super niching

I want to talk to you today about one of the most important areas of finding your gap in the market: super niching. This is something I use with my regular business mentoring and coaching clients all the time, and it’s one of the key areas I’m using to develop the gap-in-the-market business ideas and recipes over at New Business Ideas Collection. 

Traditional niching

Traditional niching is a strategy they teach at business school, and it’s not really rocket science. You find a particular group of people to supply your services to and concentrate on that area. Big companies do this all the time, for example HP make a huge range of printers for all kinds of people, and their niches will be something like:

• Granny home users who want to print photos from their mobile or camera – sell them a colour printer which is good at photos, and prints from a Wi-Fi connection on a phone.

• Small office/home office folk who want to print, copy and scan in very small quantities – sell them a multi-function printer which prints slowly and is okay but not brilliant quality.

• Medium office – a bigger, faster machine, probably a laser printer which prints quite fast and is good quality, for 10 times the price.

• Bigger office – a super-fast, all bells and whistles laser printer which can print a whole book out in 5 minutes and doesn’t break down all the time, but costs a fortune

Which niche did you fall into when you bought your printer?

Super niching – for 21st century small businesses

Super niching is about finding a really specialist area for your business, where you concentrate your efforts. And when I say concentrate on that area, I mean really concentrate, to the exclusion of all others. Examples of super-niches might be:

• Businesses in Brighton, Shoreham and Worthing who need to find office space because they’re expanding and don’t have time to talk to estate agents themselves.

• People in Cardiff who are recovering from surgery within the last month and need extra help with rehabilitation and are able to pay (or have insurance).

• Women who have been unfairly dismissed from work because they were pregnant.

• Businesses where the board members have fallen out with one another and need mediation, specialist advice and help to get the team dynamics working in a healthy way again.

All four of these would be the basis of a brilliant super-niche new business, or a super-niche for an existing business to transform into, or to focus their efforts on.

It used to be that you had to be more of a generalist supplier, so if you were a law firm, you probably offered all kinds of law, and could never really specialise. But now, when everyone’s first port of call to find a lawyer or new office space or board mediation is Google, you can build up a great business on a much smaller niche, if you get your online marketing right.

Super niching allows you to get really good at what you do

A superniche strategy allows you to build up a very firm foundation in your specialist area, both in marketing and in becoming truly amazing at what you do.

When you only have to worry about knowing everything there is to know about office space in Brighton, Shoreham and Worthing, you can get very in-depth with your knowledge of the area, because you don’t have to know anything about Eastbourne or London. And that becomes your selling point, and why your business succeeds.

I can’t recommend this super niching strategy enough – have a play with it and let me know how you get on. And if you want some more help with finding new services, products and finding your gap in the market, you should sign up to my regular emails with all kinds of strategies for developing new business ideas.

Photo credit – Colin Hanson from Flickr on a creative commons licence.  I’ve included the koala because it’s so cuddly, and because these creatures have successfully evolved to fill a very particular environmental superniche which no one else wanted.