The niche concept is crucial for the establishment and development of any business, but particularly for online businesses. However, it is a term that often causes confusion, especially for beginner entrepreneurs. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a niche marketing definition, so that we can identify it and focus our efforts on developing it more productively.
Understanding the Niche Concept
To better understand the idea of a niche market, we will first refer to some of the misconceptions about it.
- Products or Services.- It is usual to think of a niche, as the characteristics of a category of products or services. Not about the people who consume them.
- Small Audience.- Another common mistake is one that refers to niches necessarily as small groups of people.
- Rare Needs or Tastes.- A third misrepresented idea is one that considers the niches as a sector of the market that has particular needs or preferences that cannot be satisfied by conventional suppliers.
According to the previous point of view, a niche would be a group of products or services aimed at small groups of people with rare tastes or needs. Although this may be true in a variety of cases, it is a biased and minimal definition. That would mean that the majority of businesses that offer widely consumed products or services do not target niches but the market in general.
Despite Coca-Cola being one of the most consumed products worldwide, it is not aimed at everyone but those who like this soda or who share the company’s values. Even Coca-Cola works with market niches.
An adequate definition is one that considers the following aspects:
- People.- a niche as a group of people with similar characteristics, who also consume identical products or services. Not the other way around. These shared characteristics can be demographic, intellectual, artistic, religious, political, sports, etc
- Variable audience.- The group of people who form a particular niche does not have to be a small amount as long as they share, as we discussed above, similar characteristics.
- Specific needs and tastes.- a niche doesn’t need to focus on the rare features (although these are also a niche). It has to focus on those that allow one group to be differentiated from another.
Is the Whole World a Niche?
More than half of the world’s population is already connected. So It is easy to believe that anything we upload to the Internet will reach by default thousands of people.
However, it is enough to do the test a dozen times to realize that this does not work that way. The content we upload there will not reach anyone unless people want to accept our message or they are intentionally looking for it. Regardless of what platform we use either Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, our own website, a third-party blog, a forum, email, etc.,
The public responds today in a much more selective mode each time. They discard everything that is not of interest. Therefore it does not matter in front of how many people your message is. If it does not match the interests of the person on the other side of the screen, nothing happens.
Alike People Beyond Borders
We may not call the attention of a person who is in front of us and who is not interested in our message even though the message is large, bright, and resonant. In the same way, a person on the other side of the world can respond bluntly to a message much more moderate than the previous one. What is the difference?
People can be separated by oceans and inhabit the most opposite ends of the planet. They can belong to different races and cultures, speak different languages, and have local culinary tastes. However, a feature, a preference, a need, a problem to be solved, bring them closer together than even their closest relatives. They are part of a niche.
Have you thought about how different people can be in each of the following groups? Harry Potter fans, pizza addicts, sports car lovers, fashion followers, technology obsessors, etc. Perhaps there is nothing else that brings them closer than that one preference. But in terms of marketing, it is all the difference. It is what makes them a targeted audience.
Common Interests Meeting Place
For all those people with specific common interests that make up a niche, the Internet is currently the meeting place. They search for what interests them in search engines such as Google with keywords that are shared worldwide no matter what language they are expressed in. Those businesses capable of satisfying such interests can present them to the world in those keywords that match the search. That’s when the magic happens.
Let’s say two people in two different continents, are looking for Avengers backpacks for teenagers. One business on a third continent offers such backpacks on their site using the same keywords with which the search was done. There are high possibilities of concrete a sale in that situation. The only thing in common was the interest in these backpacks, but it was so specific that it defined a niche market.
In this example, we use Avengers backpacks for teenagers. These products are undoubtedly in high demand, but we could have put any other case like sports shoes, or video games, or beauty items, etc. As we can see, what defines a niche is not its size or rarity, but shared interests and characteristics. The Internet is the virtual space where those interests cross borders and really return to the world in a global village.
Are You Giving Them What They Look For?
The previous section leads us to the fact that before paying attention to the products or services we offer in our businesses, we must look at the real interests of potential customers. As we have already seen, they can be all over the world.
It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that our product or service is so fantastic that few people could resist it. We talk about all its great features, the problems it can solve, the benefits it offers, etc. And in the end, there are no interested customers because we simply sold them what “we thought was the best” but not what really interested them. Or maybe we go to the wrong audience.
How Well You Know Your People?
So the first task of any online business should be to meet the population group to which it is addressed. You must identify their demographic characteristics such as their age, gender, height, weight, where they live, schooling, religion, etc. But you must also investigate their personal (as far as possible), intellectual, artistic, sports, cultural tastes, etc.
Of course, it is not about filling us with data that we are not going to use. We must investigate what interests us as a business, and that is related to the products or services we offer.
However, to the extent that we can empathize with our audience out there, we can understand what they want and how we can give them.
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