Carve Your Niche By Dominating One

I was recently inter­viewed by a print mag­a­zine about how I started my busi­ness. In it, I offered sev­eral tips and ideas on how to carve a niche in the mar­ket­place that I per­son­ally applied.

I real­ized some of these tips were par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful. So I wanted to reprint some of my answers here for you.

If you know my per­sonal story, you know how niche mar­ket­ing played an impor­tant role in my career.

Long story short, as the child of an alco­holic I feared rejec­tion immensely, which led to a reclu­sive child­hood. We all fear rejec­tion to some degree. But for me, it was debilitating.

I wanted to over­come my fears and decided to dive into the world of sales in order to fight them head-​​on. Years passed and many fail­ures ensued until I finally became the top pro­duc­ing sales­per­son in Canada for a major For­tune 500 company.

How did I accom­plish that?

Since I hated prospect­ing, I found more effec­tive mar­ket­ing strate­gies that caused high qual­ity prospects to come to me instead of the other way around. I no longer had to prospect. I no longer had to be rejected. I no longer had doors slammed in my face.

In short, I went from prospect­ing to positioning.

In other words, I decided to spe­cial­ize in a spe­cific niche and deal with only a small per­cent­age of the mar­ket — even though my employer did not require it of me. I posi­tioned myself as an expert for a spe­cific tar­get mar­ket within that company’s larger market.

Even though I could sell every­thing to every­one from this employer, I decided to spe­cial­ize in only one prod­uct line for one par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gory of prospect.

The result? I appeared as a spe­cial­ist. (I’ll come back to this later.)

Real­ize that doing so helped me to attract pre-​​qualified prospects to my door. I didn’t have to do cold prospect­ing any­more. I didn’t have to “bother peo­ple” to lis­ten to my pitch. I attracted higher qual­ity prospects who wanted me to help them.

Peo­ple today are bom­barded with so much infor­ma­tion, com­mer­cials, and com­pe­ti­tion. Espe­cially online. Prospect­ing, espe­cially cold prospect­ing, is not only dif­fi­cult but also next to impos­si­ble. (Unless you have a million-​​dollar adver­tis­ing bud­get to risk.)

Thus, you have to mar­ket in such a way that causes those kinds of peo­ple to come to your busi­ness or web­site, and not the other way around. Like a mag­net, if you will.

There­fore, rather than prospect for clients you must posi­tion your busi­ness as unique in a par­tic­u­lar cat­e­gory or indus­try, or for a spe­cific audi­ence or mar­ket. By being unique and focused on a core mar­ket, you will nat­u­rally become the leader in that market.

With all the com­pe­ti­tion out there vying for your market’s atten­tion, it is no longer pos­si­ble to be bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion. The goal is to be dif­fer­ent, not better.

In other words, don’t dupli­cate. Instead, dif­fer­en­ti­ate! It’s bet­ter to be the leader in a small niche than an also­ran in a gen­eral one. You will nat­u­rally dom­i­nate that mar­ket as a byprod­uct rather than spin­ning your wheels try­ing to cor­ner a mar­ket by brute force.

Being a gen­eral copy­writer when I first started out would have pit­ted me against all the copy­writ­ers in the world, par­tic­u­larly all the top copy­writ­ers who were far bet­ter than me.

How­ever, being a copy­writer spe­cial­iz­ing in cos­metic surgery, which was my niche at the time, I nat­u­rally dom­i­nated that niche. I called myself “Suc­cess Doc­tor” because I helped doc­tors become suc­cess­ful. Through bet­ter copy­writ­ing and mar­ket­ing, that is.

Today’s world has become over­com­mu­ni­cated, over­ad­ver­tised, and hyper­com­pet­i­tive, it all appears as just one huge blur of same­ness. If you attempt to be too gen­eral or too wide in your mar­ket­ing approach, you will only dis­si­pate among the blur.

Peo­ple won’t see any greater value in buy­ing from you than in buy­ing from others.

One of the great­est errors com­mit­ted by most new busi­nesses is that they fall into a trap: they try to be “all things to all peo­ple.” And they do so because they are mis­lead by the notion that, by offer­ing more (or by serv­ing more peo­ple), they will gen­er­ate more sales.

