Building a biz 101 typically goes something like, “what’s your niche, bro? Just give them what they want.”
The word is so commonly used that it’s annoyingly cliche.
Let me let you in on a little truth bomb: all those brands that you love—you know, the big ones that you’re trying to emulate—they defined their niche and stuck with it. The only difference is that they did it when the term was still spicy.
And that made them passionate about utilizing their niche to its fullest potential.
What is a Niche?
If we’re getting technical here, and I guess we should for SEO sake, a niche is nothing more than a specific sect of a population.
For our purposes (because niche is also an ecological term), it’s easily defined as a set of characteristics that defines the group of people that you want to reach with your brand.
It seems simple but take down your blinders and sit with that for a few minutes. Can you tell me, with definitive clarity, what your niche is?
If yes, prove it. Click here to put a call on my calendar. I want to hear about who you serve and why.
Define. Your. Niche.
It’s way, way, way, too often that a small business owner tells me that their products are for everyone.
Literally no.
No.
If you booked that call to tell me that everyone IS your niche, I better be talking to Amazon.
Otherwise there’s close to a 100% chance that you’re not communicating to the people that matter to your brand, your website/store/copy is boring, you have too many random products with no cohesion, and you’re missing out on revenue.
Defining the type of people you serve does not limit you—it makes your brand stronger and having a strong brand is how you get eyeballs from people that will buy from you and then tell their friends about you. Hello repeat customers.
How This Concept is Evolving
Alright. So here’s another truth bomb for you.
The brands that are OGs in the niche that you’re serving had it easier.
Niche marketing is only about 15 years old—seriously, the oldest paper I could find within 30 seconds of google searching is from 2007—there were no facebook ads then and “big data” was a completely different beast.
A “specific niche” then could be something like, “people that like organic food.”
Yeah, that’s close to a billion people now.
With the influence of social media, the movement towards individualized targeting, and the increase in available touchpoints throughout a potential customer’s lifecycle, not to mention the never-ending amount of scrollable content being produced everyday, choosing and defining your specific niche is more important than it ever has been.
In layman’s terms: The difference between then and now is that a niche needs to be a hyper specific group of people that will totally understand the need for your product.
How to Define your Niche in 2019
In 2019, this is all about hyper-specificity in interests and traits, and not limiting with demographics.
Because social media platforms, websites, and google are all getting way better at picking up on defining pieces of humanity, they don’t rely on age, gender, or location as much to make decisions about what people want to see—so that’s what you need to do too.
I often hear things like, “my niche is jewelry for 19-34 year old women.”
That’s not specific enough in the areas that you need to define and too specific in other areas—this basically says “I sell jewelry.”
Remove the age barrier—every 60 year old woman still has the 19 year old in her.
Remove the gender (if you can)—I know men that buy gifts AND men that wear fine jewelry.
Increase the description of other interests—is it silver jewelry? Fine or chunky? What other things compliment your jewelry that this group of people enjoys? Is there an influencer that wears this kind of thing?
It may seem weird to ask such specific questions but the reason we do this is, and always has been, for the sole purpose of knowing EXACTLY who you’re talking to.
In our Ecourse we actually walk you through how to define your ideal customer—that’s by drilling down into your niche so far that you can extract a single, all encompassing, person… and talking directly to them.
All of the sudden “niche” is spicy again, don’t you think?
What do you think about “defining your niche?” Put it in the comments below.
11 thoughts on “Make “Niche” Spicy Again”
You made some decent points there. I looked on the internet for the topic and found most persons will consent with your blog.
This actually answered my downside, thank you!
Excellent, glad we could help!
I have been checking out many of your posts and it’s pretty clever stuff. I will surely bookmark your blog.
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Thanks. I’m new and only small
In capacity in terms of money and product creation so I think this will be particularly helpful.
We watch your work though, Dave and it’s gorgeous! You have a great niche – don’t think you’ll be too small for long 🙂
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what the step for Make “Niche” Spicy?
Hi Ridwan! Thanks for your question. This article focuses on the importance of identifying your niche when you start a business. The first step is getting clear on who your audience is. The next steps are working to make that even more clear, and getting specific on how you can communicate with them! Hope that helps!!