Marketing to a niche is targeting a certain group of people for the product or service you are marketing. Take the weight loss category for instance, that is a large group and the market is saturated with people selling weight loss books and products. To carve out a smaller “niche” of this group, you might try selling “Weight loss products for women”. This would focus your marketing attempts toward the female population looking for ways to lose weight.
Choosing a good niche market:
Niche markets appeal to targeted customers, and targeted customers are more inclined to pull out their credit card and buy when they find something that suits their needs. The idea is that if you are selling hot dogs; look for a hungry crowd ready to buy. If you stand on a street corner you will probably get a few customers, now go to a baseball stadium and you have a much larger crowd to sell to. Of course there are a lot of hot dog vendors at stadiums but the point is to find people who are hungry for what you have to sell. You get the idea.
Choosing a niche market is a tough decision for many new marketers just starting out. You may be tempted to enter a highly competitive market because the monetary rewards are so good. I am sure you have seen those ads by people claiming to have made a six-figure income selling product X. The problem is that if a lot of people are selling the same product there is a lot of competition. You will need to become a good researcher.
The place to start is with the search engines. You are going to be looking for popular keywords that people are using to search for products. Once you find a keyword with a lot of searches, you want to narrow it down to a less competitive keyword but one that still gets searched. If you are looking to sell cameras, you would type “camera” into the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and see what comes up. The word “camera” will have a lot of search results, now scan down the list and look for keywords or key phrases of three to four words containing the main keyword. What you are trying to do is get very specific. You can target cameras or camera equipment. Anyone who buys a camera will need accessories for that camera.
Which niches are better than others?
The ones that are the most popular are: weight loss, debt reduction, stop smoking programs, relationships, and making money. These are proven markets that are selling. People are looking for ways to save money, quit smoking, get out of debt, find a mate and get a job or make more money. The reason these things are successful is because they solve a problem that consumers are facing. People in situations like this are desperate to find a solution to their problem. Here is your hungry crowd.
