super niching

Super niching means finding a really specialist area for your business, where you concentrate your efforts. And when I say concentrate on that super niche, I mean really concentrate, to the exclusion of all others.

You’re looking for a tiny group of people who have a very specific desire you can satisfy or a problem you can solve for them. Most of us don’t need or want thousands of customers. We want a steady supply of people we can help and who will pay us our sweetspot price.

Definition of super niche

Super niche means a focus on a very small niche or target market, usually one that is overlooked or seen as insignificant by other businesses.

When your competitors ignore your super niche audience or treat them the same as everyone else in the wider market, this creates an opportunity for you. You can go all in on your super niche and make them feel that you are the best choice for them.

Traditional niching

Traditional niching is a strategy they teach at business school, and it’s not really rocket science. You find a particular group of people to supply your services to and concentrate on that area. Big companies do this all the time. For example, HP makes a huge range of printers for all kinds of people, and their niches will be something like:

• Granny home users who want to print photos from their mobile or camera – sell them a colour printer which is good at photos, and prints from a Wi-Fi connection on a phone.

• Small office/home office folk who want to print, copy and scan in very small quantities – sell them a multi-function printer which prints slowly and is okay but not brilliant quality.

• Medium office – a bigger, faster machine, probably a laser printer which prints quite fast and is good quality, for 10 times the price.

• Bigger office – a super-fast, all bells and whistles laser printer which can print a whole book out in 5 minutes and doesn’t break down all the time, but costs a fortune

Which niche did you fall into when you bought your printer?

Traditional niches are still very large, much too big for most small businesses like us. T

Super niching – for 21st century small businesses

. Examples of super-niches might be:

• Businesses in Brighton, Shoreham and Worthing that need to find office space because they’re expanding and don’t have time to talk to estate agents themselves.

• People in Cardiff who are recovering from surgery within the last month and need extra help with rehabilitation and are able to pay (or have insurance).

• Women who have been unfairly dismissed from work because they were pregnant.

• Businesses where the board members have fallen out with one another and need mediation, specialist advice and help to get the team dynamics working in a healthy way again.

All four of these would be the basis of a brilliant super-niche new business or a super-niche for an existing business to transform into or to focus their efforts on.

It used to be that you had to be more of a generalist supplier. if you were a law firm, you offered all kinds of law, and could never really specialise. And you ended up looking and feeling exactly the same as every other law firm.

But now, when everyone’s first port of call to find a lawyer, new office space or board mediation is Google, you can build up a great business on a much smaller niche, if you get your online marketing right.

Super niching allows you to get super good at what you do

A superniche strategy allows you to build up a very firm foundation in your specialist area, both in marketing and in becoming truly amazing at what you do.

When you only have to worry about knowing everything there is to know about office space in Brighton, Shoreham and Worthing, you can get very in-depth with your knowledge of the area because you don’t have to know anything about Eastbourne or London. And that becomes your selling point, and why your business succeeds.

I can’t recommend this super niching strategy enough. Have a play with it and let me know how you get on.

Credits

Photo credit – Colin Hanson from Flickr on a creative commons licence.  I’ve included the koala because it’s so cuddly, and because these creatures have successfully evolved to fill a very particular environmental superniche which no other creature wanted.