaller subgroups, which are otherwise known as a niche market.
While a niche market may share certain characteristics to their parent audience, they usually have far more specific wants, needs, and preferences of the types of products or services they shop for. As an example, there will always be a big audience for women on the hunt for shoes, but a niche market within this space would specifically be after brown leather boots.
For a growing number of businesses, it’s getting harder and harder to compete against bigger brands, with bigger marketing budgets – especially online. As an alternative, turning your attention towards a niche market has potentially lucrative payoffs if you manage to get it right.
The Basics Of Harnessing Your Own Niche Market
When establishing your pitch to a niche market, evaluate whether it’s just a market that’s underserved, or if it’s really just barely existent. There might be little to no competition because there is no demand, and therefore, no sales.
If you want to become a big fish in a little pond, the first step is truly getting to know your existing audience. This process involves identifying the unique needs of a potential sub audience within your existing one, providing new and compelling products, tailoring your products or services in the right way, communicating efficiently with the target group and identifying how you will position your brand against your competitors.
Your pitch could be profitable if you research the market and discover similar products or services, but not many companies selling them. Keep in mind that this is often for a reason, so approach a potential niche market with the aim to uncover any potential problems long before you encounter them.
In addition, it’s a good idea to test the waters within your niche market before you dive right into the deep end – and a good example of this philosophy demonstrated in the real world is the career of Content Hive founder, Lisa Bourke.
After spending ten years in the marketing and advertising sectors, becoming a Mum changed Lisa’s approach to work-life balance. Toying with the idea of opening a business and working for herself, Lisa knew that bigger marketing agencies would quickly dwarf her if she tried to directly compete with them.
Instead of trying to be everything to everyone, Lisa uncovered a niche market by scaling down. Rather than opening as a full scale digital marketing agency, she took a different path and opted to focus on content marketing.
Despite being an essential pillar of basic digital advertising, as the process is often labour intensive, it’s been chronically underserved and poorly delivered within the wider marketing industry. As the SEO focus of content marketing is essential for getting seen by the right audiences via search engines like Google, Lisa knew that this was a service that would long remain in demand.
As such, Content Hive opened its digital doors in 2020 – at the height of the global pandemic. Suddenly, her highly specialised content marketing services were more in demand than they had ever been, and pursuing a niche market ultimately proved to be the right choice. For Lisa, finding her ideal niche market was as simple as combining her existing skill set, paying attention to the market, and finding a gap with what types of services weren’t being catered for.
Much like any business trying to make their mark online, Lisa knew that the key to capturing the attention of her niche market was to circulate the right type of online content. In turn, she managed to unlock organic lead generation by publishing free and informative marketing information on the Content Hive blog.
While the educational resources covered a wide range of digital topics, she soon discovered that leads were rolling in from clients who read the content, but also realised that they didn’t have the time or energy to tackle content marketing themselves. In turn, they became the first of many small business owners to enlist the services of Content Hive to use content marketing to appeal to their own niche markets.
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content takes time, effort, experience and resources, but avoiding these responsibilities altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice. Thankfully, investing in a solid content marketing strategy has actually never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as blog articles, social media posts, videos and even animated Instagram stories. By using this model, we believe that it enables us to produce high quality content with faster delivery times.
