What is your niche?
The most successful businesses are highly specialized. They have a product or service that serves a particular market segment or niche that no one else is serving very well or is not provided at all.
The have also done their market research and know that the niche market is large enough to provide them with enough sales.
Years ago I learned this in the printing industry. I had a compnay called Gold Leaf Printing. My competition was every other printer in the valley, an some outside the valley! So I found a niche. In fact, I found several niches!
I began a new company as a DBA called “Medi-Forms”. This company specialized in printing for the medical industry. I learned all I could about printing that the medical industry needed and requirements for them. Then I taught that to my sales team. I printed business cards and price catalogs for Medi-Forms. When my sales staff called on a prospect, we could tell them that Medi-Forms specialized in medical printing and all we printed was medical forms!
Now the printing we sold for Medi-Forms was printed with the same equipment that all out other printing was printed (Gold Leaf Printing), but we were serving a niche that no body else in the valley could say they served exclusively!
Did it work? You bet it did. Large hospitals that wouldn’t even talk to us before now invited us in! Sales sky rocketed! Marketing was so much more to the point for Medi-Forms. Since we knew our target market so well, we geared all our marketing for them and them only. We really stood out!
I went on to create other new companies, including “Restaurant Forms” (serving the food industry), “Property Forms” (serving the real estate industry), “Legal Forms” (serving lawyers, etc) and a few others. Each new company specialized and only printed those products in their industry. I only created the new companies one at a time and only after the current company was successful. I also hired a separate sales team for each company and made sure each salesman was an expert in that industry.
Whatever stage your business is in, focusing it as tightly as possible on one or two areas will make it easier for you to attract clients or customers.
The natural fear of narrowing your market is that you will have fewer people to sell to and thereby fewer people will buy your product or service. In reality, the opposite is true. As long as the special area you have chosen has enough potential customers, the more specialized your business, the more people will be able to recognize the benefit of what you offer them.