That’s under­stand­able for the sur­vival of any new busi­ness depends on the num­ber of sales it makes. How­ever, the more gen­eral you are or appear to be, the more indif­fer­ent you will appear to your audi­ence. Indif­fer­ent to their spe­cific needs, goals, and problems.

Based on the law of aver­ages, you will have to adver­tise and mar­ket your­self quite heav­ily to be in front of as many eye­balls as pos­si­ble, with the hope of attract­ing an ade­quate amount of prospects that will in turn trans­late into a cer­tain num­ber of sales.

Unde­ni­ably, this requires a gigan­tic adver­tis­ing bud­get. Or a heck of a lot of time. For most new and espe­cially smaller busi­nesses, this is obvi­ously quite a challenge.

It’s true that, the greater your reach is, the greater the poten­tial quan­tity of responses will be. But what about qual­ity? Would it mat­ter if your busi­ness or web­site gen­er­ates a large quan­tity of unin­ter­ested, tire-​​kicking vis­i­tors that will sim­ply never buy from you?

Let’s look at the web. If your online busi­ness tar­gets every­one, then your mar­ket­ing mes­sage must be painted with broad brush­strokes as to appeal to every­one. The chal­lenge with such an approach is the fact that you will lose a large per­cent­age of visitors.

Some may fall into your tar­get mar­ket, but most vis­i­tors will leave your web­site because they likely feel left out or have no inter­est. Oth­ers sim­ply choose com­peti­tors that might pro­vide them with greater per­ceived value. Even if they offer the same thing.

In other words, the broader you are in your appeal, the less rel­e­vant you will be to any and every indi­vid­ual vis­it­ing your site. Guess what becomes the decid­ing factor?

If you’re like (or per­ceived to be like) every­body else, then the least com­mon denom­i­na­tor they have to work with is price. Price becomes the only met­ric of com­par­i­son. If there are no other points of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion, nat­u­rally the cheap­est alter­na­tive wins.

Why? Because gen­er­al­ists have too many things in com­mon. There­fore, pric­ing seems like the only dif­fer­ence. It will be the only met­ric used in com­par­ing your value to others.

Sales will increase dra­mat­i­cally if your site is cen­tered on a spe­cific theme, prod­uct, indus­try, peo­ple, or out­come. A niche, in other words. (A niche can still be, or be a part of, the mass mar­ket. A large yet under­served mass mar­ket is still a niche, by the way.)

It’s about focus. For the more focused you are, the less you will need to pro­duce a suf­fi­cient quan­tity of vis­i­tors to pro­duce sim­i­lar results by appeal­ing to everyone.

A good niche is one that has three major qualities:

• It exists already;
• It’s eas­ily identifiable;
• And it’s eas­ily targetable.

Let me explain why this is important.

The most com­mon ques­tion I receive from aspir­ing entre­pre­neurs is: “What prod­uct should I sell?” (Or “what sells well on the Inter­net?”) Quite frankly, every­thing sells and can sell well — from pet food to travel pack­ages — in some way, espe­cially online.

In fact, every­thing is being or can be sold, some­how, in some form or another, on the Inter­net. But that’s not the prob­lem. It’s not what you sell that mat­ters. It’s to whom.

In other words, don’t look first for a prod­uct to sell. Look for an eas­ily tar­getable mar­ket with an eas­ily iden­ti­fi­able need or prob­lem, and fill their need or solve their problem.

In order to achieve this, you need to be obser­vant and lis­ten to the needs of the mar­ket­place. Con­duct some mar­ket research. If peo­ple seem to be ask­ing for a spe­cific solu­tion to a prob­lem, obvi­ously it is because a niche exists that has yet to be filled.

Look at some of the ques­tions peo­ple ask or the com­plaints they have. These are very good indi­ca­tors that a need exists. Oth­er­wise, the mar­ket­place would be silent.

Once you find a viable niche, learn as much as you can from it. Every­thing will flow from that point. Fol­low this tac­tic and you will con­stantly find prod­ucts to sell.

