What is a niche market?

A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market. It's like a little slice of a whole pie. (See the niche market logo)

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. You can think of a niche market as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

The Internet makes it possible as well as profitable to cater to "wide thin" niche markets that previously were too geographically dispersed to be lucrative.

In other words, a store in the physical world selling a product that appeals to a small yet defined group (7-foot tall left-handed golfers, for example), could not get enough visitors in one city to make such a business viable.

With the Internet, however, golfers from all over the world can visit, and purchase products from an internet site.

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Finding a niche

In advertising terminology, niche market refers to a group of consumers sharing a common background, interests and consequently buying habits. The commonality may be age, race, hobbies, sports, gender, or any feature which creates a recognizable and quantifiable preference that result in unique spending patterns and habits. The successful marketing campaign is one which effectively speaks to the interests of the individuals in a particular group and capitalizes on those interest in order to sell them something they want or need.

In one form or another, every business is engaged in niche marketing. Some niches are bigger than others. Since there's no product that EVERYONE needs, your target audience will tend to be a segment of the larger population. Every business owner is on the eternal quest for customers. Here are several strategies you can use to get your share.

Go after emerging or unnoticed niches.
At the time I wrote my first book targeting the Hip Hop Entrepreneur niche, no one believed that there was a sustainable volume of spending within that particular niche. Few believed that young African American males weaned on Rap music were interested in learning about how to start a business. The truth was, I ended up selling over $160,000 worth of my self-published title within its first 20 months of its publication. The truth is, what's considered sustainable really depends on who you are. A multi-million dollar publisher might not consider the million dollars that you or I can earn catering to a small niche worth their time, energy and financial resources. You and I, however, blessed with lower overhead costs would do quite well with "only" a million or two in revenue. Wouldn't you agree?

Go after existing niches
Some of the most studied niches include baby-boomers, African Americans, generation X, women, Hispanics and the growing health conscious community. Every product that currently sells well can be used to identify a potential niche you can sell to. My forthcoming book, Above the Pendulum will introduced you to even more unique niche markets which will become more profitable in the new paradigm to which the world is transitioning.

Create your own niche
Virtually any and every trait, preference, passion, or physical feature can be used to identify and isolate a niche to market to. You can create a product and a marketing campaign for left-handed, 7-foot tall Guatemalans suffering from astigmatism and effectively sell a newly designed automobile for those individuals. There might just be enough left-handed, 7-foot tall, visually challenged Guatemalans looking for cars, homes and books to make you a millionaire before the rest of the business community catches on! The trick, however, is to determine whether the distinctions and identifying features and commonalities you've identified can create enough of a volume of spending to justify the effort.

Finding and understanding your niche market will be the key to creating wealth for yourself in this rapidly expanding marketplace. Your mission is to find your 'Guatemalans,' get into their minds to find out what they want, how they think, and how to sell to them. You must establish a brand identity in their minds. It's a task that requires a change in the way you think, the inclination to acquire new sensibilities, and the patience to hold on until the big payoff. Following is an article by fellow niche market entrepreneur Bob Leduc with some tips on how to do just that.

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Target A Niche Market To Increase Your Sales And Profits

Contrary to what you may want to believe, the whole world is not your market. Even if everybody CAN use your product or service, there is a specific group with an intense need or desire for the benefits you offer. Find that "niche" market and commit your efforts to getting business from it. You'll soon discover how profitable your business can be.

A niche or target market is a group of potential customers who share common characteristics making them especially receptive to your product, service or opportunity.

I have a good friend in the life insurance business who happens to live near two large US military bases. Almost all of Frank's sales are to career military personnel at these two bases. He tells me the US military provides an excellent group life insurance program for military members but no life insurance for their spouses. This creates a potential financial problem for military families with children. If the service member's spouse dies, it will be expensive to provide care for the children when the member is on remote assignment or on extended training duty. By targeting active duty military families and providing a solution to their "special" life insurance problem, Frank became one of the top sales agents in his company.

Benefits Of Targeting A Niche Market
Identifying a target market makes it easy for you to plan effective marketing activity. It also makes it easy for you to develop a winning sales message. When you know the specific concerns of your market, you can tailor your message to focus on solutions to those concerns. You can even create different sales messages for different target markets.

For example, one of the books I wrote is a manual about how to use simple postcards to generate inexpensive sales leads. The information and examples in it apply to all businesses. However, one of the most profitable target markets for this manual is businesses that use a network marketing or MLM distribution system. The promotional material I developed for that market emphasizes the special advantages postcards offer for recruiting new independent distributors. That's the #1 concern of every network marketer. I identify their biggest problem and offer a simple, low cost solution to it. As a result, a high percentage of the orders for this manual come from network marketers.

