Do you have a commanding influence on your market? Then you are dominating your niche. Do people refer to your ideas or are you featured in the latest articles when talking about your niche? Then you are dominating your niche. But if you answered “no”, then don’t worry we have some advice on how to successfully dominate your niche. Let’s look at the steps.
STEP 1: Clearly identify your ideal customer
Which customer do you get the most business from? Write out a clear description of this client. You know the general customer of your industry but try to pinpoint the exact customer you serve. For example if you sell wedding cakes, your broad customer would be people having weddings but let’s say you have a passion for gluten-free baked goods. Then you could focus on brides who have a gluten intolerance.
STEP 2: Look for competitors
If you find a niche and there are no competitors, there may be one of two things happening. You are a forerunner and will need to work hard to show your market that they truly do have the need you satisfy, or there is no market. Competition is good because it will help you to improve your offering.
When you find the competitors, look at their offerings and see if any clients are being underserved or if there are gaps in their products. This may be the place where your brand fits perfectly.
STEP 3: Serve the customer
For you to dominate your niche, you need to be laser-focused on your customer achieving their desired outcome. Back to our wedding cake seller, if they want to succeed they need to ensure their cake is made in an environment completely free of gluten and that they are able to make a beautiful and tasty cake. This will serve their customers’ need of having a great cake which won’t make them sick when they eat it on their important day.
STEP 4: Be innovative
To remain the top brand in your niche, you need to innovate. You need to find different yet acceptable ways of satisfying your clients’ needs. You need to have a vision of how you will satisfy your customers’ needs and test it to see how they receive it. Sometimes, they may like it and move forward with it, other times you may need to make some tweaks. But always ensure that you test your vision on the reality that is happening in your industry.
STEP 5: Seek the easiest route
Look at your processes. How do you acquire and keep your customers? Is your website intuitive, and can your customer easily find the product or resource they need? By making your processes easy and friendly to use your customers will continue to trust you. They will also use word-of-mouth advertising to let those around them know how easy and enjoyable it is to work with your brand.
Secondly, when you have easy processes for your staff, you have a better chance of ensuring that your customer has a unified experience across all their touchpoints with your brands.
By following these five steps, you will become the thought leader in your industry and others will look to you to see how to get ahead.
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