From country-wide demographics to whittling down a small corner of the ecommerce world, everyone needs a niche. It doesnât matter whether youâre working for small businesses or larger market companies: a niche helps you define your audience, whittle down your brand messaging, and sell to the people who care about what youâre selling.
Thereâs just one question. What is the niche market for you?
Finding the niche audience that works best for your specific needs might sound intimidating, but youâll likely find that it doesnât have to be. In this article, weâll tap into what it means to be a âniche business,â show some examples of niche markets, and tackle how you can position your brand to be #1 in the niche you choose.
Letâs dive in.
What is a Niche Marketing Strategy?
A niche marketing strategy is one in which you position your brand to a specific demographicâor segmentâof customers. For example, letâs say that you sell a specific type of soap. You can consider bar soap to be a ânicheâ within the personal care market. Or you could âniche downâ and get more specific about the type of soap you sell.
Maybe your potential customers are men who donât typically buy specialty soaps. Youâve just made your target audience more specificâwhich makes it easier to take on a brand voice that resonates with your audience.
In choosing a niche marketing strategy, youâll often analyze a market beyond its overall size, looking to narrow down the specific psychographics and demographics of your target market. But what does that include? Hereâs what you should expect to consider as you whittle down your marketing efforts to a niche:
- Demographics. Demo, using the same prefix as âdemocracy,â refers to the studying of people and any subset of people. That can include large, population-wide groups of people, such as those who live in a certain area. Another common demographic is people aged 18-25, as theyâre believed to be the driver of trends. But people aged 45-65 tend to have a lot more purchasing power, which can make them more lucrative customers. Ultimately, the demographics you approach with your niche will help shape the marketing campaigns you put together.
- Psychographics. This word refers to organizing people by their dominant mental attitudes. In other words, youâll use a lot about a person that doesnât define where they live, or which part of the population they belong to. Instead, itâs a prevailing attitude that you want to tap into. For example, Harley-Davidson taps into a psychographic of independence and rebelliousnessâit doesnât matter if youâre 30 or 70, because either age can belong to that psychographic.
As the business owner, you have to consider how you want to target the broader marketâor in this case, the narrower market. Usually that doesnât come from casting as wide a net as possible. Sure, some brandsâlike Coca-Colaâcan tap into near-universal values. But a carbonated beverage naturally has broad appeal.
What if you sell something far more specific, such as menâs facial cream? Well, if itâs exclusively for men, then it wouldnât make much sense to advertise to women.
Thatâs the trick of finding a niche. You want to find one thatâs specific enough to target relevant customersâbut not one so specific that you never find any relevant customers. Itâs part art, part science, and youâre going to have to know how it works if you want your niche product to take off.
Examples of Niche Markets with a Strong Customer Base
We wonât start with the steps. Instead, letâs pretend you donât run an online niche, but you do want to learn how a market segment works. The easiest way to do this is to look at examples of niche markets with a strong customer baseâjust to give you an idea of how choosing a niche for your online business might work.
Pet Owners
Itâs so large, that you might not even consider it a niche market. The famous âpet rock,â for example, is one of those business ideas that many people didnât believe it could work. But when it comes to our furry friends, the target market is large. People want to and need to care for their animals, which makes anything designed for pets a potential way to reach a new market.
Beauty and Self-care
Again, weâre starting high up hereâbeauty and self-care are major industries. But theyâre not as universal as, say, selling water. These industries especially support a large influencer market. People canât get enough of YouTube makeup tutorials or high-quality skincare routine recommendations these days. In the world of digital marketing, this is one of the go-to products that consistently find engagement with its niche. After all, a jar of bronzer runs out, eventually.
Supplements and Health
Todayâs health market is hugeâand for good reason. People need to take care of themselves. Supplements are a huge market because we expect conveniences in our modern livesâwe want the vitamins and minerals we need, but we donât necessarily have the time to spend all day cooking. Healthcare in general is an enormous ânicheââif you can call it that. Itâs really a conglomeration of niches, which is one of the benefits of niche marketingâyou can continue to hone in on people's unique needs, or you can broaden your appeal. Itâs really up to you.
Digital Marketing
Blogging, growing your social media, advertising on Amazonâthereâs always something that people want to figure out online. From keyword research to tips on finding a profitable niche (how very meta of us!), youâll find that digital marketing is a surprisingly large market. People are launching their businesses online more and more these days. Thereâs a potential niche market in digital marketing anywhere you turn over a rock.
