The Riches are In The Niches

Have you ever heard the phrase – The Riches are in the Niches? It’s a pretty famous quote in the marketing world.

A niche is a very targeted service or product that will fill a need that is either essential or desired.

Think golf. A massive worldwide sport.

A golf ball maker operates in a niche of this very large, popular sport. Without balls no one can play so they are pretty important!

If a company is the number one supplier of golf balls they can carve out a very lucrative slice of their pie.

The beauty of a niche is how targeted and specific they are.

By niching down you can stick to your core skills but add a nice little side income to your business.

Marketing a niche is easier

Within your current business, you have a detailed outline of the problems and pains this solution fixes and the type of people and markets that need this problem solved.

Have you ever been confused or disappointed when trying to market your service? You’re not the only one – this is where so many businesses fail, by not identifying their ideal customer and then not running targeted marketing to that person, just marketing to anyone.

This is called shotgun marketing.  Fire and hope you hit.  With a niche, it’s more like you are armed with a sniper rifle targeting specific people directly

But what is a niche to you and how can you find them in your business?

When I first started Melt we were predominantly a web design service – sure we integrated websites with CRM’s but over time our clients were asking for more and more.

Flyers, brochures, CRM training etc.

This is something we have grown and now offer these services as core parts of our business model.

This has been a very organic business building process, something I’ve not had to give much thought to but there are services that we could easily niche down to – we could specialise in Newsletters for example.

How can you identify your niche?

• Are there common questions your current customers ask you?
• Are there common problems that your customers face?
• Is there a service that you run for clients that works really well as the solution to these problems?
• Is there a part of what you have done that’s worked really well and you are seeing great results for your clients with?
• Is it an expanding market?

The niche we chose

In March we launched our very own Targeted Niche Service for Nurseries based on the success we’d had with 2 previous Nursery sites we had built (both won awards and played a key role in the success of those nurseries).

This Niche is called Membership Websites Lab – it hasn’t been a massive piece of work to set up nor does it take us too far away from our core expertise – it actually slots beautifully into what we do brilliantly, which is build websites.

We’ve already sold 50+ which has brought in a nice little side earning of £250,000. This has been a much more successful marketing campaign than the wider ranging marketing campaigns we’ve run for Melt.

The plan is to be more aggressive in our marketing of this over the next 6 months and become the go-to experts for Nursery websites in the UK.

Expanding your success

Once this is up and running smoothly; I will then niche down to another business sector that we know we can help bring value, expertise, and results.

As you can see we’re not having to learn new skills or deviate from what we already do – we do this stuff daily.

We will also be able to see and promote our other core services to these customers. Helping us to increase our average customer value and potential referrals.

Another great example would be…

We’ve been using a very nice little CRM called Active campaign for over 2 years now in our business and for our clients.

We’ve gotten pretty good with it (if I do say so myself). I’ve produced a number of videos on this to help people use the tool – these just sit on YouTube.

Based on these videos alone we have been approached twice now to run some consulting and training for businesses that need help, and for 4 hours consulting received £800.

Based on this we’d be silly not to do something in this space. It’s something I’m putting into place now – so if you’re an Active Campaign user watch this space.

Wrapping it all together

Hopefully, now you can see that Niching down can be a great way to add extra income to your business.

Stop a give yourself a few minutes to think about the little – is there a market, is there a problem, does it fit into your current core skill set as a business, is it something you do already and don’t charge for current clients?

All you need is a page to tell the world about the service and a few emails to test if this could work for you.

If you’d like a bit of guidance in finding a niche I highly recommend you check out Pat Flynn’s book Will it Fly. – in the book he walks you through the process of identifying these services, how to find the market for them and how to market to them. Awesome book.

Thanks For Reading

Matt

P.S. If you have any examples of how niching down really worked for your business – I’d love to hear your stories in the comments below or email me [email protected]