How Carving A Niche For Your Brand Can Skyrocket Your Business
If you wanted to build a house, would you give the building contract to anyone who says they are “capable”, or would you rather give the contract to an architect?
Carving a niche for your brand can skyrocket your business to success in more ways than you can imagine.
If you are a someone who is very passionate about cooking, and you want to develop your brand as a chef, if people sense that you know what you are doing, you will gain more recognition than someone who isn’t only a cook, but a physical health expert, a dentist, a personal trainer and an athlete.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it’s bad to have many interests. I’m definitely not asking you to forget your other hobbies.
All I am saying is that you pick one of your many hobbies and interests, specialize and learn all you can in that field. Focus on doing excellent work and you will become recognized.
Who says chefs can’t run marathons once in a while?
A niche market is the subset of a market on which a specific business (products or service) is focused.
In this post, you are going to learn the benefits of carving a niche for your brand and how you can go about carving a niche for your brand.
What are the benefits of carving a niche for your brand?
It’s possible that you have come across this topic before. The whole internet is going crazy about carving a niche for their brand. These days, it seems like everyone and their sister is talking about niching.
In fact, you have come across the sentence so many times that it has started to sound like the most cliche of all things cliche. LOL.
Just because it sounds like a cliche doesn’t mean it’s not true.
Specialized understanding and fluency in a specific field is a key prerequisite to success. So this cliche is very necessary.
Now let’s get into it.
Why should you carve a niche?
1. Carving a niche for your brand makes you a thought leader in that field
Being a thought leader in your industry is one of the best things that can ever happen to you, because, as a thought leader, you set the trends for others to follow.
You are an authority because people value what you say, they trust you enough to hold your word as their gospel truth.
Your specialized knowledge is highly respected, you gain trust and credibility so easily because you are known for one thing.
Look at content creators on social media. People flock to their pages to get the latest ideas, knowledge and information about things.
They have a massive following and a huge amount of likes on all their posts because they have a defined audience, and their audience knows what to expect.
Because their audience knows what they do, they know what to expect from their favourite influencers. And in this new age, once you have over 5k followers, you are considered a celebrity. Therefore, it’s best to have a defined audience.
Serving a niche market brings you a lot of trust and credibility. For example, many patients will rather let a heart surgeon operate them than a surgeon who is good in this and in that.
2. Helps attract the right people
If you have a defined audience, there are so many things you can do with it.
Many influencers with define audiences are the target of big brands who want to reach the kinds of audiences the influencers have.
So let’s say, for instance, you are a fashion blogger, and your audience are college/university students who love to learn of the new fashion trends and dress as casual as they can.
Brands that want to reach college students will reach out to you for advert purposes, fashion brands and stylists will also want to collaborate with you, just to reach your audience.
Asides that, you tend to attract your kind of audience.
If you sold hair extensions for example and you focus on imported hairs, people who love to rock premium imported hair extensions will flock to your page.
Or if you are a graphic designer, who only makes complimentary cards for small business owners, you will attract people who want to make business cards.
Except you want to expand your business, adding other design projects to your portfolio may confuse your audience.
There are many ways to go about expanding your business. Jumping from one niche to the other, or combining a lot of services together is not the best way.
3. Reduced Competition
Carving a niche for your brand will also cause you to enjoy a reduced amount of competition in your field once in a while.
Although we will always have competition in business, once you are seen as an expert in a niche market, competition tends to be less intense.
As it’s easier to get more of the same types of the customer over and over again, you won’t have to really worry about how to get new clients.
People will naturally gravitate toward you. They’ll research your field and your name will pop up, so that way, you are getting clients.
Word of mouth is also another great way to attract customers as a specialist because one good job you do for a client spreads around, and before you know it, you are getting booked regularly.
All in all, carving a niche for your brand makes you far more memorable, and you’re likely to be remembered than the generalist.
4. Lesser costs on marketing
Since you don’t try to be all things to all people, you will find it easy to define your market and nail your ideal clients.
This will drastically reduce your marketing costs because you know who you are talking to and you know how to get them.
You know what their needs are and where you can find them. In fact, you’ve spent a lot of money researching who they are so you don’t need to spend more money meeting their needs.
Therefore, marketing to them will be pretty easy and will cost very little. Developing sales and marketing messages become easy and cheap once you’ve nailed your ideal clients.
And when your niche is clearly defined, you don’t need to spend blindly anymore, instead, you can focus all your selling and marketing activities on your target market.
Let’s now look at how to carve a niche for your brand
So how do you carve a niche for your brand?
By trying to be all things to all people, you will find it hard to get a strong customer base, and you’ll often spend a lot of money trying to advertise to multiple people at once.
But carving a niche for your brand will save you a lot of that money and your time.
1. First, determine the market you want to enter
You need to first determine the market you want to serve.
Whether it is food, fashion, finance, sports, business, music, etc. You must decide which one you want first.
To do this, and to make sure that you are as good as can be, you must first look at the knowledge and skills that you have.
Here, you will need to carry out SWOT analysis. SWOT is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.
Using the SWOT analysis when carving a niche for your brand will help you decide which niche to go. So if you have adequate knowledge in the Finance and Business niches, the SWOT analysis which helps to determine which one to give a go.
If you choose to go into the food niche, you can start creating a business brand around it. After you’ve done your SWOT analysis, start building your brand both online and offline.
Get a website and create well-optimized social media pages, create a content strategy, start blogging about your new food business so that you can get your brand in front of new people.
Just loving to cook will not cut it, you must also start getting yourself familiar with all the things you need to know to make an excellent cook and build a lasting business.
2. Break it down into a micro-niche
A micro niche is a specific area in the broad niche that you have chosen.
What this means is that, if you have chosen to open a food business, you must specify what kind of food you want to cook.
You can decide to specialize in making the best finger foods there is. You can choose to make traditional dishes as well. There are many kinds of cooks out there.
Researching properly before you start will put you many steps ahead those that are just starting.
3. Determine your target audience
If you can adequately nail your target audience, you will succeed in your content marketing strategy.
Your target audience is the people you are trying to reach with your content, who you are creating new products and services for and who you want to reach with your business.
To better nail your target audience, you can create what is called a buyer persona for your business.
Read this post on how to create an ideal buyer persona for your business
By nailing your target audience, you will have little to no problem selling and creating content for your audience.
Your target audience will love beautiful and quality pictures of food posted on a regular basis, so you would want to make sure that your Instagram page is well optimized.
Also, you can share your recipes via your blog. You can create content around healthy eating, meal plans, balanced diets and so on.
Then you would need to create a Youtube channel where you will share your videos, cooking etc.
Here are 6 tips to help you promote your business properly wherever you go
Conclusion
In all seriousness, carving a great niche will help your brand grow faster, help you reach the right people fast and help you succeed in your overall business brand development.
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