What is Niche Marketing Definition ?

The word ‘niche’ is defined as: “A special area of demand for a product or service”. ‘Marketing’ is defined as: “The opportunity to buy or sell”. If you put the two works together, niche marketing means buying or selling a product or service in a special area of demand. All that really means is that a product or service is being sold to the people who are most interested in that particular product or service and not to the world in general.

Oftentimes big businesses use niche marketing. For example, a company that makes computers and computer accessories might advertise all-in-one copy/printer/scanners to the home computer user while at the same time advertising single function machines to large businesses.

One of the things that make niche marketing so attractive to sellers is that their advertising budgets go further. It costs less to advertise to a specialized market than it does to advertise to a broader market.

Niche marketing must be designed to meet the unique needs of the targeted audience. Niche marketers must tailor their product to meet those unique needs. If, for example, you have designed a product to make poodle grooming easy enough for the untrained professional to do it, those who own poodles will be most interested in your product. Those who own Blood Hounds or cats couldn’t care less. If you have written an e-book that will explain how to start and succeed at an online business, those who are looking for that information are your niche market. Those who are happy doing what they are doing are not interested at all.

Niche marketing is a very effective and cost efficient way to advertise and sell specific products or services to a specific audience or, hopefully, buyers of that product or service.

Niche Marketing vs. Internet Marketing Niche

Comparing niche marketing and an Internet marketing niche is equivalent to comparing apples with oranges. Apples and oranges are both fruit. Niche marketing and an Internet Marketing niche are both forms of Internet marketing but as different as apples are from oranges.

The term ‘niche marketing’ means selling a specific product to a specific type of buyer. There are far less competitive niches than an Internet marketing niche.  Most niche markets are more open to the latest marketing strategies, as well. Small niche markets are not over stocked with gurus and wise men and are much easier for the beginning marketer to break into. A niche market allows you to promote your own niche product or that of a niche affiliate product. There is a niche market for anything and everything you can imagine. All it takes to break into a niche market is a good idea, a good product created by you or someone else that will appeal to certain people, some advertising and the desire to succeed.

The Internet marketing niche, on the other hand, means that you will be promoting your own Internet marketing product. This is a very crowded field of endeavor and really difficult to break into. It’s a world filled with gurus and wise men who have been playing and winning the game for a long time. This doesn’t mean that it is impossible to cash in on the Internet marketing niche because, of course, you can. It is a world still built on demand and that means that if you have a product that can compete and if you have the willingness to play hard ball with the big boys then you can succeed at the Internet marketing niche game.  Just be aware that there are easier niche market nuts to crack.

3 Niche Marketing Examples

Niche markets are often segments of larger industries and verticals. Here are a few brands that found a way to drill down into their industry to market to a niche audience.

Divvies Vegan and Nut Free

There are hundreds of brands that sell sweet treats and snack foods such as cookies, brownies, popcorn, and cupcakes. While most people can choose from dozens of brands to find options that satisfy their cravings, there is a group of people who cannot. Those people have allergies or food restrictions that relate to animal products and nuts.

Divvies saw this under served segment in the sweets industry and created a brand that exclusively targeted this group. Selling cookies and cupcakes is not a unique idea, but selling them as vegan and nut-free options differentiated Divvies in an already saturated market, allowing them to stand out and build a loyal customer base.

Lefty’s: The Left Hand Store

Identifying an under served community in a large market is a smart way to approach niche marketing. Like Divvies, Lefty’s: The Left Hand Store found a widely under served community of people – those who favor their left hand instead of their right hand.

Because 90% of the population uses its right hand, left-handers have widely had to adjust to using products designed for “righties.” Lefty’s saw this as an opportunity. They created a store that sells products designed exclusively for the other 10% and found success reaching this smaller, often ignored audience.

UNTUCKit

The commercial clothing industry is a vertical that can feel like everything has been done. But UNTUCKit proves there are still creative ways to create a new space in a long-established market segment. By making even just a small change, you can build a whole new sector in a traditional space.

UNTUCKit probably wasn’t looking to create a new type of shirt. They were more likely focused on serving a specific community of people: those who didn’t like to tuck in their shirts. To give those people want they wanted, UNTUCKit created a new line of products that solved a problem that a lot of people were having, but didn’t know how to solve.

How to Find a Niche Market

After seeing a few examples, you will be better equipped for identifying micromarketing opportunities in your own industry.

To find and flush out an idea for a niche market in your vertical, go through the following 4-step process.

1. Identify your strengths and interests.

Start by considering what you offer and what you’re good at. The best niche marketing strategies play into your brand’s unique strengths and perspectives. So reflect on the special and exceptional qualities of your brand, team, and offerings.

Also consider the areas that you enjoy working in and the people you like working with. Niche marketing is an opportunity to drill down and focus on the sector of people you most want to connect with, so decide who you are most eager to serve.

• What specific problems do you solve?
• What problems can you solve better than your competitors?
• Where do you especially excel?
• What do you know a lot about?
• Who do you and your team like to serve?

2. Do industry research.

Once you have an idea about the type of niche marketing you want to do, validate that it is a reasonable idea. Do a competitive analysis to see if there are competitors in this space and if there are, what those brands are already doing.

Also look to see if any openings in your target market may have been missed and if there is legitimate demand in the vertical.

Use Ubersuggest to see what ideas might be out there. Ubersuggest is a keyword suggestion tool that provides variations of a phrase or word that people are searching for. Enter a broad term to engage in keyword discovery and get ideas for how to drill down into a topic.

You can also browse Amazon product categories. Because Amazon is such a massive online retailer, it’s a great place to get inspiration for product categories you may not have thought of. Spend some time browsing to see how to drill down into popular product categories.

Last but not least, use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool to gauge search interest. Knowing what people are searching for will offer insight into customer interest and help you see what type of competition already exists in a niche market. Use Alexa’s Keyword Difficulty Tool to search for top keywords and see how often the phrases are used by searchers (popularity score) and how competitive the term is (competition score).

3. Get to know your ideal customer.

Another way to gain insight and spark inspiration for niche marketing is to look closely at your target audience and identify what they really want and need. Getting to know your ideal customer can help you offer them a better product, service, or message.

To research your ideal audience, use Alexa’s Audience Overlap Tool. Enter your site or a site that has an audience you would like to reach. The tool will help you find similar websites that share the audience and explore them in an interactive visualization. From here, you can look for trends that tell you what else the audience might be interested in. You can identify ways to focus in on your ideal customer’s needs and find opportunities to market what you offer.

For example, a yoga studio might enter mindbodyonline.com (an online scheduling site for fitness and wellness classes) and see that audiences also frequently visit potterybarn.com, anthropologie.com, and urbanoutfitters.com. Because those sites are all boutique-style shops with unique clothes, decor, and gifts, the yoga studio might see this as an opportunity for creating a specialty product shop or campaign just for yoga enthusiasts.