Five Key Steps to Succesfully Niche Marketing On The Internet

Posted by Erdem OZKAN on 18 November, 2008

This item was filled under [ Featured, Innovation, Marketing, Strategy ]

Niche marketing on Internet is one of the fastest growing industries. Firstly, let’s define the main issues.

When used in business, the term “Niche” is used to describe fresh, virgin and profitable. A niche market is a focused targetable segment of a market. A business which focuses on a niche market adresses a demand for a product or a service which is not met by any supply. Niche markets don’t exist themselves everytime. In some situations, you must create your niche markets by identifying demands (needs and wishes of your customers) which are not met by your competitors.

Niche Marketing

Niche marketing is the process of finding and serving profitable niche market segments. Niche marketing means less competition but much more effort than traditional marketing. The hardest part of niche marketing is finding customers. The easiest medium for niche marketing is the Internet, because of its capabilitiesfor reaching customers easily.

A niche market means special customers with specific desires and much more challenge for you to sell your specific products or services. Reaching these customers is so hard, but the most efficient marketing medium to use is the Internet. Niche marketers need to know how to use and apply the Internet’s advantages.

Five Key Steps To Succesfully Niche Marketing On The Internet

A Niche Business Idea: The first step of finding a niche market is having an innovative and profitable unique business idea focusing on market segment with less or no competition. A niche market can only be built on an innovative, unique business idea. A niche business idea must align with Maslow’s highest need levels of your customers. (If you know nothing about Maslow, please learn Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.) There are lots of ways for having goog business ideas and one of them is to use an idea journal to protect your creative ideas. Divergent thinking and critizing traditional markets will help you to find a niche market idea.
Most Detailed Market Research: The second step is as important as the first step. Before blindly investing in a business idea, you must be sure that you don’t have any competitors. This means, if anyone has diffused into your target market before you; that market has become ‘not-niche’ . You need a market research to know how many customers you can have. There are lots of ways to learn market size. If you can, then hire a good market research company but if you can’t, then social networks are the best tool to research potential of a niche market. For example, if your audience is business people; business social networks like LinkedIn and Xing are the best places to look for. Also, hobby sites and special forums and even Google will help you. Internet provides more ability to target than traditional media. Product or service creation becomes easier since you will know which people are potential customers for you.
Financial Research:If you want to earn money, you must have a good financial research before you start your niche business. Theoretically, niche businesses bring high margin of profit to their owners. But if you don’t have an income model then it means you don’t know how to make money from this niche market. You must know how much your audience is ready to pay for your niche service or product. Because over estimation will be a reason for high spendings and at last undesirable bankruptcy.
The total Investment required for your business must be calculated, too. If you don’t have enough capital to start your business, this means you need somebody else’s money. VC’s or angel investors are the best candidates for investing on your business. Banks are another option but in this economic situation, it’s so hard to get a loan. On the Internet, you can reach VC’s and angel investors and submit your ideas to them very easily. But before searching for an investor, you must have a business plan. An effective business plan is a powerful tool for you to use as an effective selling document. A business plan may be used to seekfunding.
Internet Marketing:A nieche marketers first task is to communicate the key messages to the audience. The web has very broad reach capability and has passed the the other mediums’ reach level. Internet gives more ability to target the customers. Profiling and segmenting customers is easier than the traditional mediums like television. For example you have an advertisement campaign and target people living in big cities like NY. You can only estimate how many people has watched your advertisements and come to you to buy your services or products. But Internet advertisement can show you who clicks your ads and come to your website to buy your services or products. Internet marketing activities are all easily measurable and you can see the reactions immediately.One of the most important tricks for the Internet marketing is making your customers feel themselves as a member of a invaluable community. This is so hard because state of belonging comes from hearth; this is so easy because you have an efficient tool named ‘Social Networking’ .Interactivity is another advantage of Internet marketing.The increasing ease of use makes the Internet the most interactive marketing media. Consumers want and like to comment on your products or services; and if you response their wishes quickly then you’ll become a lovemark.
Innovation is The King: It’s absolutely true that innovation is the king in the niche marketing world. Initially, you must have an innovative – niche idea. But innovation becomes more important if you succeed starting and running a niche market – business. The competition will come to you at the speed of light. There will be many competitors which want to take your market.; even the super niche markets face competition. The key action to protect your business is living with innovation. You must improve your services or products frequently by product/service innovations; so before they copy your idea you must serve new features to your customers.Another type of innovation is user experience innovation. Usability of your products or services,;how the consumers feel when using your products or services, how they can reach you when a problem occurs, your CRM capabilities and some other touchpoints are as important as your products or services. We must control the level of the user experience and we must be sure it’s high-level. Every niche business must cycle through these five steps to survive.

Abstractly, every marketing medium has different applicability and power , and the positives of Internet as a marketing medium far outweigh negatives. With an innovative – niche business idea and a well defined customer base you can succeed at Niche Marketing on the Internet.

I think, niche marketing on the Internet will be the future of the marketing and believe that marketing will be reduced to individual-level…

* This article is a draft and will be improved. Your comments are especially welcome.