Target Market: Finding Your Niche

Your company specializes in creating certain types of products or offering certain services. As you construct your online marketing strategy, you need to focus on your target market.

Whom do you plan to sell your products or services to? Are you filling a need in the marketplace that is not addressed by anyone else? If you have competitors in your market niche, how will you differentiate your products or services from those of your competitors?

Do market research

The first step you must take as you begin to identify your target market is to conduct market research. You want to learn if there is a need for your product or service and get an idea of how large the market for it might be.

Asking questions about demographics, income, psychology, geography, and typical buying behaviors will point you toward the needs and desires of your target audience. You can ask these questions by means of surveys or focus groups. Either way, your goal is to find out more about the people who buy your products so that you can market to others like them more effectively.

Study the competition

Next, you’ll need to take a hard look at your competition. Visit your competitor’s websites and carefully read their articles, white papers and other material. Subscribe to journals or magazines in your field. Learn all you can about the competitive landscape.

Now you need to determine how you will differentiate your company from the competition. What is it about your product or service that will motivate your ideal customers to do business with your company and not with your competitors?

Define your niche

Finally, you’ll need to identify a marketing niche in order to build the most effective marketing strategy. Trying to market to a very broad audience can make it difficult for you to meet the specific needs of any group within that audience.

Is the niche a good fit?

Once you’ve loosely defined your target market, now really think about what this represents for you and your business. If you’re a wiz at repairing computers and really prefer to work on Macs and not on PC’s, either become “The Mac Specialist” or work on all types of computers until you can hire someone to take over the PC portion of the business.

Can you make a living servicing this niche? It may be the perfect match for you, but if there won’t be enough orders for your product or enough interest in your service, you’ll need to either enlarge your niche or broaden your offerings.

As you identify your target audience, keep in mind that each customer represents unique needs and buying habits. Once your target market has been defined, you’ll want to work on tailoring your marketing strategy to meet the needs of all the various personality types within your niche and buying methods represented within your target market.

We offer a range of marketing services specifically for small businesses. Give us a call and get some practical recommendations for your situation.