“Jack of all trades, master of none”. The figure of speech describes a person who does and tries everything. They learn tons of skills rather than gain mastery in one. Certainly, skill in a few areas has its benefits, but what really makes your business stand out?
Niche.
Your niche – the secret sauce that makes your business unique – matters more than anything when trying to stand out. Why, and how do we really dial in our niche?
Attract the Right Customers
A business should stand out. They should also capitalize on the number one benefit of limiting your business to a specialized market – attracting ONLY the customers who truly need or want what you have to offer.
Because you provide the perfect solution to their individual demands, your ideal clients see the value in doing business with you. Customers will continue to do business with you if they sense the value in dealing with you. Loyal customers matter more than anything! Remember that having the appropriate clients beats having a large number of them.
Determine your ideal customers and provide the greatest possible service to them. Too many companies strive to serve everyone to make a quick buck, even if it means deviating from their primary business and wasting resources.
This gives the owner and managers headaches that don’t make the front-end cashflow worth it.
Make Selling Easy
Trying to please everyone dilutes your marketing, and your messaging will never resonate with anybody. Tailor your marketing and messaging to communicate directly to your target consumer. Speak their language. Share things online that are relevant to them – be the subject matter expert that they need to seek out.
Marketing to a specific audience costs way less than trying to reach everyone. You can skip the channels that miss the target if you know who you’re talking to, where they are, and how to contact them. Instead of “spraying and praying,” you focus on one or two very effective channels and maximize their effectiveness.
Leverage this in your digital advertising. Why create a target audience of 100,000 people when you can go for a 1,000 person audience and potentially 100x your return on ad spend?
New prospects and customers only care about these things:
- Speed
- Convenience
- Credibility
- Quality
- Price
Why try and master all of this if you can’t? Instead, define your core business, understand your core customers and focus on what you are good at. Who are your customers? What on the list above do they need most? How can you address these needs better than your nearest competitor? If you can hone in on the answers to these questions and give your customers what they want, you create demand for what you do.
Test and Measure
The research matters. However, you’ll never know how what targeting and messaging will work until you try it and measure the results.
If the consensus appears favorable, you can then begin casting wider nets. Finding your niche is nice but it must have the potential to be profitable!
Some of the most common ways to define a niche include:
- Price – is your offering positioned at a high-end market or do you offer something at a discounted rate?
- Psychographics – does your offer appeal to a specific market base on values, interests or attitudes?
- Locality – Are you the only company offering a particular service in a geographical region?
- Demographic base – Do you target a specific demographic such as working moms? Or a particular age group, income level or education level?
- Level of quality – Do you offer a premium product/service sought by an exclusive market? Does your “cheaper” offering meet need?
Notice how you can test, measure, and tweak all of these.
Proficiency and Passion
Hopefully, your business fuels some sort of passion of yours. You’ve won half the battle in this case. Too many entrepreneurs make the mistake of pursuing a business that doesn’t fit them. Don’t create a niche if it doesn’t somewhat align with your passion.
If you’re still brainstorming, go for a niche in which you’ve already gained some experience or competence. Do some thinking on your interests, your are, your experience, and your unique selling points.
The most important lesson in all of this – You can’t be all things to all people. So don’t try.
At the end of the day, business is about providing solutions to problems. Focus on finding the best solutions for the most important problems.
Need guidance in defining your niche and using it to grow faster? Book a strategy session with an ActionCOACH. From there, we can pinpoint the exact strategies and systems your business needs to achieve real results.