How To Find Niche Market and Sell To Your Target Market

I only learnt about the word “niche market” when I studied internet marketing. I assume that everyone involves in business know about the meaning of niche market and know how to find niche market. But I’m totally wrong! When I talk to more business owners, I often surprised that they either have no idea who will buy from them or they assume that “everyone” will.

Assumptions of “everyone” will buy from you can lead to wrong decisions, wrong pricing, wrong marketing strategy and ultimately, business failure.

By definition, a niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market. For example, if you want to have an online business selling women accessories or fashion, who is your targeted market and potential customers? The first thing you may need to do is to define whether your product is international or local targeted. Then, you should divide your market into market segments:

* Age: children, teens, young, middle, elderly
* Education: high school, college, university
* Income: low, medium, high
* Marital status: single, married, divorced
* Ethnic and/or religious background
* Family life cycle: newly married, married for 10 – 20 years, with or without children.

Also, to determine if a particular niche is right for you, ask yourself these questions:

* Do I have an identifiable target population with similar interests and needs?
* Is the market large enough to support my business?
* Can I tailor my products, services, and business identity to address that market’s particular needs?
* Is my target market currently underserved?
* Can I reach my potential customers in a cost-effective manner?

Normally people purchase products or services for three basic reasons:

* To satisfy basic needs.
* To solve problems.
* To make themselves feel good.

Let me share with you one very useful keyword tool – Wordtracker to help you get ideas about your niche market and keywords for your website. This keyword tool will show you the average total online searches per day for certain keywords.

For Keyword – women accessories (total searches – average 4 per day)

results as at 10.03.2009

For Keyword – lady fashion (total searches – average 19 per day)

results as at 10.03.2009

For Keyword – handmade handbag (total searches – average 106 per day)

results as at 10.03.2009

From the above keywords researches, it’s not difficult to know that handmade handbags is a niche market and the more people search for the keywords that related to your site, the chance of your site being visited is higher.

I would like to show you one more example.

results as at 10.03.2009

Baby clothes has 2,019 searches per day but baby clothes is too general and you may target “adult baby clothes”, “organic baby clothes” or “baby boy clothes” that make your business more specific and targeted to a niche. So now, you get my idea how to make use of the keyword tool for your business?

The most successful home businesses understand that only limited number of people will buy their product or services. Therefore, you should build a better and stronger business by identifying and serving a particular customer group – your target market. By finding a niche market, you can greatly increase your home business and have less competition in the marketplace.