Here's Why Most Niche Marketing Fails

“Find a niche” or “get into a niche” is something business people throw around so much it has almost become a cliche. The thing is this: You really should find a niche. No, scratch that, you should find multiple niche products and niche markets to get into. Then, you should market to your niches. Remember that last sentence.

By the way, feel free to call us at 832-900-2000 if you’d like to discuss a specific niche you’ve found challenging.

Niches are Easy to Find for Most Businesses

Know your niche. Don’t dilute the message.

Niches are all over the place. Really. Take a look at your product and/or service offerings as well as the markets — and sub-markets — you serve. You’ll be able to spot a few niches quickly. No kidding — it’s easy. In fact, you probably already know 2 or 3 niches you’d like to increase sales to.

Here’s Why Most “Niche Marketing” Campaigns Aren’t Successful

The biggest mistake I see business owners and managers making about niches is this:

They insist on marketing to their niches with their general marketing message and that doesn’t work. They lack dedication to the niche.

Getting into a niche requires clarity of the uniqueness of your product or service and/or of your unique abilities to serve a particular niche market. The dilution of the message is usually subtle. It’s what we call message creep — the tendency for people to want to tell about everything they do or can do with special orders in a marketing piece instead of focusing on the simple message that speaks to the niche.

And, the niche only cares about one thing. That’s what makes it a niche.

For example, let’s say you’ve decided there’s a huge niche market of people who will only use purple fitness balls for yoga and you are placing an ad in Fitness Ball Today magazine to sell to them. Your ad should talk about — you guessed it — ONLY purple fitness balls, not red ones or yellow ones. This is a niche and it’s a clear one. Yes, you can mention that your purple balls are available in multiple sizes and with stripes but that’s as far as it goes — nothing more. ONLY purple fitness balls. Get it?

And, if you really want to be dedicated to the niche, you should setup purplefitnessballs.com (I didn’t check if that’s a real website).

The problem is, everyone wants to mention that they also have a full line of red and green balls as well as yoga mats, tights, special classes… and so they become NOISE, just more noise, another turn of the page; another place that sells stuff.

You have to decide if you really want that niche or not. If you really do, you have to kind of ignore everyone else when it comes to the messaging for that market.

I get it — the hesitation, I mean. It takes b…, uh, guts to take that step off the ledge and spend money on an ad that only talks about one product or product line (such as purple balls) but, assuming your operational strengths and profit margins are better and higher for that niche, then owning that niche will be a fantastic thing for you.