Niche Marketing
Establishing an online shop to make the most out of niche marketing is the culmination of a process of identifying a group of users of your product so you can use web design to direct your internet marketing
efforts more precisely to that group.
Look for a niche that seems to be under serviced - one in which there's not a lot of competition - then do some
market research to determine if it looks like a viable market. If you find lots of competition in your
marketplace then you will have to create your unique niche in order to position your business against them.
Who is your target market? What do you know about your customers? The lifestyle information about your target
buyer can help you in to develop your product to better match what your customers want - and it can help you
work out how best to reach your customers with promotion.
Demographics are the basic measurements of your market. Things like income, employment, industry, age, gender,
family status and location will probably describe the customer who buys from your industry. You need to know if
this description holds for the product your sales specifically - if not, then the reason could be very important.
You might have proven customers already that could be the basis for a niche market - can you build an
identifiable target from this group? Picking the right target market group is an important step toward
achieving sales large enough to ensure the success of your business.
Arm yourself with as much information as possible about your perfect customer and then target that customer in
every way you can. Your niche should be your core business - your best or largest or most profitable market.
When deciding on products to sell choose just a few and become an expert in those. As the number of products
increases so do the difficulties of internet marketing - if you have a well defined set of products that appeal to the
same market niche the promotion becomes much easier.
It is very important to find out if there is a real need for your idea before you have invested too much money
and effort. Who will buy it? How many of them? How much will they pay? Test, test, test - you can't do enough
testing in the marketplace.
The smaller the niche the easier it is to use good web design to build information rich sites. Small business websites should cater
to small niche markets - the most effective sites are those that help people get the information they want when
they want it.
Have a unique idea as the basis for your product or service business - but if low price is the key difference
then there should be other differentiation as well.
"Differentiation" is the collection of differences in features and benefits between your product and that of
the competition. There are many ways in which a business can be unique - low pricing - clever packaging -
better service - different benefits to the competition. But differences only matter when they are important
enough to the customer to influence the buying decision.
So the important thing is to work out how important each of these differences is to the buyer. Then working
out how to communicate the most important differences is the basis for the positioning strategy. Test which
differences matter to customers in deciding to purchase your product rather than that of your competitors.
These differences then form the positioning strategy for your promotion.
Success in a niche market comes from clearly positioning a unique and well differentiated product in a way
that the defined target market can easily accept the USP for your product and make a buying decision against
the competition.
Rev: 10th November 2004
©2004
