Establishing Your Product in a Niche or Vertical Market
Remember ezimerchant's five ingredients to online success? These were:
o Getting found on search engines
o Establishing your product in a niche or vertical market
o Creating a great Unique Selling Proposition
o Exceptional customer relationship management
o Patience
In this ezimail issue I want to cover the topic of establishing your product in a niche or vertical market. A niche market is a focused, targetable portion of a market frequently not addressed by mainstream providers.
Why should you bother to establish a niche market? Because of the great advantage of being alone there; other small businesses may not be aware of your particular niche market, and large businesses won't want to bother with it. The trick to capitalising on a niche market is to find or develop a market niche that has customers who are accessible, that is growing fast enough, and that is not owned by one established vendor already.
The biggest mistake an online business can make is being everything to everyone. Look at the Pet category. Why bother competing with pets.com when you could focus on and attract every parakeet owner in the world with parakeets.com (Interestingly, this has been taken as a domain but not used!)
The truth is, running two or three web...
Find Receptive Customers with Niche Marketing
A great marketer may believe he or she can sell the proverbial "ice cubes to Eskimos"--and they may be right. Great sales techniques and marketing strategies can make virtually any product a winner. Someone did, after all, make a fortune by selling simple stones to the public simply by marketing them as "pet rocks." Imagine, however, just how incredibly successful a sales campaign could be if you already had an interested audience hungry for a product? This is the tantalizing scenario provided in the realm of niche marketing.
Niche marketing focuses on finding insular market segments that are not well-served by larger entities seeking to appeal to "the masses." These niches are often woefully underserved and are extremely receptive to new product offering aimed to their particular interests and needs. A talented internet marketer can make the exploitation of smaller niche markets remarkably lucrative.
Successfully marketing products to discrete niches requires the very same tools needed by traditional marketers. One must have an understanding of the market and a product to sell. The better the understanding of the niche, the more likely a marketer is to be successful. Likewise, a well-designed product is...
