Target Niches Are Your Way to Riches Become known as an expert at serving a tight niche market and you can double your fees overnight.
By John Jantsch
Most small businesses try to serve giant chunks of the market in an effort to capture more business. The reasoning goes, “If I can be all things to all people, my market will be unlimited.”
The reality is just the opposite. When you attempt to be all things to all people, the only thing that is unlimited is the amount of competition you will face from every other firm that claims to do what you do.
The surest way to tap into the potential of a market is to narrow your focus to one or two very specific niches within a target market group. When you become known for serving a tight niche, several things happen:
• You get very good at serving that niche. • You can more easily communicate what your business does. • You can more effectively ask for very specific referrals. • You are more attractive to media outlets that need experts. • And the big one...you can double or triple what you charge.
When given the choice, most buyers would rather hire a company that has specific expertise with their type of business or need.
An architect would much rather hire "The Architect's Consultant" than a business consultant. Someone who wants to learn a certain piece of software would much rather hire a company that features that software as their sole service offering.
When you become the preferred choice, or when you start to get calls from companies whose market you excel in, price is no longer the driving issue. When given enough information, prospects make buying decisions based on value, not price. By communicating your expertise and focusing on your prospect’s business or problem, you instantly take a big leap in the value equation. Where to Look for Niches Take a look at your current client base. Where do your revenues come from now? In some cases, establishing a niche can simply be a matter of focusing on what you already do but repositioning the way you communicate.
Don't forget the 80/20 rule. Do 80 percent of your profits come from one or two services or products? If so, that’s your niche.
What about market niches? Do you find that you work better with accountants and doctors? Or maybe you seem to draw retail businesses. Consider your centers of influence. Where do you have a large number of contacts? Your church, school, hobby group, trade association, geographic region?
Sometimes niches present themselves through your competitors: either as a niche they are succeeding with or as a way to find gaps that are not being served.
Successful Niches The wireless phone industry has experienced tremendous growth over the past 10 years. Players have come and gone, technology has changed and competition has been fierce. Do you want to know the company that has been the most profitable and grown the most throughout this timeframe? Nextel is now the #1 wireless provider in the country in terms of subscribers and profit. The primary reason Nextel has come out on top is because it targeted a niche and let everyone else fight over the price shoppers.
Nextel’s “walkie-talkie” technology offered something very appealing to a specific target niche and everyone else stayed away. Now Nextel is leading the pack, and no one is nipping at its heals forcing them to offer profit-killing promotions.
More examples . . . A successful financial planner played football in college and is very involved in his church. He chose to focus on folks close to the university and folks involved in his church. He’s found that 95 percent of his new clients are voluntarily referred.
A small software training company started out trying to promote its ability to train business owners to use any type of small business software. At some point, the company became very good at one popular contact management program and redesigned their entire business around training business owners to use this program to grow their businesses. The results have been stunning.
An Internet Resource One of the ways to hunt for potential niches is find out what people are searching for. The Internet offers some great tools for just that. One is a service called Overture, which is a pay-per-click Web advertising service. For "niche hunting," Overture offers a tool that allows you to type in a keyword, such as “software training,” and see how many people have searched on that and related terms in the last month.
John Jantsch is a marketing coach and the author of Referral Flood. You can get more information at www.ReferralFlood.com or by sending a blank e-mail to
