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In today’s online world, the number of your competitors is increasing day by day. Especially if you’re dealing with services, it’s insanely easy for anyone to set up a website and the barriers to entry are very low. To succeed if you’re a startup, or continue to succeed if you’re an established business, you need to have a new way of thinking. You need to have a niche marketing strategy.

A niche market is one that caters to a specific subset of your market in order to customize your product for them.

Unlike traditional marketing which is getting more and more obsolete by the day, a niche marketing strategy uses special tools and paradigms to capture and retain its share. These strategies mostly boil down to techniques used to improve loyalty.

One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is trying to market their product or service to a large general market instead of focusing on a small niche market.

As a marketing consultant, getting my clients to focus on a niche market is the most difficult part of my job. Whenever I tell a client that they must start off small and focus on a specialized niche market, my client almost always says, “But I think everybody could use my product and if I limit my market, I will get fewer sales.” Then my response is, “Okay, if you want to market your product to the world, how many millions of dollars do you have to invest in regional, national and international advertising campaigns?” Then I get a blank stare or the phone goes quiet.

It’s an art to capture and draw profit from a small market segment.

Those who have exposure and have spent their lives in regular marketing fields can’t really understand how to proceed in these new markets. And they will fail without a proper niche marketing strategy.

To be successful in today’s hyper-competitive, over-advertised marketplace, you absolutely must focus your business and marketing on serving a specialized and preferably small niche market. This is especially true and a matter of survival if you have a small marketing budget. If you ignore this advice and try to market to a large general market before first becoming successful in at least one small niche market, I can guarantee you that you will soon go broke and be out of business. However, if you do decide to focus on serving a small niche market, you greatly increase your odds for business success with much less risk.

So what is a niche market?

A niche market is group of consumers or businesses that all have a very specific need or want. For example, let’s say you sell fancy and fairly expensive parrot cages. Your niche market consists of people who own parrots, and particularly people who own parrots and earn an income large enough that they can afford to buy your fancy parrot cages.

On the other hand, if you decide to market your fancy parrot cages to everybody in the United States who owns a bird, you are marketing to a fairly large general market and the money you spend on marketing will be wasted because nearly all of the people who will see your marketing will NOT have a need or interest in buying an expensive parrot cage. Yes, that sound you just heard is the sound of your money being flushed down the toilet because you ignored niche marketing.

There are many other niche markets that could be considered too.

The key is to determine who has the most desperate need for your product or service and then focus your marketing on that niche market.