Niche Marketing: How To Make Your Brand Different from Your Competitors

How To Make Your Brand Different from Your Competitors

WHO IS YOUR CUSTOMER?

Who are the potential customers and how will you reach them? They are the reason why you have a business in the first place. The business idea is about solving their problem, therefore you need to know who they are, where they are, what they need, and how to reach them.

The fashion business is quite vast so you can not just come up with a blanket mission statement like “I want to make quality and affordable clothes for all functions.” That is vague and caters to the whole population of consumers in your location.

No start-up can seriously aim to serve every single tailoring need in their location alone. You simply do not have the resources to achieve that. Before you start using up your limited resources let us sit down and sort this out first!

Find Your Niche

A start-up cannot expect to compete with the bigger boys in any industry. But as an underdog, the crumbs falling from their table is enough to grow big on until you can sit at the table. There is a population of underserved or unserved consumers in every industry that you could target to build your customer base from the ground up.

The prudent thing is to find them, focus on meeting their needs alone, and do it well. As you grow you can expand your customer reach, but as a newbie, that small community of unsatisfied consumers is your lifeblood. This type of focused marketing is called a niche business or a niche market.

Niche What?

A niche is a biological term, it means a comfortable or suitable position in life. In layman’s terms, it means a sure footing that you build on first before venturing into the larger market.

A niche market is the subset of the market on which a specific product is focused. The market niche defines products, services, or interests that appeal to a small, specialized section of the population. It is also called a small market segment. The niche market is highly specialized, and aiming to survive among the competition from numerous super companies.

Let’s go back to Mercy, the Ikeja fashion designer.

See Also: Why Business Plan Might Be The Only Solution to Your Business

Example Of Finding A Niche Market

Mercy, a fashionista recently moved to Ikeja to start her business and grow it into a medium-sized enterprise within 10 years. But Ikeja is full of fashion brands that are supersaturated with talents, capital, and ideas. It seems that there is a cloth-making or selling business per square kilometer.

So she had to compete with imported ready-made clothes, second-hand cloth merchants, custom-designers, already established fashion designers with access to larger resources, and other small-scale start-ups like hers.

The fashion market is one of the largest markets in Ikeja with numerous subsets. We have established that Mercy is a cloth maker but that just makes Mercy one of the thousands of cloth makers in Ikeja. What can make Mercy stand out in the crowd? Mercy needs to identify the following:

0ne specialized service she can provide excellently,
A small section of the population that need that service, and
If the small population is large enough to create a profitable enterprise.

Mercy may do these herself or she can get a business consulting agency like ManicleWorld to do all the groundwork for her. The fashion business is used as an example here but niche business applies to any business in every industry.

Understanding a niche market is having the people within that market who have similar problems or need that you intend to solve.

Ikeja is her local market, a smaller subset of the Lagos market, but we will further sectionalize her target audience by highlighting the problems she can solve within the market and settling on a small customer base that she can comfortably provide her service too.

Yes. Ikeja is a commercial hub and residential area, therefore a business start-up could choose to provide business-to-business (B2B) services or business-to-consumer (B2C) services.
B2B or B2C

How To Make Your Brand Different from Your Competitors

1. Identify Your Product/Services

Take your time and plan your business. As earlier stated, this applies to any business in every industry. Analyze your industry or consult ManicleWorld, determine what specialized service you can comfortably provide that will set you apart from the crowd.

2. Identify Your Customer Base

Define your ideal customer demography and targeting them based on your research. Create a brand that deliberately targets them. Determining the price range, production quality, and the demographics that you intend to target so that you streamline your resources to meet this target instead of catering to the whole population.

For instance, if your brand falls under the fashion industry, you will need to understand certain things. factors that influence consumers’ taste in tailormade clothes are religion, physical attributes, economic status, tradition, and season. You could choose to target Muslim women, or curvy ladies, or middle-aged career women, or nursing mothers, or high-end consumers.

You could specialize in baby clothes, girls' or boys’ clothes, bridal wears, adire attires, evening gowns, for-rent dinner dresses, and tuxedoes, etc.

And if you are in a different industry, you can think of it in the line of your industry. The rules are the same. You could also decide to opt for professional market analysis and recommendations that would help you discover your niche. simply request for the service via mail here. You can also contact them directly via WhatsApp

3. Understand The Market Size

Do a reality check and decide if your market is large enough to pay your bills. This is important because a major aim of any business is to make a profit. You have to determine how many customers you need to have a favorable turnover. If your niche market is too small, you need a bigger problem. You could partner with a related service provider to hit a larger market. You may need to change location or do your SWOT analysis (contact Manicle via mail or WhatsApp).

A niche market is oftentimes characteristically small so it is measurable. Capital needs can also be determined and net profit calculated based on the market size, so you can know if the business is worth doing.

The Power of Focusing on a Niche

The good thing about niche business is that you can channel your limited resources into efficiently solving the problem of your target audience enough to gain their trust and retain them. Since you can identify your target audience, you do not need to spend too much on marketing to the general population. You create your brand and market your brand specifically to your target market.

Referral or word-of-mouth marketing is a big bonus in a niche business. If you offered an excellent service to a customer, he/she would recommend you to another potential customer. If you have a website or social media page, you could convince your satisfied customer to write a review of your service on the page.

Research has proven that referral marketing is the most effective form of marketing and it is free of charge.

Your customers are easily identifiable and accessible so you can cut out a lot of unnecessary cost in production and service delivery. If you need to use influencers, you can easily identify the right influencers that fit your niche, you may discover that some influencers are willing to promote your services unprompted and for free because they also fall into your target audience.

Niche Strategy

So, what do you need? You need a market strategy or in this case, a niche strategy. I have discussed them through the length of this article, let me list your niche strategy out for you:

a. Carry out a market analysis. Here, you will:

Select your target audience
Determine an underserved or unmet need
Research your customer base

b. Create your business plan.

c. Market your business to your target audience.

While it is good to have knowledge of these things, knowledge in itself is useless until applied. If you feel you are ready to apply but need the help of a professional assistance to go about your niche, simply chat me up and let's get started. If you also have comments, contributions or questions, kindly ask in the comment box or reach me directly. Thank you.

Written by

Faniran Olumide

Content Writer. Manicleworld

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