Get Slightly Famous

Why You Need To Choose A Niche

The greatest fear businesses have about choosing a niche is a fear that they’ll narrow their market too much and have less business. Actually, the opposite is true. Businesses with a focused market niche get more business with less effort because their marketing speaks in real terms to real people.

As long as the niche you choose is large enough to support your business, you’ll make a much more convincing case for your services, and with much less effort and marketing expense. The more your target market will recognize the benefits you offer, and the more ideal, qualified business you’ll attract.

When you target unfocused groups like “retirees,” “women,” or “business owners,” you’ll never be able to fully get your mind (or your pocketbook) around a convincing marketing message. When you handle all clients, you never develop excellence in any particular area.

Moreover, in the increasingly commoditized marketplace, it’s harder to get noticed and taken seriously when you market yourself as a generalist. As a generalist, you’ll have to work hard to stand out from the crowd.

Determine your niche by exploring subsections of a broader category. A “retiree” niche can break down into something more specific such as: “retired business owners,” “retired widows,” “retirees who live abroad,” or “gay and lesbian retirees.”

When you break down a broad category into subsections, and choose an area where you can focus, you can…

--Deliver better products and services as you accumulate niche expertise
--Develop a special reputation within the group, and within that group’s referral network (niche clients always know/affiliate with others like themselves)
--Immerse yourself in your niche members' world. You can read what they read, join groups they belong to, to not only deepen your understanding of your niche but to become an insider and trusted advisor.
--Cultivate symbiotic relationships with related professionals. As a niche advisor, you can target and network with other businesses that can add value to your clients and customers and become valuable strategic partners and referral sources.
--You’ll get Slightly Famous. Niche marketing sets the stage to secure a dedicated following among members of your niche that leads to word of mouth and referrals.

Will declaring a niche mean you’ll turn away business? Sure. But it’s a worthwhile tradeoff. The business you DO attract will fit your predetermined success criteria.

Niche Networking

Slightly famous marketers don't just network, they "niche network."

Before you try to meet as many people as possible, do your homework: devise a networking strategy likely to advance your business goals by putting you in touch with the best members of your target market.

Go out of your way to meet 'centers of influence.' These are people who stand out as the "hubs" that link others together within any market niche. The most powerful centers of influence are industry pundits, industry Web-site proprietors, writers, speakers, and publication editors. If you gain their trust, they can spread the word about you within their network and give you credibility.

Establish a contact sphere composed of business contacts in which you can develop and benefit from symbiotic relationships. This will help you pool your networking efforts and enjoy mutual referrals. A wedding industry contact sphere, for example, could include a caterer, florist, photographer who refer business to one another.

Here's a case study of niche networking in action:

Scott Testa, chief operating officer of Mindbridge.com, focused his company's networking efforts on profitable industries where they had an established track record. He drew from his experience in the financial services sector, and targeted credit unions through their trade organizations and other centers of influence within the credit union industry.

"We'd spend time at these association meetings; we’d meet prominent people within the industry, introduce ourselves, and demonstrate our track record with credit unions," says Testa. "Once we'd earned their trust, which was easy because we could point to relevant clients and press coverage, we'd ask for names of anyone who might want to learn more about our services."

Testa has successfully networked his way into several industries, including credit unions, financial services, non-profits, payroll companies and banking. "When you become an industry insider and do a good job, word travels fast, and you become the preferred provider to that industry," says Testa. "We tapped into a sense of camaraderie that exists among members of our target markets."

Excerpted from Get Slightly Famous(tm): Become A Celebrity in Your Field and Attract More Business With Less Effort.

Finding a Niche by Going Deep, Rather Than Wide

One of the mantras for running a business is "find your niche." Developing a niche means going deep, rather than wide. So, instead of going to a wide audience, and achieving 5% of a 75% market share, you might be much more successful going after 75% of a 5% market share.

Here’s an example of a successful entrepreneur who went deep rather than wide.

Alex Fisenko is known in the world of coffee as "the dean of beans." I first learned about Alex a few years ago, and profiled him in my book Get Slightly Famous.

The 60-something coffee expert started an first espresso shop in the 1960s. Since then, he's focused on selling his expertise about launching a successful coffee business to aspiring coffee shop owners. Alex now conducts coffee shop seminars and sells a training course called "Espresso Business Success."

His VERY simple web site, www.espressobusiness.com, generates thousands of dollars a month in products sales and consulting engagements around the world. By targeting the best prospects, he now makes more money through product sales and consultations than when he ran coffee shops. Aspiring coffee shop entrepreneurs easily find him on the web because his market is so narrow and because he demonstrates that he knows what he's talking about.

Ask yourself if you might take your business further by focusing your offerings. If you find the right, untapped market niche, you're on your way to taking the stuggle our of marketing your business.

Market Research...As Easy As Picking Up The Phone

I hear statistics all the time such as..."80% of all small businesses fail in their first year."

