This is a question every entrepreneur has to answer but, I have to say, when I started out I found it difficult to answer in relation to my business. Funnily enough I didn’t find it a problem when working with my clients and identifying their niches. I found I could easily cut through the fog and arrive at an answer for them but the same didn’t apply for me. In the beginning it worried me and I asked a number of people hoping to arrive at a solution but no one quite gave me a satisfactory answer. Although I couldn’t articulate at that point what my niche was I knew that when I heard it and it felt authentic I would know it. So I decided to be kind to myself, relax and just allow it to fester underneath the surface while I focus my attention on some of the practicalities of running a business.
So, how important is having a niche for your business? Surely if you have a product or a service that everyone in the world could use then why try and reduce it down to a very small group?
Well just from a practical point of view very few start-ups or SMEs can afford to run a series of global marketing campaigns, apart from cost it’s the amount of time you would need to invest. Social media does to an extent get around this but you would still need to invest a lot of time to reach everyone. So what are the benefits of defining your niche?
- It helps you to attract your ideal clients. That alone is worth it!
- You will be able to maximise your marketing budget by knowing exactly where to focus your campaigns.
- It helps you to build a much stronger presence in your market by developing more targeted marketing content.
- It enables you to focus your communication efforts to help you stand out in a crowded market and to be seen as the expert in your field.
- It helps with positioning, which comes before branding – see my post tomorrow.
So choosing the right niche for your business is important but don’t worry if you can’t do it immediately, you just need to give yourself time to get clear and not allow others around you to pressurise you into choosing a niche.
Have a fabulous day everyone and it’s the weekend – time for champagne!
Carole
