How To Find Your Ideal Niche Market

Today I want to explain in clear terms how quickly find your ideal niche market. It’s extremely important that you select a proper niche for your business; it can increase revenue at a surprising rate, improve your exposure within the market, and raise customer satisfaction an amazing degree because your company is an expert in that particular field.

Why Is Selecting a Niche Market Important?

Well, the short (and most sensational) answer is that you can make a lot of money doing it. Have you ever heard of Joe Polish? No? Joe first got his start in the business world teaching marketing to carpet cleaners. That’s right, only teaching the folks who clean your carpet a few times a year. Joe is the marketing expert for carpet cleaners. And he was very successful at it, too.

It was only after building the top brand in this particular niche featured around carpet cleaning that Joe decided to expand and teach marketing in general. In other words, from the niche market comes many more opportunities for expansion and financial gain.

So if you want to be a very highly paid professional in a given niche market, become a marketer who teaches a specific niche. For example, you can be a realty marketer – but even better, you can become the marketing expert for real estate. This applies for practically every niche. You can become the marketing expert for lawyers. You can become the marketing expert for architects.

A Jack of All Trades, A Master of None

Now, an architect who’s looking for marketing advice might have something like 15 full-service ad agencies applying to put his name on the map. They’ll try to woo him with their big business tactics about many projects they’ve dipped their hands into – “We can do anything you want, we work with EVERYBODY, just tell us what you need”. Not a bad pitch, right?

But WHAT IF, out of those 15, you’re the one guy that says, “I only do business with architects… and I only do business with your style specificially. I know exactly what you need, and I have 150 testimonials from other architects who made great revenue with the tactics I taught them in your market. My coaching sessions and business strategies are top notch for architects.” Suddenly, you’re worth 10 times more in an architect’s eyes than the ad agency that does everything for everyone.

Learn From Your Clients As They Learn From You

By selecting a niche market and area of expertise, you learn from your clients as well. If you have realtors and you find a realtor with really good marketing, then you can learn from his marketing while you teach other realtors what you learned from this guy. That’s a synergistic effect. If you market for realtors and market for architects and market for lawyers, a lot of the knowledge you learn about the realty business in particular (like which market to target) won’t necessarily apply to lawyers or architects. Consequently, you perform a poorer job and usually end up not be able to correctly solve the immediate needs of your niche.

How To Research For Your Ideal Niche Market

A lot of people want to start a business, blog, or coaching company without much a real focus on how to market it. They say things like, “Oh… I just really like to talk about this. I think it’s neat!” But they don’t necessarily take out the 10-15 minutes out of their day to research their niche. This is really a waste because researching the basics of your niche are so easy to do, and the benefits are endless.

First of all, if you’re starting a local business like a cleaning company in Toronto, for example, you can research it using a tool called Google Keyword tool. I think most people can figure this out on their own. However, I have a process I prefer much more. It’s a tool called Longtail Pro, and it’s much better than a simple Google search. Longtail Pro not only researches all related keywords, it researches all the competition and gives it a competition score. Then you can look up what this competition score means in relation to your potential idea and make a reasoned decision on how to proceed.

Forums Tell You What Your Niche Wants

If you’re researching for an information or coaching company such as a fitness company or advice column, you can go on fitness (or advice) forums in your related niche, scour the threads, and read what people are talking about. The issues that people address in forums, the problems they complain about – those are the things your company is here to solve.

If you do this, you will have a much better understanding of what people want than if you just try to go off of your personal experience or estimation based on the past. Back in the old days, before the internet, advertisers used to send researchers out on the road to prospective communities to learn about different niches by doing research inside those communities. This was a slow and expensive process that has been rendered obsolete by the relative ease and speed of modern internet researching. Take advantage of this fact!

Research Complaints About Competitors and Solve Them

Another thing you can do is go on review sites like Yelp and read reviews of local companies nearby in the same niche. So if you’re starting that cleaning company in Toronto and you need to know about your possible competitors, you can go to Yelp and read about specific issues addressed by customers of the current companies in your area and tailor your business to help fix their problems in a much better way.

You could literally write on your website, “Check this out – we don’t do [particular issue raised about competitors]… we do [refreshing new solution]”. Voila – you look cutting edge and more in tune with your market.

The International Benefit

It is also worth mentioning that if you’re in a country outside of the United States, niche research is a particularly useful skill to have. This is partially because countries outside of the United States are somewhat behind the U.S. in online business and online lead generation.

So, here’s what you can do – you can research the American market and find out what they’re doing. If you’re in Toronto, you can find a cleaning company in New York and look into their marketing tactics and use the same techniques. Right now, there are huge gaps in the French, Spanish, and German speaking markets in online marketing techniques compared to the U.S. Use this to help your business and learn from the highly developed American market for long term success.

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I think the topics discussed here are highly valuable to any marketer, and I’ve implemented many of them myself for my business. A niche market is a profitable, valuable, and exciting place to start your business, and I highly suggest you start looking into it – today.