How To Find A Niche Market
If you've been in business for some time you're probably already targeting one or more niche markets with your sales efforts. If you haven't or if you're just starting your business, here are some things you can do to uncover profitable niche markets for your business.

Start by listing all of the benefits offered by your product, service or business opportunity. Be sure you're listing benefits, not features. You must know the difference between benefits a features to market anything successfully.

A feature is what something is. A benefit is what it does. For example, my favorite donuts are now delivered in a re- sealable box. That's a feature. The donuts stay fresh for a week after I first open the box. That's the benefit. Understanding this difference is important. People never buy something to get a feature. They always buy to get the benefit produced by the feature.

After listing all the benefits you can think of, list some of the characteristics of prospects whose current situation would be dramatically improved by those benefits. You should begin to see a definable group emerging as a niche or target market.

Next, you want to determine if the group you've identified is a market you can reach and develop profitably. If it is, you will be able to answer "yes" to all of the following questions:

1. Can I identify individual prospects within the group including contact information to communicate with them?

2. Do prospects in this group have a strong need for (or a strong desire to have) my product, service or opportunity?

3. Do the prospects in this group have the money to pay for what I'm offering?

4. Can I deliver my sales message to these prospects under favorable circumstances?

5. Is this group large enough to produce the volume of business I need?

Don't waste your time on this market if there is a "no" answer to any of these questions. It's not a niche market for you.

Be sure to use the information you developed in finding your target market to create the sales material for it. You already know the overwhelming benefit(s) you offer to this market and why it's so important to them. Just build your advertising and sales material around this benefit and you'll soon enjoy the profits of successfully targeting a niche market. [End Excerpt]

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Niche Market

By definition, then, a business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service that is not being addressed by mainstream providers. You can think of a niche market as a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

For instance, instead of offering cleaning services, a business might establish a niche market by specializing in blind cleaning services.

Why should you bother to establish a niche market? Because of the great advantage of being alone there; other small businesses may not be aware of your particular niche market, and large businesses won't want to bother with it.

The trick to capitalizing on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already.

Also Known As: Market niche, niche marketing, niche business.

Common Misspellings: Nieche market, nihce market.

Examples: Establishing a niche market give you the opportunity to provide products and services to a group that other businesses have overlooked.

Niche Marketing before, during and after a Recession

There is no doubt that the world is changing. Given the economic changes we're all reading about, anticipating and experiencing, how would you like to learn how to survive and thrive in the calm before, the prelude to, the tempest during, the wake behind, and the aftermath of what's being called the greatest economic upheaval since the Great Depression? How would you like to develop the skills to weather just about any such storm? be successful? financially independent? free from worry? secure? Sound like a plan?

The concept of niche marketing will be just as important as it is now. However, there will be new New consumers, new types of consumers will emerge when all is said and done.

Something has changed. The paradigm has shifted. Yes, paradigm. We're going to be using, and you will be hearing that word quite a lot over the coming years, so let's define it. According to the dictionary: A paradigm is “a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them..”

We are at a critical point in history where our assumptions, concepts, values and practices as it relates to success have, are, and more importantly must change in order for us to survive. What has changed is this: In this new paradigm, survival=success.

It doesn't mean we've downgraded success to be simply about survival-what people think of as “just getting by.” Quite the contrary. It means we've upgraded the definition of “success” so people will realize they've been working with a limited definition all their lives. What's been missing is a global component to the definition of success.

We're also expanding the definition of “survival” to mean not just “getting by” but the actual and real continuation of existence. We are at a point where the very existence of the planet and its ability to sustain life is now more visibly threatened.

The new paradigm holds, therefore, that there is and can be no success without survival. Every form of life-including the planet-has inherent within it the desire, the programming, the instinct and the coding for survival. And it is this basic, universal thrust towards survival--global survival--that must be the all-encompassing, underlying premise of all our efforts to succeed.

Therefore, what's needed is a strategy for survival, not just individual survival, but survival of the planet as we pursue our purpose in life, honor our passions, and strive for personal wealth, money, freedom from worry, independence and security. Our goal, as we apply the new strategy, is sustainability of the planet, because survival of the planet = our survival = our success.

Admittedly, many people feel overwhelmed in the face of such a broad and sweeping goal as the survival of the planet. They believe that such lofty ideals and strategies are for the scientists and experts who will tell governments and big business what to do in order to reverse the ecological trends. They feel powerless to effect real change on the planet, and so, resign themselves to looking out for their own interests--their personal survival--first and foremost.

