Finding a market niche

Finding a market niche is the key to understanding how your business can deliver the greatest value to all your customers and prospects. Most small business owners start by trying to define some single overall target market. Instead, I recommend you think of your business as serving several niche markets.

A niche is simply a narrow market that serves a well-defined type of customer. The key to growing your business is to serve a few of these defined target markets to the exclusion of everything else. This allows you to focus your marketing message.

Don’t confuse well-defined with "small." It's certainly possible to have a niche market that is quite large. The value of a niche is not its size, but the fact that it is focused on a set of customers with very similar needs and wants.

Look at Your Past Customers

The easiest way to begin finding a market niche is to look at your past clients. Create a spreadsheet of past customers by creating column headings. You can start with customer name, business name, industry type, services and/or products purchased, and total amount spent over a particular time period.

If you're a business that mainly sells to other businesses, then your spreadsheet can also contain columns related to industry, number of employees, business type and possibly geographic location.

You should start to see some patterns that will allow you to start defining specific customer types. You might find patterns in the way clients purchase your product or service. Is it an impulse buy or does the purchase need to go through an approval committee? 

(A cikk folytatása itt található / Continued here)