Sim­ply put, don’t carve a niche. Rather, find one and fill it. Con­se­quently, your mar­ket­ing will nat­u­rally help to solid­ify your posi­tion and thus dom­i­nate that niche, rather than try­ing to “get more clients” by try­ing to appeal to and go after everyone.

Sure, there are ultra-​​targeted niches that are very small and lim­ited. In such cases, the only way to remain prof­itable is to dom­i­nate sev­eral of them. Some peo­ple will go after a mul­ti­tude of small niches. Oth­ers will go after smaller ones within a larger market.

This is called “mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion,” where you seg­ment your mar­ket­ing to cater to a wide vari­ety of small niches. But for the scope of this arti­cle, let’s just say that nar­row­ing your focus will attract not only more prospects but far more qual­i­fied prospects, too.

How do you dom­i­nate a niche?

It doesn’t need a lot of work, really. When you posi­tion your­self as the expert in a niche, you nat­u­rally dom­i­nate it through the power of lead­er­ship. Lead­er­ship is not the result of an action or an event. It’s a posi­tion, one based on the power of per­cep­tion.

If you offer a cus­tom­ary prod­uct or ser­vice, or if your com­pe­ti­tion offers the same thing you do, cater­ing to a niche helps to project an aura of unique­ness and supe­ri­or­ity instan­ta­neously by virtue of the fact that it doesn’t appear as customary.

Rather than copy­ing your com­pe­ti­tion, you iso­late your­self from them.

For instance, if you required brain surgery, would you choose a den­tist? Of course not. More impor­tantly, would you choose a gen­eral, med­ical prac­ti­tioner, even a gen­eral sur­geon? No. You would prob­a­bly choose a neu­ro­sur­geon. A brain sur­geon, in other words.

It’s the same thing for direct mar­ket­ing. If you owned an imported car that needed new brakes, would you choose any gen­eral mechanic? Or, if one existed, would you choose one that not only spe­cial­izes in brakes but also spe­cial­izes in imported cars?

Exper­tise is in the eyes of the niche.

You become the leader not because you are supe­rior but because you are dif­fer­ent. You’re going from being indif­fer­ent to your mar­ket to being dif­fer­ent to them.

Spe­cial­iza­tion is in itself a pow­er­ful mar­ket­ing process that, as a byprod­uct, gen­er­ates the per­cep­tion of exper­tise. It’s amaz­ingly effec­tive in cre­at­ing top-​​of-​​mind aware­ness.

Con­trary to pop­u­lar opin­ion, focus­ing on a seem­ingly smaller niche doesn’t lessen your chances of mak­ing sales. Quite the oppo­site. For exam­ple, an accoun­tant spe­cial­iz­ing in car deal­er­ships will acquire more clients than a gen­eral accoun­tant will.

An adver­tis­ing sales­per­son spe­cial­iz­ing in home fur­nish­ing stores will sell more ads than a typ­i­cal sales­per­son will. A pho­tog­ra­pher spe­cial­iz­ing in wed­dings will get more pho­tog­ra­phy book­ings than a reg­u­lar pho­tog­ra­pher will. And the list goes on and on.

As more busi­nesses get started, and the more inun­dated with mar­ket­ing mes­sages our soci­ety becomes, then the less time, energy, and money peo­ple will have to spend in choos­ing the com­pa­nies or web­sites with which they will do business.

Thus, spe­cial­iza­tion helps to solve that prob­lem by pro­ject­ing an aura of expertise.

Take a mechanic. Rarely would you call a gen­eral mechanic an “expert,” unless she has invested a con­sid­er­able amount of resources in brand­ing her­self that way, or in edu­cat­ing her­self deeply in the world of mechan­ics backed by many years of experience.

On the other hand, it would be easy to dub a mechanic — even a new one, with no expe­ri­ence — that spe­cial­izes in imported car brakes as an “expert mechanic.”

Sim­i­larly, by find­ing, fill­ing, and dom­i­nat­ing a niche, you can become an expert by default — not by design. You become an expert as a nat­ural byprod­uct. In other words, a gen­er­al­ist is just a mar­keter. But a spe­cial­ist is an expert. That’s the difference.

About the Author

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