You need to learn what you can and must do in order to be the change we all seek, weather any storm, and survive in the new paradigm. It is through the application of the strategies contained herein, that you can weather the storm, be successful, financially independent, free from worry and secure.

All the success principles you've encountered in life will remain the same. The laws of prosperity and success haven't changed. There is still the law of cause and effect, the law of attraction, all the knowledge of how to win friends and influence people, and all the other immutable laws of reality we're come to know, love and practice. However, it is the goal toward which these laws are applied that is decidedly different.

In this new paradigm, you will not need to succeed at the expense of others. You need not exploit the poor and working class in order to get ahead. You need not shelve your ethics in order to advance.

Not everyone is motivated by money. Many are content simply to make a difference for the community as a whole. There exists a paradigm of success, therefore, that adepts, tree huggers, spiritualists and (even) capitalists alike can agree upon. Why? Because everyone shares the basic desire for and thrust toward survival, so we will be appealing-hopefully-to the basic common denominator that unites us all.

Why should I?

As you read through the phases of this strategy, you may be tempted to think, “People have become successful without believing, knowing or practicing these things. Why do I need to change my beliefs and operating basis now?”

Remember this very important consideration: We are not saying that you cannot achieve the old definition of success using the old methods. It is that so-called “success” at the expense of others and of the planet, that has brought us to where we are today. We are working, therefore, on establishing a new definition of success for this moment and beyond.

Or perhaps, realizing that you will be ahead of the curve in your thoughts and actions by following this strategy, and that it may be awhile before the rest of the world catches up to you, you may be tempted to wait and see, and, in the meantime, play by the old rules since there is still a lot of money to be made exploiting others, raping the planet, and looking out for self first. “Why should I be one of the first to go out on the new limb?” you may ask yourself.

As said, this book is not for everyone. It is for those who are already ahead of the curve in their thinking, and are seeking a strategy to support their willingness to be one of the first.

The phases

This book proceeds through the phases of a strategy that abandons mythology, dismantles the existing, respects the previously maligned, incorporates the cosmic, invokes higher consciousness, and empowers the reader to grow in his/her understanding of reality such that the goals of a new kind of success become attainable.

1. Lift the veil

We first need to come to terms with reality as it is playing itself out and admit what others aren't admitting, entertain what is being dismissed, and accept what is being denied. Among those admissions are: There is a transition in effect. Capitalism as it is practiced is under siege. There is a deception taking place. We are greater than we imagine or have been led to believe.

2. Adopt new perspectives

Before you can succeed in the new paradigm, you will be required to relinquish certain perspectives and adopt others. Many of these beliefs and perspectives are on a scale on the opposite side of your current ones. On on abstract level, for instance, where once you believed in hot, now you must believe in cold. Where once you saw only day, now you must also see night.

However, the specific beliefs and revelations that come with the new paradigm are less important than developing the mindset that allows all possibilities. In other words, it should be within the realm of your world view that other perspectives exist, that you should not feel threatened by the possibility that these alternate reality exists and, more importantly, that they can co-exist with yours.

3. Redefine success

The next most critical component of the new strategy is to redefine success. We are going to impose a specific definition of success. While it is true that success is different for everyone, that belief has been the major flaw with the old paradigm. But fear not, I'm not going to tell you that buying your mother a house is more (or less) important than helping a human rights organization.

What I AM going to tell you is that if your strategy does not include or factor in the viability of life on the planet as a critical goal, then it is a flawed plan. Success-and by extension any product or process you create to achieve that success- must include consideration for the effects on the community, other individuals' lives, and the planet as a whole.

4. Empower with new skills to help with the transition

The reason people are feeling hopeless and desperate is that they have not been adequately prepared for the changes we are now experiencing. They have been led to believe that infinite growth based on finite resources is possible. They have not incorporated true survival principles into their life's plan. They have fostered a dependence on external forces for their personal survival. As the house of cards starts to fall, they are left without any viable strategy and run from one room of the house to another in search of security. With the right strategy, you can free yourself from this panic.

5. Execute the strategy

Once we have equipped ourselves with the new mindset of a new type of success, we will need to execute the practical, logistical steps of recognizing and responding to the needs of the new paradigm, creating appropriate products and processes, pricing appropriately, and devising marketing strategies which are consistent with the new paradigm.

SUMMARY

The tragic flaw with most self-help/empowerment/wealth-building books and courses, even those that incorporate the “new” awareness of sustainability and green thinking, is that they overlook, or worse, seek to maintain the paradigm of greed, the illusion of separateness, the suppression of empowering information, and the deception of belief in external control in achieving their aims.

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