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Benefit from differentiating market niche and offer

Written by: Molly Gordon

Article Overview: Find out why professionals often resist choosing a market niche and how you can benefit from thinking of your market niche as the location in which you make your offer.

Benefit from differentiating market niche and offer

One of the reasons that professionals resist choosing a market niche is that they confuse niche and offer.

Think of your market niche as the location or domain in which you make your offer.
By contrast, your offer is WHO YOU ARE and WHAT YOU DO. Your niche is WHERE and WITH WHOM you do it.

Here's an example of differentiating market niche from offer based on my client's coaching practice.

HER NICHE is working with independent professionals and artists to craft prosperous businesses or careers that fully align with their values, aspirations, and desired way of life.

THE OFFER THAT SHE IS in this market niche distinguishes her from hundreds of other business coaches. As an offer, she is a gifted somatic coach, helping her clients embody success. She is an artist and a business owner herself, and her coaching springs from a deep personal engagement with the concerns that her clients bring to the work.

The offer that she is also includes her spiritual beliefs and practices, her training as a singer, her skills as a writer and editor, her passion for learning, and much more. The offer that she is, in short, encompasses a lifetime of experience -- past, present, and future.

When she tried to discern a market niche based on the offer that she is, she was stymied. Was she a somatic coach? A creativity coach? A spiritual coach? Every niche seemed to be a too-small box, a dead end that limited her as an offer. When she conceived of niche as a location relative to the people she can best serve, niche became a refined point-of-focus for her unlimited and unique offer.

Having chosen a niche (or, more accurately, having acknowledged and accepted the niche that chose her,) she is now committed to honoring standards and boundaries that support that niche. She refers prospective clients who do not fit her niche to other coaches. She is careful to clarify her market niche whenever she writes or talks about her work.

By focusing her niche marketing strategy in this way, she can make a very strong impression. So can you. What's more, referrals have increased substantially. Every time she refers a prospective client who wants career coaching or some other service that she could easily do but that does not fit this niche, she creates a source of referrals. The client she turns away knows where her offer is of maximum value. He knows that she has the integrity to work within the domain in which she offers the greatest value. He won't hesitate to send people her way when they want business or marketing support.

SHOWING UP IN YOUR MARKET NICHE AS A POWERFUL OFFER

I used to see people's eyes glaze when I tried to tell them what I did. I knew I was losing them, but I didn't know how. Now that I name my niche before I describe my services, it is easy for people to connect with what I am saying.

There's a paradox in naming your market niche. When you give people a category to put your products or services in, it is easier for them to get a handle on what you do and to remember it. It's also much easier for them to appreciate how you differ from other professionals in that category. In other words, by putting yourself in a category, you can also make yourself stand out because you distinguish yourself from others in that category.

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Visit AuthenticPromotion.com to find more sound advice on niche
marketing: learn how focusing your niche market actually expands your appeal to clients, increases referrals, and leverages your unique background and interests.

Related Articles
  Declaring an Authentic Market Niche
  Finding a Niche Market
  Profit from a Niche Market
  Home Based Business; The Power of Niche Marketing
  Niche Marketing - Your Chance to Succeed in Internet Marketing Business

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Re: Some free advertisment opp - That is a very generous offer, indeed. What niche market does your website appeal to? How much traffic does it get per day?
Re: Starting a Online T-shirt Company - I recently started a tshirt printing and embroidery business. We are still in a start up phase but have already found out how important your niche is. We spent a lot of time finding our niche, our customers and how we would reach them. As soon as we attempted to market to our niche we found several flaws in our marketing plan. Luckily we were also able to talk to some people in our related niche and got some excellent ideas on how to market our products. I would suggest that you think about who you are going to sell to, where they buy their clothes now, who your competition is and how do they market to their customers. Then do a test marketing to see if it works. During the test of our marketing is when we found out it would take way too much time and money to market the way we had planned. Now we are marketing to a different market but with the same end customer. An example would be wanting to sell t-shirts with sport team logos. The market appears to be the sports fan. But when you look at marketing to all the sports fans in the country, state, county or school, you will find it very expensive and impractical. But if you have a unique enough of a design you can market it to the sports stores or concession stands and have them sell it to the sports fan. Yes, the money may be less, but the profit will be higher as you will sell more shirts than you could on your own.
Re: Online Teen Magazine... Tips - [quote="mathew":238ajid7]I think there are huge numbers of teens nowadays who are interested in entrepreneurship, like myself, though not really enough just yet to start a magazine just for this group. I like akula's ideas about gearing it towards the popular social network sites, you could definitely make something out of that![/quote:238ajid7] I was going to say the same thing. Your best bet is to find a niche market that 1. caters to teens 2. is based on that one niche market. That will help a lot with advertisers as well as readers. You have a lot of competitors and this is one way of going around them.
Re: Best Internet Marketing Strategies - [quote="christew":latsmlgi]Plus a niche is not a bunch of keywords, it is a demographic interested in a particular topic. You need to learn about the people in this demographic. Keyword research tells you their search habits and gives clues to competitiveness and potential profit, but you are looking at through a very narrow window of a much bigger picture.[/quote:latsmlgi] Good point. Knowing about both the group and the keywords they tend to use is of course the best combination, but if you thoroughly understand your niche market and your products, the content you write for your website and the articles you post elsewhere will almost certainly include natural "keyword phrases" even if you don't research the keywords - and if your niche is tightly defined, that will probably suffice. I am not saying you should ignore keyword research, but knowing your products and market is more important.
Re: Matching competitors prices - beware - [quote:2bbxdsgo]Are you talking about your carpet making business by any chance? I checked out your website the other day and was very impressed with the quality of the carpets you make. You have a great niche market here, and if you target the right market you should not need to look over your shoulder and worry about cheaper competition from overseas.[/quote:2bbxdsgo] Hi David, Yes I'm talking about the carpet making business, thanks for the compliment! I would agree that there is an attractive niche market - in fact several - related to this business. The challenges come when you are faced with the reality that you [i:2bbxdsgo]are not alone[/i:2bbxdsgo]. When we are bidding on the high-end projects, our main competitors are the manufacturers overseas in Thailand, China etc... as they do produce exceptional rugs. They are represented mainly by Interior Designers. We do get our fair share of the market because we are stealthy, faster, and have a more hands-on service. BTW - I don't really worry too much about the competitors because we are well established and have a good system in place. Most of our clients are coming via the internet, which is just the way I like it!


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