Exploring Market Niches and Tapping into Untapped Opportunities (Part 1)
The most successful businesses are those that find and satisfy the needs of a market niche. If your product can’t find its target market, or your market can’t find your product, your business will fail from the start.
When you learn how to tap into a market niche, particularly a rapidly growing demographic with unique needs and preferences, everything about your business changes. But it begins by defining your market niche.
Define your niche market
Entrepreneurship springs out from a niche market need, and defining your niche market is one of the hardest parts of starting a business. Once you get it right, everything else will quickly start falling into place. Remember, it’s not everyone that wants or will want the product or service that you offer.
So, start by doing thorough research to find a profitable niche or sub-niche market, and understanding who is in that market and what they want before stepping out to give them exactly what they want.
How big is this pie called the niche market? How much of it can you bite? How much of the market can you capture and own based on your marketing capacity, skills, and capabilities? These are critical questions that you must answer.
No product or service is right for everybody. If you get turned down, chances are you haven’t defined your niche, and maybe you are approaching the wrong people.
Focus on your niche market
Whenever you come up with a business idea or solution, watch closely who shows up and why. Bill those who show up and keep your eyes focused on why they came.
Your business doesn’t need everyone in the marketplace; it only needs a segment of the market who find your offering highly valuable and can’t live without you. When you find such people, serve them better than anyone else could.
By giving attention to a specific group, you achieve a very high market share in that category. There’s nothing wrong in establishing a monopoly in a niche market that both you and your market enjoy.
Niches get you riches
Specialize your market and be special. In niches are the market riches. That is the principle of niche-man-ship. Therefore, when you think niche, you think rich. I came across an expression some time ago and had to note it: niches and rags have one thing in common; they are often neglected.
Niches are a goldmine that shouldn’t be neglected. Discover them and dig them. ‘The secret of most successful start-ups’, someone said, ‘is the ability to hit a bull’s-eye-to aim with exquisite specificity.’ This specificity is what a niche market embodies.
Whatever market that you choose to serve must be large enough to sustain the business and give room for growth, and niched enough to make you narrow down the focus. It’s more like not focusing too blurrily on the forest or too minutely on any particular leaf.
To succeed in today’s competitive market, you need to concentrate all your energy on a well-chosen segment into which you can pour all your resources. The key idea in nichemanship is specialisation. This is the age where professionalism excels. And at the root of professionalism is specialisation. Successful enterprises specialise.
