How to find your business (or social media) niche

If you’ve just started your journey into building a brand, one of the first steps is to find your niche. Your niche is your business (or your brand) and the specific clientele you want to target.

It is something you are passionate enough about to create a compelling story around (or book someone, like me, to create a story for you). Once you have that brand story you can form a media strategy, and begin to persuade your customers.

This blog is not designed for experts, it is for everyday businesspeople trying to make sense of the modern media landscape.

Maybe you are the director of a multi-million dollar company but you slept with your marketing manager and now they’ve quit, drats, now you have to do your own marketing!

Maybe you are new to social media and you want to learn how to be influential enough to grow followers, or maybe, you just want to learn how to manage perceptions and tell a captivating story in your Tinder bio- that’s OK too because after all,  even our online personal profiles are a form of marketing.

We can all benefit from knowing marketing, and how to shape a brand.

Finding your ‘niche’ or ‘passion’ is integral to your business success. You may already have a successful business and niche, but if you don’t, now is the time to think of your ideas.

• Can you find a gap in the market of your chosen niche and fill it?

• Can you build a product that will make a difference in the world?

• Is your current brand something you are so passionate about that you can stand behind it through thick and thin?

• What is the unique value proposition that you can offer a customer?

• Can you solve the problem of a specific niche?

These are some things to consider. You have no idea how many business owners I have met who struggle to tell me what their point of difference is, or what they stand for. If they don’t know this, how on earth can I help them tell a persuasive story?

If you are a budding social media influencer reading this, or even a business looking for a stronger sway over your social following. You may want to ask yourself what your social function will be. Are you a health and fitness advocate? Or a fashion influencer?  Or do you just want to do something wacky for attention like @dudewithsign?

This account, which is just a man holding up witty signs in public places, grew to 3million+ followers in the space of a week and is now a verified account. How did he get such traction? Because he did something different and got attention.  He subverted the paradigms of Instagram by holding up signs with messaging such as ‘stop sharing your post in your story.’ Ironically, @dudewithsign is now an influencer.

This book was a result of brainstorming to find my own niche. What am I passionate about? I asked myself, What am I good at?

I am a writer, who is obsessed with media and has worked in advertising for the last ten years. When the book came to me it was as though a light bulb had been ignited, and I wish that I had taken the time to sit and think about what my unique value proposition was earlier.

I was sitting in the salon chatting with my hairdresser:

‘I’m looking to get more business so I don’t have to work my second job’ She told me, as she applied the final foils to my hair, and successfully made me look like a crazy woman who wants to use a tin foil headdress to communicate with extraterrestrials.

‘You post amazing transformation shots on Instagram. With a little bit of marketing you would have heaps of new clients’ I replied.

My hairdresser sighed ‘I spoke to a friend of mine about helping me set up social media advertising, but she charged so much money.’

Ding! A light bulb ignites in my psychotic mind.

‘It’s easy to do it yourself!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m going to write a simple blog on the subject. Would you read it?’

‘Yes!’

I imagine this was the moment when her eyes filled up with tears of happiness and she looked at me as her saviour, but in reality, she probably just said yes so, I would book another appointment.

Whatever she was thinking doesn’t matter because I had found my niche. Perhaps there’s merit in tin foil hats after all!

In case you are still stuck for ideas, we will now cover some simple steps you can follow to find your niche.

Think about your skills and passions.

Get out a notebook and pen and brainstorm the things that you are interested in and what you are good at.

Growing a brand or building a following isn’t easy and you need a niche you care about.

Passion is really important in determining what your niche will be. Brands can take years to grow so you need something that you are willing to dedicate your life to.

Trust me I know. I have dabbled in many start-up ideas, and although I have learned from them because my heart was not there from the start, I was not able to find the drive to grow these brands.

Believe it or not, I was umming and ahhing about writing a how-to dating book before this. Needless to say, this got scratched from the list of my possible author topics when I looked at my dating history and realised it really hadn’t been all that successful.

Think about your market

Now you have a list of all the things you are passionate about or skilled in.

Next, think about whether there is a market for your niche, or if you could use any of these skills to fill a gap in the market.

The best way to create a brand that catches on is to solve the problem of a niche rather than trying to market to simply everyone.

Ask yourself if there are problems in your niche that your brand or product could solve.

Ask yourself how profitable you think your business could be.

Let's use dating apps as an example. Here in New Zealand, the two big players are Tinder and Bumble. Tinder emerged first on the scene in 2012 and by 2014 was registering up to one billion swipes per day, but Bumble (who launched in 2014) was able to steal some market share by solving a simple problem of the niche; they made it mandatory for the women to message first. This simple alteration means women no longer have to worry about whether they should send the first message or not. 

This was a smart move by Bumble because dating apps are like nightclubs, once you get the women, the men will come. 

Research your competition

Finally, research your competition. Have a look at how many people are doing what you want to do. Ask yourself can I compete? Or better yet, do it better? What would be my point of difference?

So if dating was the niche you wanted to go into, you would look at these two big players with the eyes of someone in the dating niche and see if they were lacking, or if there was a problem in this niche you could solve that the other big players haven’t yet. 

If you are an influencer you can use this formula also. For example, let’s say your passion is cooking and living a healthy lifestyle. You decide you want to set up an account around healthy living and eating. However, when you do some competitor research you discover there are multiple accounts with this genre, so you decide to reduce your niche even more. You decide to specialize in a raw vegetarian diet.

Then you may realise that there is a shortage of pre-made raw food deliveries and decide to solve the problem you have discovered in your niche by starting one.

This is my quick three-step formula for finding your niche, take a moment to think about your points of difference and what you stand for. When you have decided upon a niche, think about whether this niche has a problem you could solve.