Why finding your own niche can lead to business success

   

Can you identify your audience? One of the most important and sometimes difficult first tasks of any new business owner is to identify who will be interested in buying their products or services, who they should market to and who needs to hear from them? The classic mistake made by all too many entrepreneurs is to assume that they are playing to an audience that includes … well, everyone.

Today’s market is moving further and further away from mass interest and closer to niche businesses – those that are focused on a particular social, racial or financial segment of the market that can be clearly identified and marketed to.

For years business advisers, accountants and bank managers have been trying to get us to focus on our core markets, but now is definitely the time to start listening. It is more important than ever to know your audience, to understand their motivations, their wants and needs, where they may be found and how they may be influenced.

You don't need millions of clients to be profitable

It is also more acceptable than ever before to play to a smaller crowd to achieve your corporate success. You don’t need to have millions of clients to be profitable: even massive mass-market players are starting to move towards a focus on the niche or narrower audience.

Search engines are a good barometer for business activity. They rely for their survival on offering the public an intuitive interface with the web that will return the business websites that they need, and a shift of focus towards offering niche sector searches has been noted recently.

Google is a global phenomenon – it is not the most popular search engine in every country but it has a monopoly in much of the western world, and most of us find it difficult to remember a time before it existed (it was actually launched just ten years ago, in September 1998).

Google has always taken a “whole of market” approach to searching for results for its customers, but trends are now shifting, and smaller, newer competitors are nipping at its heels by offering a more sector-orientated approach to search. If Google does not step up to this plate, it runs the very real risk of losing its monopoly and going the way of former search mega services such as AltaVista and Lycos (we don’t hear much from them these days, but once upon a time they were the search engines of choice).

The growth of niche search engines

This new trend has shown that there is a demand not only for more niche or sector-orientated businesses but also for search engines that are tweaked or tweakable towards finding them.

The role of a search engine is to supply the most appropriate results for its audience, but what percentage of a search engine’s users are blind, women, Korean-speaking, Muslim …? Search engines that weight the importance of websites favouring a particular sub-section of society will therefore be more accurate and useful for that sub-section, and this is what is starting to happen.

One such search service, recently reported on by the BBC, is Rushmore Drive. Launched in April 2008, it was created specifically for a black American audience. Because search engines decide upon the positioning of websites in their results based on the wants and needs of the majority of those who use them, an argument can quite confidently be lodged that as only 14% of the American population are black their needs and wants are not being effectively met by an “all of market” search engine – or at least that is the belief of Rushmore Drive’s founders.

Google and Yahoo! have made some steps in this direction by providing facilities to enable users to create their own individually orientated search facilities, but we are well and truly on the brink of a new era in search that paves the way not only for new players at the top of this arena, but for any niche or sector-orientated business.

Start your niche business

Corporate gurus have been telling us for some time that to succeed in your business you must be completely focused on its success and to truly believe in and be excited by what you do.

What better way of achieving this than to start a business based around your community, a hobby that you are passionate about or something that you fervently believe is missing in the world? Being this niche-orientated will enable you to accurately identify your audience, focus your promotion on them and rapidly become a big fish in your small pond.

Small businesses rarely fail because of a lack of energy and enthusiasm, as it would be quite normal to find a new business owner slaving over their work well into the night, on weekends and over public holidays. Lack of funds and lack of entrepreneurial experience are the most common reasons why new businesses do not reach their potential.

To focus your business on a smaller market will enable you to minimise financial waste and maximise return on investment when promoting (something your accountant and bank manager will rejoice at).

About the Author

This article was written by Bill Morrow, founder of Angels Den. Angels Den offers entrepreneurs with bright ideas or enterprises of any size the opportunity to meet with investors whose funds can help businesses to reach their true potential.

• Free Accounts Software for small businesses - Download TAS Basics Now!
• Starting Up? Get 18 months free banking, and much more from Lloyds TSB!
• Home Business Insurance - Save money with Direct Line for Business. We guarantee to beat any quote for the same cover. Immediate quote available.