How to Find Your Business Niche

3 Ways to Help Better Position Your Business for Market Success

Finding your business niche is the first step of defining your brand. If you don’t understand how to position your business in the market place or know what you’re selling and why, then you won’t be able to effectively market your business.

It’s important to find your business niche so you can:

• Differentiate yourself from your competitors;

• Optimize your website for the right keywords;

• Have a clear message on all marketing materials;

• Develop new ideas or products that appeal to your target market.

Here are 3 ways to make finding your business niche easier:

1. Narrow your focus.

You’ve heard the saying “Go big or go home?” Not in this case. To stand out from the competition and attract more visitors to your website, you need to be very specific about what you offer.

For example, business may offer a variety of marketing services. However, they wouldn’t get very far if we only used the keyword “marketing services” on their website or put that term on their business cards.

Instead, they promote a number of different services on their website, marketing materials and in the real world such as Brand & Marketing Consulting, Website Development and SEO.

Get focused and you’ll find your business niche or niches.

2. Define your target market.

You’ll hear this again and again in marketing advice: finding the right audience to target is crucial.

Many business owners make the mistake of trying to be everything to everybody, or launch a website filled with content that doesn’t speak clearly to the people they want to reach.

Think about who wants what you’re selling. Is it entrepreneurs? HR professionals? Stay at home dads? Tech-savvy millennials?

Once you’re come up with your target audience, you can narrow down and define your business niche even more. Plus, you’ll be able to craft search engine-optimized content that will engage and inform exactly who you want to be buying your products or services.

3. Know the competition.

It’s essential to know what kind of competition you’re up against when you’re defining your business niche. Start with Google.

Search the keywords people might use to find your business. If you see pages and pages of results and a lot of PPC ads (those are the paid ads that appear to the right and sometimes above the organic results), competition is high for that keyword or keywords.

You’ll probably want to narrow down your niche even further, or find another niche to target. For example, if your niche is corporate fitness training but there’s a lot of competition, brainstorm some other keywords to optimize your site for – maybe in-office corporate training, executive fitness training and corporate weight training.

The trick is to find the balance between low-competition keywords that have a decent search volume. If you’re the only one using a specific keyword but nobody is searching for it, you’re not going to get the results you want.

Once you have defined your business niche, you’ll be able to market your products or services more effectively.

You’ll know your focus, target market and competition, which will make differentiating your brand and defining your unique selling proposition (USP) much simpler.

A good brand strategy takes time, and ideally some professional help to ensure you’ve got everything you need for a clear, concise and compelling brand message.