5 Steps to Find Your Niche

If you have started your own business or thought about it, you’ve probably heard how important it is to find your niche. But that can be easier said than done. How do you find a market that you feel you will be able to cut through the noise and leave a mark?    

Start with What You Know

Nailing down your value proposition is difficult. If you are doing it in a field or industry that you aren’t familiar with, it is exponentially harder. If you want to find your niche, start with what you already know. What are your current skills and talents? What do people ask you to help them with all the time? There is a difference between what you are good at and what you are interested in and want to jump into. That difference will translate into more resolve, stronger confidence and greater overall resilience when you are feeling stuck. Make a list of your three greatest strengths and narrow it down from there using additional criteria.

Identify Where is the Greatest Need

Prioritize your list of three strengths by which one solves a problem or serves a need for the greatest number of people. You can’t be all things to all people. It is important to be focused on who your target client is and communicate your value proposition based on what benefit they will experience. This means knowing your clients’ pain points and being able to speak to how their live will be better from working with you/using your products.

Find Your Niche by Validating Your Focus

You know you are great at what you do. You see the value in what you have to offer. You believe that your prospective customers will benefit greatly from your offering. But that doesn’t mean the market actually exists. Validate your beliefs by doing market research. Are there other companies already offering solutions? Are you finding evidence online that people are searching for solutions to the problem/need you solve? Wherever you have the opportunity, gather information directly from your potential customer. Entrepreneur suggests using resources such as Quora, Google Trends and Google Adwords to include in your  market research. When you find your niche, your understanding of the market and how to differentiate, communicate and sell in that market will make a tremendous difference to your level of success.

Create and Adjust Your Offer

Now that you have a few areas of interest and have figured out where your opportunity is related to market size, it is time to look at the numbers. How much are people going to be willing to pay for your offering? Do you solve a problem of convenience or of necessity (is your offering recession proof)? If you are a one of a kind offering (ideally, you are), it can be harder to determine what the market will bear because there is no historical information. This means you want to build testing and opportunities to collect feedback into your business processes, so you can make adjustments if necessary.

The Takaway

Napoleon Hill shares in the classic book, Think and Grow Rich that it is the application of specialized knowledge where there is greatest opportunity. Once you find your niche, you have the opportunity to leverage your specialized knowledge to build a successful business.