Does this mean that small business success is largely the victim of bad luck? On the contrary, I believe that most failed small businesses result from charging into business with untested assumptions. The answer lies is performing sufficient market research, which can be as easy as picking up the phone.

Market research removes the risk and guesswork of developing your business, products and services, which I explain in my book, Get Slightly Famous:

Once you have a working idea of the market you'd like to serve, you need to dig deeper to test your assumptions. The process starts with market research: analyze your best potential customers, your competitors, your market's predisposition toward your products and services, and your ability to serve these people so well as to make you their vendor of choice.

Market research can provide relevant information for establishing a solid foundation under any business. Even if you have been in business for years, it's a good idea to stay up-to-date with market research that might help you understand where your market niche is going.

Market research can, among other things, help you understand your potential customers, the likelihood that they’ll buy your products and services, why they’ll buy them, and how much they’ll pay. Market research can also help you evaluate your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, thereby providing one of the keys to dominating your niche.

I've always held that market research is the most underutilized Secret Weapons for small business success. Ryan Schmidt, a current client and owner of a new software wholesale business, summarizes below how easy (and eye opening) simple market research is for testing assumptions about your target market.

I've finally learned that the secret to positioning and growing any company for success is to conduct as much market research as possible.

Prior to conducting market research for SoftwareLot, I came up with services and marketing strategies that were based on my assumptions of what customer's would want from my company. I was about to launch SoftwareLot.com based on these assumptions when you strongly suggested that I take time to do market research.

Following your advice, I created a list of the top 10-12 companies in the Pittsburgh area that showed the most potential of needing our services. I took several days to call each one up and ask them a series of questions. I recorded all of my interviews on a tape recorder so I could go back and listen to our conversations and take notes.

I asked every company I talked to how much they paid for services like ours, what their profit margins were, how much software they purchased per month, and what the top 3-4 most important aspects they expected their software vendors to have. I also asked what trade journals they read, what websites they visited, who there top vendors were, etc.

I also saw a trend in commonly used vendors, and I was able to visit the websites of these vendors and create my product prices, return policies, shipping policies, etc., based on what these vendors where doing. When I talked with each prospect, I also explained SoftwareLot.com's business model to them and I asked them if they thought it was appealing, or if they saw any flaws in my model.

To my surprise, I found out a few surprising things. First of all, my original marketing strategy was going to be solely based on how cheap our prices are, because I thought that price was the most important buying factor for our potential clients. As it turns out, almost everyone I talked to told me that fast and reliable shipping was the most important thing to them, followed by an extremely efficient customer service department as the second most important thing. Price actually came third.

Based on this information, I completely changed my marketing to focus on our fast FedEx shipping services and 24 hour customer support response time. I also discovered that I could increase my profit margins by 15% without hurting sales. This will dramatically increase our profits every month, and I never would have known that this was possible had I not taken the time to conduct this research.

Another great advantage to talking directly with prospects and customer's is that they will tell you exactly how to sell them on your services. They will stress what is most important to them, and if you record the conversations, you can copy exactly what they say word for word in your marketing campaigns. It's extremely powerful.

Needless to say, I am very happy with my market research results. It has helped me establish a company that is tailored to provide exactly what potential prospects are looking for, and it has given me invaluable information that I can use for marketing, profit projections, and word of mouth marketing. The market research that I conducted has given me a complete idea of who my customers are, what they want, and how to sell them.

Thank you Steven for recommending this process to me. It's made all the difference in the world.

Good Sales,

Ryan K Schmidt, CEO
SoftwareLot.com, LLC
http://www.softwarelot.com
ryan@softwarelot.com
1-888-SOFT-LOT

Cultivate a “Super Niche”

Today's consumers seek out businesses that understand them, and the more you specialize your business to address the needs of a core group of people by "speaking their language," you can develop your very own "super niche" of fanatically loyal clients and customers.

A super niche is when you strategically target a particular market segment, get to know its inhabitants inside and out, and your company the business of choice within your industry to members of that niche. You do this by specializing your products and services to the needs, wants and desires of the most qualified prospects in your niche. By developing inside knowledge of this group, and giving them exactly what they want, you will inspire the loyalty that people give those who understand them.

Mari Gottdiener, one of my clients, is a former attorney who specializes in getting credit bureaus to address and correct credit-report errors. With a little research, we decided to refocus her credit and consumer advocacy business from general consumers, who were obviously hard to target, to the narrowly defined market of professional mortgage brokers.

We discovered that mortgage brokers were ready-made prospects. They had an ongoing need for her services on behalf of their loan applicants. She began networking with brokers at trade association meetings, and gave presentations at several mortgage offices. We published articles about credit repair in mortgage broker trade publications. We even conducted a web seminar that reached a national mortgage broker audience.

Mari's decision to focus on the mortgage broker sector transformed her business. The more she focused on being the person who fixes credit problems for mortgage brokers, the easier it became for her to define what she could do for them. Now, her name gets passed around, and she's developed a special reputation within that market that makes getting business easier than ever.