These days it has become increasingly more and more difficult to distinguish your business amongst the sea of like businesses that offer the same or similar services that yours does. How do you stand out in the crowd? Well, first of all, stop trying to compete with bigger companies that offer more and that are already established in the industry you’re trying to get into. Secondly, find a niche – a smaller market of potential customers that you can focus your business on and achieve success with. But why?

Having a niche for your business can help you on a variety of different levels – decreased competition, higher visibility in the market, the ability to stay ahead in your niche market – there’s a lot of sense to be made from determining a niche for your business. Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of niche marketing more closely:

Less Competition

As you can imagine, having a niche market allows you to enjoy less competition for the same customers. This helps you focus on your niche market while the other guys are trying to compete on a much broader scale. Decreased competition allows you to save some of your resources that you were using to market to everyone because you’re now focusing on a much smaller group of potential customers. And, honestly, who wants to work harder on their acquisition efforts because there’s just too much competition? That’s right, no one.

Increased Visibility

When you’re not competing for the top spot for the most general relevant keywords in search engine results, you’re obviously going to be seen more – a lot more. In fact, by doing some keyword research, you can probably find much better, relevant and accurate keywords that aren’t being targeted by bigger companies who compete for broader terms. It’s not that you don’t want to be seen by people using those broad terms, it’s that you want to not have to compete for them, directly. More specific searches lead to more visibility and less competition.

Honed Expertise

Not surprisingly, when you focus on a niche market, you focus your attention – your expertise – on that niche. All of your products and services cater to that niche, for example, DPi Graphics has small businesses in their niche market, many whom have been in business less than 5 years. Why? Because we believe we can best be of service to businesses starting out with quality design and marketing. Our expertise is in helping small businesses with their design. Can we do design for large businesses and corporations? Absolutely. Do we focus on those businesses? Nope, because they aren’t in our niche market. Our expertise has been honed by focusing on small businesses such that it has become what DPi Graphics is all about.

Better Customer Relationships

When you’re focused on your customers and their needs, your business relationships prosper. Having a focus on your customer’s needs is part of having a niche; you’ve seen the need within your market and created the niche. Your customer’s needs are the needs of your niche market. When your customers see that you’re attuned to their needs and issues, their trust in you builds. Having and focusing on a niche can help you build relationships with customers that will last well beyond the sale.

Fewer Resources Needed

As was stated above, when you have less competition, you’re likely to use fewer resources to keep up. Saving on resources is huge; and it’s effects are probably only felt after scaling down from a broad marketing to a niche market. Resources, which often refer to time, people and money, are perhaps one of the biggest commodities a business has and any time you can save on them, well, that’s huge. Ensuring that you and your business aren’t spread to thin is one of the most important things you can do to protect your achievements. Staying fresh and taking the time to manage those resources instead of having to expend them will enable you to pay attention to the needs of your niche market more closely.

Easier to Stay Ahead

When you’ve got less competition and you’re using fewer resources, it’s just easier to stay ahead – maybe even get ahead – of the competition. Too often, larger businesses whose focus is too broad spend more time focusing on what the competition is doing and less on what the mission and vision of their business is. When that happens, customer relationships suffer and an obsession with staying ahead of the competition sets in, which is a recipe for failure. Staying ahead should be part of your focus, but your main focus should be on your niche, the needs of your customers and fostering good business relationships. Be content to stay ahead of the game, but don’t be swayed to ignore your niche’s needs just to be on top.

Easier to Determine Target Market

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, having a niche for your business helps you identify you target market easier. Knowing how to market to your target market (check out our post on target audience) may help you determine you niche – if you haven’t found one yet. Your ideal customer belongs to a certain niche – that niche, or target market, is where your marketing efforts should focus. It seems pretty easy, however, when asked who their target audience is, many businesses can’t tell you definitively how they are trying to reach. By defining your niche, you define your target audience. The broader your market, the more difficult it will be to determine who exactly is your ideal customer.

As you can see, there are a slew of benefits to finding a niche market for your business. And, it really is something you should do. If you’re tired of trying to compete with the big corporations, or at least, businesses with large advertising and marketing budgets, try a different approach. Go smaller instead of bigger. More specialized instead of generalized. Find the one thing you do better than anyone else and make that your niche. Focus on it and market it. Take care of your niche and it will take care of you.