The Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Your Niche and Target Market As the saying goes, 'If you try to sell to everyone, you will sell to no one.'
By Scarlet Vincent •
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The most important aspect of setting up and running a successful business is knowing your ideal clients within your specific niche.
Your target audience is the group of people who fall within a similar demographic with shared interests, values and beliefs. When you are clear about your specific niche, it will be much easier to identify your target audience. Once you know who your target audience is, you will then be able to implement your marketing, including the process of your content and product development. Therefore, choosing a niche should never be underestimated.
Identify your passion and skills
The best way to choose a niche is to first decide on what you enjoy and what you are good at. This way, you will be able to monetize your passion and your skill. With the two key factors combined, you will be able to build a strong foundation for your business. Doing something that you are passionate about will keep you motivated in the long run, because you are doing something that you love. This will be the main drive that keeps you going whenever you feel like giving up. If you are doing something that you don't enjoy, you have a higher chance of quitting as it will be more difficult to stay motivated.
When you also choose something that you love, you'll naturally be good at it. When you're good at what you love to do, you will have the ability to solve problems in that particular market, because you are using a skillset that you already have.
Related: Is Focusing On a Specific Niche Really That Important?
Identify your target audience's problems
Building a profitable business is about understanding the problems and desires of your target audience and being able to bridge the gap to help them get to where they want to be. To solve their problems, you will first need to be aware of the problems that they are facing.
So how do you know what sort of problems they are facing? With the internet at our fingertips, we can easily search for keywords on Google to find out what pain points our potential customers are facing. Facebook groups and Quora are great platforms to discover the questions that people are asking. They are also ideal places for market research. Take a look at the discussions that are taking place and try to notice what questions they are asking, along with what problems they are facing.
Research your competition
It is important to know your competition to truly understand where you stand so that you can determine the profitability of the market. Understanding your competitors will enable you to identify market gaps and fill the gap. You'll get to establish your unique value proposition and determine whether the market is oversaturated or not. Knowing your competitors will give you an idea of how to outrank them by studying their strengths and weaknesses. Competitor analysis and monitoring your performance will help you be well-equipped with making improvements along the way.
Determine potential profitability
During your market research, you should have an idea of the profitability of your niche as you gather information. Choosing an evergreen industry is one way to ensure that your business will be in a profitable market. Some markets tend to perform better than others because they are evergreen, which means that there is always demand in those markets. You can conduct market research using Google Trends to find trending topics and keywords that are highly searched. It is crucial to determine whether the niche you have chosen has a need and whether people are willing to pay for what you have to offer.
Related: 4 Tips for Finding Your Profitable Blogging Niche
Validate your idea
The last thing that you want to do before deciding on your niche is to validate your idea by running a test. You can use crowdfunding websites such as Kickstarter to validate your product idea and raise funds in the process. You can also create a landing page on MailChimp and start collecting leads just to see how well the promotion goes and whether the niche that you choose has any demand. One quick way to do that is by running a few paid ads to direct users to your landing page and measure the performance of your ads.
The worst thing that can happen is choosing a niche with low demand, registering your company, and having your website up and running, only to realize that nobody wants your products or services. These are mistakes that you can avoid if you implement all these steps before finalizing your niche and getting things up and running.
Establish a strong foundation
It may seem tiring to conduct market research and competitor analysis, but every startup needs to build a strong foundation. It's important to understand your competitors as much as your customers so that you can constantly make improvements in your marketing. When you do that, you are strengthening your unique value proposition over time and creating a brand that stands out.
Related: Think You Don't Have What It Takes to Run a Niche Franchise Brand? Think Again.
