In this post we are going to talk about how to research and find your niche.
One of the main reasons businesses research to find a niche in the market is to ensure they find profitable customers to grow the business. With the huge amount of competition the world wide web has introduced, finding an audience for your products/services is essential. But finding a suitable and profitable marketing niche is not necessarily an easy task.
Research and Testing
Finding your niche entails a fair amount of research and testing. You need to ensure that your product/service can attend to a specific need of a certain group of people; But at the same time this select audience must be willing and able to provide profits the business requires.
Niche Marking works for new and established businesses
It is not necessary for your business to be a current leader in your business’ particular industry. As long as your business is able to create a niche for a product/service it provides you can go on to be a leader in that particular niche. As such, your business’ success can be greatly improved if you can find a problem within a specific niche that your products/services can fulfill.
Before you start
Before trying to find your online niche you need to determine whether the product/service you are providing has a good demand. This is the first and most basic principle that needs to be dealt with. Only if there is a demand for the product/service can you create a specific and profitable need for your product/service.
There is no point in doing further research if there is not good demand for the product/service you are selling; Or if your product/service is not able to provide a decent profit. It is definitely not worth the effort to pursue a limited and specific niche if there is very little demand for your product/service in the general market place.
Determine Feasibility First
It is therefore important that before doing any niche research that you; 1. determine if there is a demand for the product/service; And 2. Ensure the potential profit is sustainable. Both Demand and Profitability should be established before attempting to find the right marketing niche. Skipping this step can put all your hard work to waste. It is pointless marketing to any market, let alone a niche market, only to discover that the business is not able to provide you the expected result;
ClickBank
A quick way to do this is to use the ClickBank Market place (https://accounts.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm).
Look for affiliate offers in a similar category and take note of the pricing and details related. You can check the following:
- Gravity is based on how many different affiliates have made a sale in the last 90 days. It is an indication that affiliates have made at least one sale for this product.
- Popularity takes into account all of the factors available such as gravity, price paid to affiliate, affiliate commission %, the volume of product sold, and the % of sales ref by affiliates.
A product that is popular and has gravity is a pretty good indication that it is a viable option.
SEO Book
You can also use a free tool such as SEO Book. Once signed up for free, you can then go to the Keyword tool (CLICK HERE) This tool will allow you to search a keyword and will display certain information. The things to check are the monthly figures (there is one for the US and one for the UK) to check the amount of searches and the CPC. If you keyword has a high number of searches, but the CPC is low, I would suspect that people are generally not making a lot of money for that search term. Remember, high volume + low CPC = low click through rates and even lower conversions. On the other hand, if your keyword has a higher CPC money is likely being made in that category. However, if the search term has a low number of searches I would not suggest it as a good investment, unless you have other keywords for your products/services to add additional traffic.
Still do specific Market Research
While these two quick and easy options are a nice way to do a quick pre-liminary check, they do not work for all industries, products and services. You should also do more specific market testing in addition to what you discover here.
Start Finding Your First Marketing Niche
Once a decent demand and profit margin has been established you can then start investigating specific marketing niches. In this step you need to determine some of the specific online habits your target market have. There are available software programs that can help you in this stage of your research. We will go through some of the ones I use during this series. By knowing your customers’ online habits, you will be able to form a specific niche marketing strategy to get directly in front of these people.
Pricing strategy
The next step will be to check your pricing strategy. It is important for you to know how your pricing fits in with other competing products/services. While pricing is important it is not necessarily true that the lower the price you offer the bigger edge you will have over the competition and the more successful you will be. Getting into a price war is not conductive to good profit margins and can easily have you pushed out of business by a bigger company. If you position your product correctly within your marketing niche as a tailored solution, you will be able to charge a reasonable price with good profit margins. However, you also need to be seen as competitive in the eyes of the customer.
Implementation
When you have found a profitable marketing niche and have completed the necessary research and formulated a great niche marketing strategy you will then be ready to implement your strategy and work your way up to success. This is what we are going to tackle in the upcoming posts.