Many eCommerce businesses offer a wide range of services and products, but they don’t know how to find a niche and keep struggling to become the market leader.
Instead of targeting a large population, you can focus your idea on a small portion of it. Narrowing your scope could provide you the opportunity to be the best in your field.
Imagine starting an eCommerce business from scratch in the health and beauty industry and trying to compete with the whole market.
Amidst so many products, competitors, and customers, it will be like an uphill battle just to secure your own place within a crowded industry like that.
It is always easier to build your eCommerce store around a smaller and engaged niche market.
A niche market allows you to get specific about what you are going to sell and to whom, which gives you a better chance of building a stable market position, even if you are a newcomer.
What Is A Niche Market?
Before getting into how to find a niche, it’s important to understand what exactly is a niche market.
A niche market is simply a small and focused subset of a larger market of businesses or consumers.
This group has a particular set of needs that can be met by a targeted service or product, that addresses those needs.
By working in a niche market, you can stand out from your competitors, establish a positive reputation for your business, and boost your authority as an expert in the field of your business, eventually attracting more customers to your service or product.
A niche can be defined by a series of preferences, qualities, and needs, such as:
- Price and budget
- Demographics (like age, income, and gender)
- Psychographics (values held, attitudes, topics of interest, and preferences)
- Geolocation
- Unique needs
These determining factors are so precise that they appeal to only a selected group of members of the broader market rather than everyone else.
Here are the tips and tricks that will help you find your niche.
1. Reflect On Your Passions And Interests
Is there a skill or hobby that you are particularly passionate about or are really good at? Take some time and reflect on your interest areas as potential niche market ideas.
Below are a few questions that you can ask yourself to spark your brainstorming:
- What skills come naturally to you?
- How do you enjoy spending your leisure time?
- Do your colleagues, friends, or family ask you for your advice on any specific topics?
- How do you approach problem-solving?
- What topics do you enjoy learning about?
Once you write down the answer to these questions, you might find yourself a list of ideas that can be considered for your eCommerce business’s niche market.
2. Identify Customers’ Problems And Needs
Think of the problems that are being faced by your target market and ask yourself how your passion or interest can turn into a product or service that can meet their needs.
What could be their motive to buy something?
Research your potential customers and determine their product research and purchasing behaviors and the challenges that they are currently facing.
There are various tools that can help you in exploring your buyer persona.
This will help you in getting a better idea of how you can provide value to your niche market with your business.
3. Research The Competition
Another important aspect of how to find a niche is researching the competition.
Let’s say you picked up a niche but it has huge competition in the market, it wouldn’t be such a great idea.
Besides, if you find a decent level of competition in your niche, you can research them and find out the gaps in the market.
If you feel that you can fill those gaps with your business and provide value to potential customers, it could be a great niche market for you.
You can use tools like Google Trends and ClickBank to explore the best-selling products that your potential customers are researching and determine if your new business can meet their needs.
4. Make The Most Of Keyword Research
Keyword research covers anything that consumers are looking for, what they need, and what they like.
You can use that technique to find out what is amongst the popular searches of your potential customers, and find a niche that could coincide well with your business.
If you have a broader industry in mind, you can even type that into Google, and let Google suggest you additional keyword strings or use the Google Keyword Planner.
5. Define Your Niche And Its Profitability
If you are dedicating your time and resources to a new business, it is essential that it has the ability to become profitable.
Here are a few factors that you can consider when finalizing the niche for your eCommerce business:
- Customer demographics
- Customer values and interests
- Customer location
- Product quality
- Price
When researching, if you find a decent number of similar products, but you see that there is not an overabundance of those products it would mean that your idea is profitable.
Take a good look at the price points of your competitors’ products so that you can price your own products accordingly.
Resources like Amazon (for products), agency directories (for services), G2 Crowd (for software), and price monitoring tools like PRICEFY.IO are really helpful when you want to evaluate your competitors’ pricing, and determine prices for your own services and products.
6. Test Your Product Or Service
Create a website or a simple landing page for your business so that your potential customers can find you on the web and research your business. Give out free samples to your target customers or offer a trial period of the product.
This initial test period would not cost you a large sum of money, but you can use paid ads and promotions to drive traffic to your website.
To assess if people want to put money towards your product or not, you can take advantage of platforms such as crowdfunding sites.
Not only will it help you in getting funding but also in getting your product in front of your potential customers. All is well if your test turned out to be successful.
However, if the test does not turn out as successful as you hoped, don’t scrap your idea and the niche entirely.
Go back to the ideas that you had thought of earlier and see if there are any key areas where you can still make your business successful in the selected niche.
If not, then it’s time to look for a different niche for your eCommerce business. Don’t lose hope, as it’s still better than launching a business completely into a wrong niche and then regretting it.
Conclusion
More than anything, the eCommerce landscape is highly competitive.
By researching niche markets and understanding how they can benefit your business, you are in a favorable position to identify the area of the eCommerce world that you might be able to corner and dominate.
Once you have done that, there will be no looking back. Use the above-mentioned steps of “how to find a niche” and turn your business into a market leader.
