When you start out in business, if you’ve got some moxie and some drive, you secretly pursue (and sometimes openly brag about) World Domination! You’re going to be the Donald Trump of whatever! Your name will be in lights! You’ll lose track of the 100-dollar bills that you sprinkle off your hotel balcony for the lesser folks to scrape up. Yes, indeed, a life of lights, limos, and luxury lies just over the horizon!
Then you realize, a few years later, that your chances lie fixed somewhere between fat and slim. The horizon is closer, and it looks a lot more like mortgage payments and daily survival. So much for world domination.
Now you’re ready to really think about conquering something. And that’s a niche. Leave World Domination for Hannibal. You want Niche Domination.
What is niche domination? It’s creating, or moving into, a market cavity narrow enough that you can become the big fish, and expansive (or expand-able) enough that you can make a living dominating it.
You’re a marketer. Fair enough. So are millions of others, so you immediately are in no position to be THE go-to marketer of the century. So…
- What specific marketing competency(s) do you possess?
- What are you most interested in?
- Which industry is the one you best know, or in which do you see the most opportunity?
- What sub-set of that industry is your best target?
- Which companies do you stand a realistic chance of making your mark on, or with?
- Is there something quite unique – a hole in the market – that you can fill?
Now you’re ready to pursue Niche Domination! The fact is, you have to be a big fish in only one very small pond to be a resounding success. You don’t want to be in a large lake jockeying for position with 200 other boats, chasing after the same fish. You want to find a small, hidden body of water where other boats don’t go.
Forget world domination. Or at least, build your foundation with niche domination and move on from there. There’s a ton of success to be had, and money to be made, in the small creases of the marketplace!
(Image credit)
I posted on this topic a few days ago at my site, MyShingle.com here -
http://www.myshingle.com/2008/12/articles/marketing-making-money/another-pitch-for-the-niche/
I agree with you and look forward to reading more of your advice on how to succeed in niche markets.
I think one of the best advantages to finding your niche is how much easier it makes search engine optimisation (SEO). If you can identify a specific need in the marketplace, and you know there are people searching for a term related to it in the search engines (using Google’s AdWords etc), then you’ve got yourself a clear marketing channel ahead of you.
I am always thinking about what hole in the market there might be. Because if you can fill that one hole that it is much easier to pursue niche domination. Otherwise, I find it pretty difficult to have domination when there are already so many more successful blogs in that niche.
So true, Specialize in what is in your brain, take that to your market. Knowledge sells on the Internet. People are hungry for super content. When you get down to that, your competition at Google is a lot less. David
The simple fact of the matter is that prospects/customers appreciate expertise – very specific expertise. Trust is the name of the game. You garner trust by understanding the needs of the customer, you need to become the trusted adviser.
Very insightful. We have adopted this strategy when starting web hosting and it has really paid off (providing hosting for the Chinese market, where we are based). We could have tried to go ahead the Godaddy and 1and1 and be nowhere by now…