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.

And I realized that 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, I feared rejection immensely, which led to a reclusive childhood. I wanted to overcome my fears and decided to dive into the world of sales in order to fight them. Years passed and many failures ensued until I finally became the top producing salesperson in Canada for a Fortune 500 company.

How did I accomplish that?

Since I hated prospecting, I found and developed 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. In short, I went from prospecting to positioning.

In other words, I decided to specialize in a specific niche — even though my employer did not require it of me. I positioned myself as an expert in a specific area (for a specific target 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, but for now, 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. Prospecting online is not only difficult but also impossible. 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. And by being unique, you will naturally become the leader. With all the competition out there, it is no longer possible to be better than the others. The goal, therefore, is to be different — and not better.

In other words, don’t duplicate. And don’t dominate. Instead, differentiate!

It’s better to be the leader in a small niche than an alsoran in a general one.

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. But being a copywriter specializing in cosmetic surgery (which was my niche at the time), I naturally dominated that niche.

Today’s world has become overcommunicated and hypercompetitive — one huge blur of sameness, in my estimation. If you attempt to be too general or too wide in your approach, you will only dissipate among the blur. And people will not see any greater value in buying from you than in buying from the competition.

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, 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 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 quite a challenge if not impossible. Admittedly, it is 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 visitors that will simply never buy from you?

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

They may fall into your target market, but visitors that leave your website do so because they likely feel left out or become uninterested fast. Others simply choose competitors that might provide them with greater perceived value. In other words, the broader you are in your appeal, the less relevant you will be to any and every individual visiting your site.

If your site sells everything, chances are that your audience will not perceive any greater value in shopping from you than from anyone else. In fact, the only common denominator, with which they have to work, is price. If there are no other points of comparison, naturally the cheapest alternative wins.

Why? Because the greatest common denominator between generalists is pricing. And price 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. Put in a different way, the more focused you are, the less you will need to produce a sufficient quantity of website visitors to produce similar results.

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 commonly asked question I receive from aspiring entrepreneurs is this: “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. But that’s not the problem. It’s not what you sell. 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 provide them with the solution.

In order to achieve this, you need to be observant and listen to the needs of the marketplace. 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 have found a niche, everything will flow from that point. In fact, if you follow this tactic you will constantly find products to sell.

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

Sure, there are ultra-targeted niches that are very small and very limited. In such cases, the only way to remain profitable is to dominate several of them. This is often 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, if you’re a generalist already, narrowing your focus to a smaller segment 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. And leadership is not the result of an action or an event. It’s based on the power of perception.

If you offer a customary 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? Would you choose a general, medical practitioner, even a general surgeon? Not really. You would probably choose a neurosurgeon. 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 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. Specialization is in itself a marketing process that, as a byproduct, generates the perception of expertise. It’s amazingly effective in creating “top-of-mind” awareness among a specific target market.

For instance, 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 advertisements than a typical advertising agent will. A photographer specializing in weddings will get more bookings than a regular photographer will. Ad infinitum.

As more businesses get started, and the more inundated with marketing messages our society becomes, the less time, energy and money people will have to spend in choosing the companies with which they will do business. Thus, specialization helps to solve that problem by projecting an aura of expertise.

Take the mechanic, mentioned earlier. Rarely would you call a general mechanic an “expert mechanic,” 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 — that specializes in imported car brakes as an “expert mechanic.”

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

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