Fitness and Athletic Wear
You might consider this an offshoot of supplements and healthâand you might be right. But theyâre such a large market in and of themselves that fitness and athletic wear deserve their own mention. A lot of people have brand loyalty in this niche, because, after all, who wants to wear clashing clothes, even if itâs to the gym?
Food and Beverage
People need to eat and drink! Yet there is a more specific audience for different types of food and beverages than you might imagine. Yes, people around the world love Coca-Cola, so it seems like the broadest possible style of product. But you wouldnât believe the niche opportunities that rise all the time in the food and beverage arenaâheck, in the beverage arena alone. Consider the recent craze for carbonated beverages that arenât quite âsodas,â for example, and youâll see thereâs always room for a unique specific product.
Letâs put it this way. A few decades ago, did you ever hear of coconut water?
Travel
People love to travel. Love, love, love. Niche market ideas often come about simply from combining one of the niches above and combining it with travel. For example, what about food and beverage products you can take with you while you travel? Thereâs an instant niche. Or travel totes for dogs? Another niche. A beauty kit you can take with you wherever you go? Itâs such a large field of products, you might not even consider it âniche.â
One of the keys to the travel market is that it creates a lot of pain points for the traveler. They have to take care of themselves while they move. They have to seek out conveniences they donât have because theyâre not at home. This makes the travel market an ideal way to cross-reference with other niches and see what you can come up with unique markets that feel original.
Gaming
Again, weâre starting off at the higher levels here. Itâs fair to say gaming is not âniche.â Within gaming, there is PC building culture, livestreaming, competition, and all sorts of other mass market ideas that have created a loyal customer base over the years. Like travel, this one is easy to cross-reference with other niches to find new ideas. For example, a gaming chair combines furniture and gamingâeasy-peasy. Snacks designed for gamers? They exist, too.
Home Furniture and Organization
With the rise of Marie Kondoâs âThe Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,â there seems to be a mass market appeal to the idea of getting organized. And thatâs a good thing. If you can sell products that help people maintain better homes and clean up their lives, youâve tapped on a specific niche that can be profitable as well as helpful.
Remote Work
In the months during the onset of COVID-19, you might have noticed that stock in Zoom skyrocketed. What was going on? The world was becoming increasingly remote worker-friendlyâmainly out of necessity. Now that weâre in 2022, not many people are finding that they want to go back to work. Enter the major-market niche of remote work. People will even buy fresh plant subscription services to keep their home offices smelling fresh and looking good. Itâs a niche you can tap into from a variety of angles.
Home Improvement
And weâre not talking about the sitcom. Given how many homeowners there are across the countryâindeed, across the globeâit only makes sense that a huge percentage of them care about upgrading, maintaining, and repairing their homes. That makes for an absolutely enormous market full of repair tools, home-improvement kids, shelves, and anything else under the sun that you can consider part of making a home better. Cross-reference it with other items on this list and you may find some fun niches, as well.
Sustainable Products
A lot of people are concerned about plastic in the ocean. What does that have to do with your marketing efforts? Simple. Youâll find that sustainable products can turn existing products into a new niche. For example, letâs take plastic straws. People who really care about the environment donât want to use them. So you might market to a niche that wants to buy reusable, washable straws for specific types of drinks and drink containers. With any niche on this list, you might ask yourself if thereâs a large enough market to offer a more sustainable, plastic-free version of it.
Body Positivity
Clothing isnât really a niche, considering how all of us need clothes, but there is a market for plus-sized clothing that prompts body positivity and normalizes people of all sizes.
Education
It wasnât long ago that alternative methods of education formed through correspondence courses. But todayâs digital infrastructure makes it easier than ever to learn how to to build new skills. The digital world means you can teach someone in virtually any niche with video lessons, quizzes, PDFs, and more. Education is a large niche because of all it encompasses, but in digital marketing, it can be applied to any micro-skill you can think of and still become profitable.
How to Find a Profitable Niche Market
Whew. Thatâs a lot of niches. And those are high-level ones, the niches that contain multitudes of other niches.
So you might be wondering how your online business might fit into all of these niches. After all, youâre not planning on selling the next Coca-Cola, or building the next Fabletics. How do you find your niche without narrowing your choices down so much that you avoid a market altogether?
The trick is to start âniche-ing downâ until you find a sweet spot: an underdeveloped niche that still has enough people looking to buy what youâre selling.
Letâs explore some strategies for doing exactly that.
