Niche Marketing Strategy
For A Home Based Business
For a home based business a niche marketing strategy makes much more sense than the big company type brand building advertising you might see on TV or in glossy magazines. By the way, you may want to take a quick look at my practical definition of marketing.Before you consider any form of advertising for new business, you need to assess whether your new enterprise has a decent chance of making profits. FINDING A PROFITABLE NICHE - A GAP IN THE MARKET The first step is to understand the importance of marketing research, and try to discover whether there is a gap in the market - a niche - which your service can fill. What is this gap? It is a bunch of people with money who want to buy something - and they can't find anyone to buy it from. If you think you have a great idea but the fact is that no one wants to buy your service, your home based business will not succeed. There is no gap. Conversely, if people do want to buy but there are plenty of businesses already supplying what they want, it's probably a bad idea to become yet another supplier offering the same service. Again there is no demand - supply gap. For a successful niche marketing strategy you need to identify a product or service that is wanted by sufficient people with money to pay for it. You then need to check the strength of competition. It's all about high demand and low supply. Let's say that you find a gap where you do have a few competitors but also there seems to be room for you to make a go of it. The next step is to understand something about positioning in marketing. This will help you develop your USP or Unique Selling Proposition as part of your differentiation strategy Here's the number one question you will need to answer before wasting money on advertising: Why should anyone do business with me rather than with my competitors? Once you can answer that question, you can start advertising your business - testing the market and using a target marketing strategy to direct your advertising efforts towards you most likely customers. One good and low cost way to carry out market research is by exploring local or online home business networking ideas - also a good resource where you may find owners of small businesses with practical suggestions about how to take your business forward. PROVIDING GOOD CUSTOMER SERVICE & SELLING You also need to provide good customer service on a consistent basis. One likely route to business failure is to find a gap in the market, develop a good USP, and then deliver a service or product to your customers that simply fails to live up to the hype.
It's also interesting to assess your potential competitors in this light. Are their customers happy or do they complain about poor service or inconsistent delivery? Your business opportunity might be based on providing customers what they want - and what your competitors are not giving them. So, making the right promises in your marketing is also one of the keys to good customer service. Your marketing strategy should be based around knowing what you can deliver to customers on time every time - the essence of providing good customer service - as well as your research about what your potential customers want to buy. This will also help when it comes to the sales process where you can work out the best situation, problem and implication questions to ask potential customers, following the Spin Selling technique - a step by step approach explained by Neil Rackham in The Spin Selling Fieldbook. You can use these principles to develop a step by step Spin Selling strategy - creating a series of the questions relating to the type of solutions you can offer to your niche customers. SUMMARY
If you're wondering where to start, here are some summary articles on marketing ideas for small businesses and local small business marketing.
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