Defining Your Small Business Marketing Niche

Have you ever heard the saying "If everyone is your customer, no one is your customer"? Many small business owners are afraid to create a niche for their business thinking that they will end up turning away prospects or that they will cut themselves off from potential customers.
The fact is, having a niche actually makes your small business marketing much easier. A niche gives you focus. It allows you to tailor your message to your particular audience. It allows you to have a better understanding of your target market and to craft a very clear and concise target market profile.

But in my opinion, the most important benefit of defining your marketing niche is that it allows you to know exactly where to spend your marketing dollars. And as a small business owner, having control over your budget is extremely critical to the success of your business.

Many small business owners have a hard time defining a niche. Even the entrepreneurs who are convinced that niche marketing is the way to go have a hard time pinpointing the exact niche to focus on. If that sounds familiar, let me share the process that I use with my own clients to help them define their marketing niche:

Consider Your Passionr
Many small business owners believe that in order to create a niche around their passion, they need to totally recreate their business model. Fortunately, that's just not true. You don't need to change your products or services, you just need to focus on who it is you offer them to.

I have a client who is a chiropractor who is absolutely passionate about bowling. He is on two bowling leagues and has hundreds of trophies and plaques displayed in his office. He was under the false assumption that in order to create a business around bowling, he would have to become a bowling coach. We simply shifted his marketing focus to target other avid bowlers.

We created how-to guides for relieving wrist stress and back pain and used them as lead generators. It was so easy to get the word out about his guides - he knew exactly where to advertise them.

Granted, his business and his passion were a perfect match. But chances are, with a little creative thinking you could turn your passion into a client niche also.

Consider Your Knowledger
What are your special skills or knowledge base? Is there an industry you're particularly knowledgeable about? Is there an industry that you'd like to learn more about? And how can you turn this into your marketing niche?

For instance, I have a colleague who is a certified corporate coach. He works with CEOs, CFOs and CMOs on business growth initiatives. His background was in the office supply industry. His family owned a small office supply store as he was growing up, and right after college he went to work for a national office supply chain. When he decided to become a corporate coach, he decided to focus on the office supply industry. Because of his knowledge base and skill set, he was able to set himself apart as an expert and create a phenomenal niche for himself.

Consider Your Partnersr
Think about the partners or colleagues that you work with on a regular basis. Who do you network with? What are their niche specialties? And how can you tweak that into your own niche?

Some small business owners already have built-in niches without even realizing it. You might belong to a networking organization that you can piggy-back on. Or maybe you have a group of referral partners that has already carved out a niche that you would fit into perfectly.

Take a look around you and tally up all the niches that already exist in your circle. Think about your skills and passions and map out a plan to develop a referral partnership program to help you break into the niche of your choice.

Consider Your Reachr
One critical step in defining a niche that many entrepreneurs forget to take into consideration is the all powerful "How will I reach them?" This is an especially dangerous factor if you define your niche too narrowly. You might really want to work with 35-year-old women who live in Saskatchewan, drive Volvos and own grey miniature poodles. But do you know how to find them?

It's essential that you identify an easy and relatively inexpensive way of contacting the members of your new niche. Is there an industry organization for this niche? Are their trade publications or magazines that they regularly read? Before assuming that your niche is too tight, I suggest you contact a list-broker and inquire about mailing lists. You might be amazed at some of the narrowly defined lists that are available. You might even be able to find a list of 35-year-old women who live in Saskatchewan, drive Volvos and own grey miniature poodles.