- Add a demographic or psychographic to make your niche more specific. For example, letâs say that your niche is gaming. A big market, no doubt. So how do you find a profitable market thatâs underdeveloped? You might go to gaming communities in social media platforms like Reddit to see what kinds of questions are asking. Maybe you come across a popular post by someone who is 70 years old and asking what gaming setup they should get. Voilaâyouâve niched down. What if you focused on products for an older demographic that wants to start gaming, but doesnât know how?
- Search individual product categories to see the niches that already exist. Letâs say you go to Fabletics, for example, while knowing that you donât want to compete with Fabletics. But you might be able to specialize and niche down. Why not browse their categories to see what other niches people are enjoying? You might not find a niche right away, but chances are youâll find stimulation for all sorts of new ideas that can help you develop your online marketing skills.
- Enter a Google or Bing search and look for âPeople also askedâŠâ about popular products. Hereâs a little SEO secret if youâre not into SEO: Google and Bing publish some of the most relevant questions that users are asking related to your own keyword. All you have to do? Enter in that keyword yourself. You can do this to find if there are any product questions that people are asking that makes a product or service more niche-specific.
- Weigh your results against popular keyword tools. If you use a popular keyword tool to see what people are searching for online, youâll get a sense of how many people might belong to the niche you picked. For example, letâs stick with the âbar soaps for menâ example from above. If you were only to advertise âpine bar soaps for menâ you might find that itâs not quite enough to support a businessâbut if you offered all sorts of different scents, you could create a business around that. Itâs all about discovering that sweet spot where your business has an edge, but doesnât get so specific that it niches itself out of the marketplace.
This should give you a few tools to start poking around and exploring various niches. But as you poke around, try to write down the niches that appeal to you. Then sleep on this list. Let it simmer overnightâor a few nights, whatever the case may beâand return to it. Try sharing the list with a few friends, to see if any of them stand out as particularly underserved niches.
Chances are, you wonât get very far until one screams at you as a potential niche to try out.
How to Create a Niche Market if There Isnât One Already
Letâs be honest: not every niche seems obvious at first.
Take the advent of the iPhone, one of the most revolutionary commercial products in the last few decades. The iPhone promised to bring all sorts of functionality to a single phone, providing it with a computer-like experience and putting it within the range of your palm.
Yet this niche didnât exactly exist before the iPhone. People simply didnât know that they wantedâor neededâa mobile phone with that kind of functionality.
Before small cellular phones, no one might think it would be a good idea to put a small, lower-quality camera into something that can fit in your pocket. Sure, mobility is niceâbut the idea of having a small camera that wasnât that high quality didnât sound all that great at first.
Then, things changed. People realized that they did like the convenience of having so many devices work through their phone. The world changed. Software grew with the mobile phones. People started using them for games more often. They started texting more often. Social media became a thingâand people wanted to see who was posting what on these things called âapps.â
Grantedâitâs kind of hard to compare a massive overhaul in the way we live to creating any old niche market from scratch. But letâs look at some specific steps you can create a niche market if you donât find one already:
- Be wary of listening to feedback. People often say one thing and do another. Itâs simply part of the human experience. Donât put too much stock into peoplesâ hypothetical opinions of your niche or your online store before you launch it. What really matters is what people buy, not what they say theyâll buy. And youâll often find that in business, the two concepts are very different things indeed.
- Move a niche into the future. One way you can create a niche market that doesnât already exist? Try to take a niche that already exists and add something to it. Some brands do this by combining existing concepts into something that hasnât been seen before. Other brands might do this by innovating in the technology, creating a new product category.
- Watch where customers are pointing you. Do you already have an online business up and running? If so, you have an invaluable source of information available at your fingertips, assuming you have analytics that can point you to what customers are doing. You can see which categories are getting the most traction. Which of these categories might you combine, to create a new âsubsetâ niche when you introduce new products?
Ultimately, moving a niche into the future is going to be a challengeâbut itâs certainly something you should keep in mind if you want to build a more unique online presence. And the more your company sticks out from the crowd, the more memorable your brand will become.
Choosing a Niche Market that Works For You
What is a niche market? It can be big or small. It can be wide or narrow. But ultimately it refers to a market that serves a particular set of people with specific tastes and needs.
In this article, weâve outlined many examples of large niche markets. But there are subsets of each of these niche markets that can keep going down and down the ladder until you arrive at something highly specificâi.e., cleaning kits for the jewelry you buy for your pet. Thatâs highly specific.
But keep in mind that specificity doesnât necessarily mean you wonât make a profit. Itâs up to you to test the niches, find out what works, and ultimately, position your brand to fit the needs of your target market.