How to find a niche business

Starting from today, we will dedicated a biweekly column to the best web articles about the world of sales, personal growth and entrepreneurship. Let’s start with a really interesting article extracted from one of the world’s leading magazines, “entrepreneur.com”.

To be one step ahead of the competitors, there are several different strategies that can be adopted: for example, delivering a better service or product may be the starting point. Of course, it can be tough and more difficult to be the absolute best rather than being the first to conquer a new niche.

So the question is “How do you find a new niche business?”. The answer lies in “micro-specialization”, that is to say becoming an expert on a specific topic.

Here are 5 steps that can help you to identify your area of specialization:

1. Define your industry

First you need to identify the industry you would like to enter, even before finding your own niche. For example the banking industry, the medical field, the direction of investments, the fitness industry etc.

2. Find your niche

At this point, once you find the industry of your interest, you can choose a more specific area. For example, if we take into account the Internet Marketing niches, we could focus on the development of e-commerce sites or deal with content marketing. Each of these niches is very specific, but that’s the “trick”. The more we narrow the field, the more we are sure to find many customers that really need our services.

3. Use the “SPAN” method

It is a process based on 4 stages to help customers to verify the feasibility of micro-specialization.

Subtopics: are there enough “secondary” arguments in your specific niche? To check this, you can include your keyword into Google research and look at the related keywords. Another method is to search for books devoted to that specific topic on the web or on Amazon and see if there’s enough material to justify the existence of an expert.

Pain: will your service/product be able to alleviate or lift people from some kind of suffering? Not necessarily physical pain, of course, but a need, a problem awaiting a solution. If there is no real need, you can hardly succeed.

Attainable: is what you propose really attainable? You have to be honest and transparent about this. Can you really offer a service that could help your customers solve a problem? If you are not convinced on this point, it is better to find another niche!

Numbers: is the market big enough? You can audit the data extrapolated from Google Ads, that can tell you if there are already competitors investing in that niche. Or you can use platforms such as LinkedIn or Facebook to get an idea of the popularity of a specific market.

4. Become a reference point for your Customers

Becoming the reference for your customers means being necessary when they need quality information about your particular sector. You can use different media such as podcasts, blog posts, SlideShare presentations, etc.

5. Reach new people

Presenting constantly new content to new people, you can reach success step by step. You can also host your content on industry sites or participate in programs or podcasts on the topic.

To be number one in a niche means a lot of sacrifice, but when you reach your goal and collect the initial results, only then you will be grateful to hard work you’ve done.

This article has been extrapolated from “5 Steps to Carving Out a Niche Business” by Brian Ainsley Horn

Brian Horn is an author who deals with sales and is a co-founder of the branding company, Authority Alchemy. He transforms entrepreneurs in “celebrity entrepreneurs” who use the process of “marketing authority”.

Increase your productivity

Order Sender, the digital catalog and order-taking software for sales reps, allows you to optimize your daily work, thus increasing your productivity and your performances:

  1. less errors while taking orders
  2. less phone calls to the company
  3. greater autonomy
  4. more time to focus on the Customer.
30/01/2017
Mix