To understand your niche you must first
understand your product. Basic marketing
strategy tells us to find a need and satisfy it
with a product or service. What need does your
product or service satisfy?
The answer isn’t difficult to discover. Make a
list of your top 50 customers on the left-handed
side of a piece of paper. Then draw six columns.
Head each column with a particular need that
your product or service fills for your
customers. Finally, go down the customer list
and check off the needs that your product or
service fulfills for each customer.
Look at this list carefully. What’s the most
common need you satisfy for your customers? Do
you satisfy more than one need for several
customers? Do you see customers that might have
a need you’re not meeting yet?
After you define your product niche, you have to
determine the overall size of your product
niche. Maybe you make widgets that can be sold
to manufacturers around the world. Maybe you
offer dry cleaning services to people who live
within a three ZIP code area. To research the
overall size of your product niche, start at
your local library. Check out:
Your local, county and state chambers of
commerce may also have valuable marketing data.
If the standard references don’t provide you
with enough information, contact your industry
trade association.
Once you understand the size of the overall
market for your product or service, answer these
questions
-
Where do you fit
into the overall market for your product or
service?
-
What percentage of
the market for your product or service do you
control locally? Regionally? Nationally?
-
Who are your
competitors?
-
How does your
product or service differ from similar
products or services delivered by others in
your industry?
The answers to these and other questions give
you the first piece of the niche marketing
puzzle—where your business stands in the
big-picture market for your product or service.
Now it’s time to look at the other side of the
equation and investigate your niche market.
