A niche market is a focused targetable portion or subset of a market. A business that focuses on a niche market is addressing a need for a product or service specifically for a narrowly defined group of potential customers.

Online, niche marketing is required more than ever.

Why? On the Internet, any business has the potential to reach global market. If on a small town a shoe store displays all sorts of shoes because of the number of potential customers is limited, online even shoes for very specific need suddenly is no longer small.

In my hometown I would be very surprised to find 500 stamp collectors in total, let alone joining a club to share experience and trade collections. However, even those who only collect certain theme of stamps could find a lot of collectors with similar interest online.

It Doesn’t Have to be Hard

You don’t have to work hard to find your niche market. It doesn’t have to be difficult at all. Sometimes, all you need to do is to fill one segment of a market that hasn’t been fulfilled by mainstream business.

Travel industry is an example of one with a lot of competitions. It’s next to impossible to rank high on organic search engines unless you spend a lot of time doing it. At the end of the day, there’s still no guarantee that people will choose your travel company over others.

With a bit of creativity, anyone should reveal many untapped market and get unfair advantage even over big and established travel companies.

The fact that the business targets specifically to the target market itself is enough of a unique proposition that the market automatically draw to it instead of the more generic company.

Examples of Niche Markets

Currently, most meeting planners rely heavily on sites like Travelocity or Expedia for hotel and service ratings. The information is not specific to meeting planners’ criteria.

MeetingUniverse.com is a niche travel site that caters to fill the business traveler and meeting planner markets. The site includes information otherwise not available in generic travel site that planners consider important when choosing a hotel.

This site offers the ratings and other information as a membership subscription service. Meeting planners should be able to save a lot of time when planning for a meeting in various cities around the country.

Let’s take an online example.

A 14-year-old kid was impressed with a travel destination his parents brought her to during a summer holiday. Her father suggested that she built a web site for her favorite beach, the Anguilla.

In a few months, she started getting and converting traffic from Google. She started publishing newsletter soon thereafter and drive even more repeated traffic from email contacts.

Anguilla beach lovers like the site and newsletter. They pass it to their friends around the world. People now consider Anguilla as a vacation destination of choice.

She successfully established a unique view of the vacation experience from her own eyes, and people like the personality.

She earns revenue from various sources include affiliate programs, service income, referral deals with local businesses, sales of e-books and guides, etc…

… All while working part time. Sometimes she has no time to work on the site because of her schedule, exams, and so on.

How’s that for competitions in a travel niche?

More Example of Niche Marketing in Actions

Another very competitive niche is dating. Many companies offer high amount of payment per lead for any affiliate who can drive them traffic. That’s about how lucrative the market is. They’re fighting for signups.

How does niche marketing helps?

Nowadays you can see a lot of niche specific dating sites, such as:

• Christian singles dating
• Dating sites for environmentally conscious singles
• Adult dating sites
• And so on…

Conclusion

Niche marketing is an important concept for small business, no matter which media you target. It’s not just pure theory that you read in books and articles.

You can do something similar. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination and effort to come up with a niche. The niche itself can become a strong unique selling proposition (USP) that is compelling to the target market.

Niche marketing can save a business. Less is indeed more.