To Niche Or Not To Niche?

How focusing on a niche can grow your business

Marketing your business to as many people as possible seems like an excellent idea, but what if it’s actually holding you back? Could trying to be all or many things to all or many people be putting a spanner in the works of growing your business?

You’ve worked hard creating your business and you know that you can deliver a really good product or service. Now all you need are some customers. You know you need to let people know about what you have to offer and that it may take a little time for them to make a decision to buy, so you’d better get the word out there right now.

It’s hard to resist throwing your all into splurging your message in front of as many people as possible, but not everyone is interested in what you offering and it takes a great deal of effort to make yourself heard above the noise of all your competitors, large and small. So, what can you do? You desperately need customers but how can you find them?

One answer could be to target a niche instead of the whole market, which while it may reduce your overall exposure, will concentrate your efforts on where it’s most productive.

Easier for Clients to Find You

People looking for your specific solutions will find it much easier to find you because they’re using specific key words when searching. Instead of having to trawl through long lists of entries, they can cut through all the generalist businesses to find yours, which offers exactly what they want.

Easier to Find Clients

You can also use keywords to find the clients most interested in what you have to offer, focusing your efforts in a much more time and cost-effective way. Being specific enables you to increase the success rate of your marketing efforts and avoids you wasting time sifting through great numbers of ill matched customers.

Reduced Competition

Because you’re no longer competing in the vast general market, but in the much smaller segment serving your specific niche, niching can make it much easier for you and your business to stand out in a market with much less noise. Less competition also means that you can carve out a healthy living doing what you’re best at.

Increased Collaboration

You won’t be the only business putting all your energy into one niche. Others will be offering specific services to their ideal clients, which is where you come in. Any customers that can’t be served by one business could be passed on to another that has exactly what they need. Niching can make collaboration with complementary businesses possible and enable referrals from others in related but different niches (think wedding businesses), all of which can increase interest, sales and ultimately the growth of your business.

Greater Expertise

Serving a specific niche means that you develop expertise in that market segment, enabling you to serve it more effectively. You will develop your reputation as a specialist, building trust and deeper relationships with your customers. Being better able to serve the customers helps create greater loyalty from your client base.

Cost Effective

Because you’re reaching out to a discrete group who are more likely to be interested in your services you will find that the costs of marketing to this smaller group are lower. Less effort has to go into moving these customers towards a sale and your time and energy can go into other tasks that benefit your business.

On The Other Hand…

If you’re a new business or you don’t really know which way you’d like to grow your business, niching might prove to be a premature step.

And while niching can be great for helping get your business established, it may be a little limiting for those looking to grow their businesses. You can expand your niche into related areas but it may be that you need to look at targeting a second niche, particularly if your original niche isn’t generating enough profit.

Thought also is also needed on what to do if the economic conditions that underpin your industry change. The current pandemic has shown that relying on one niche could be risky, so it can be useful to aim to have “your eggs in more than one basket”. Still, having complementary niches can still give all the benefits described above, without risking getting lost in the general chatter of the larger market.

You also need to be aware that success can also bring attention from other businesses looking to move into your niche if you’re generating a reasonable profit. Having a limited client base could be a risk for your business and mean that you need to diversify quickly when competitors mop up significant parts of the market.

The reality is that niching may or may not be right for you at whatever point you are in building your business, but for those who adopt it, niching can reduce overwhelm by focusing in on a specific element and helps you to stand out from the crowd.

It may be that you can achieve these things without niching, but the reality is that many people struggle to pinpoint what’s different about their business and the rise in importance of social media means that overwhelm is real for many business owners. Niching can help address these issues and help you build a thriving venture.

If you’d like more information on how Redcurrant Social can help you reach your niche, take a look at my social media courses or email me to find out how I can help.

Deborah Padwick is a trained Social Media Manager, with experience of helping small and global companies with their social media presence. Deborah set up Redcurrant Social to help small businesses grow successfully through social media.