By definition, a niche market is a very focused and restricted market often accessing a passion that has sales potential. For example, vegans are a niche market while food is only one area or category. It is important to distinguish between niche and ultra-niche markets in order to successfully understand your future customers and target them with the right product. This is where individual entrepreneurs make a lot of money and margin.
What is a niche and ultra-niche market?
If you sell everyday products that everyone consumes, we are not in a niche market. For example, selling chocolate, cars or furniture is not a niche market at all. You can find these products in your city without any worries and you don’t need the internet to find your happiness.
On the other hand, there are sub-categories of these categories. The deeper you dig into them, the smaller the market you will get. The interest here is to find and sell products that few people can afford. Even better if it’s a true passion (for example targeting ukulele in music). People are willing to spend a lot of money on passions, and you are able to get good margins compared to a larger market.
Let’s take the example of chocolate. Almost everyone loves chocolate. However, there is dark, white, milk chocolate and many other forms. This is not yet a niche. But if you dig deep enough, you will realize that there are some very interesting information about this chocolate. For example, if it is from a fair trade and organic. It is therefore a responsible chocolate and not everyone is sensitive to this. On the other hand, if the chocolate is coupled with original foods like goji berries or other berries. Selling chocolate is not a niche market, but selling organic chocolate from fair trade and made up of a combination of berries that are not found in the mainstream (e.g. blueberries or chili peppers), you may be on to something. We are on a market that will interest the lovers of chocolate, nutrition and who are concerned by a more responsible consumption. We are therefore entering a niche market that we have created from a global market. If we push the vice even further, we can focus only on dark chocolate and protein, we enter the ultra niche of sports lovers who consume only organic food and seek a healthy food to boost their energy after sport.
What are the advantages of targeting the niche?
The advantage is the disadvantage of selling in niches: the market is small. The smaller the market and therefore the more niche, the more likely you are to sell well, but that it also runs out very quickly. Nevertheless, you can last several months on a niche market and generate more than a hundred thousand euros in sales. Here are all the advantages of working on a niche market:
- You can make good margins because your product is not found on every corner.
- It is much easier to understand the problems of these people and to solve them, and therefore to target them with advertising, especially with facebook audience insight or google adwords.
- It’s also much more fun to market. Selling peas on the internet is not fun. Selling only Lego pieces on the internet is much more fun!
- It allows you to reduce your research and decision time by stumbling upon a product you like.
- If your market is about a passion, your future customers will always have a budget to spare to make an impulse purchase. It is therefore much easier to sell in a niche market.
- You may have very little competition in some niches, which is not necessarily a good signal to launch.
The interest of the niche market is that you will be able to obtain margins of times two, three or four very easily! Much more fun than working on a global market, you will be able to quickly find your new customers who are only waiting for one thing: to finally find the product you are selling and get it no matter how long it takes to deliver and how much it costs. They are patient buyers who are aware that they have to wait a little while for delivery and make some sacrifices to finally get what they want.
Niche ideas for dropshipping or for an internet business
On my youtube channel, I provide you with niche ideas that you can exploit, no matter what your business is. It could be a marketing opportunity for a start-up, a local or virtual business, a service provider or dropshipping:
- The steampunk which consists in selling clothes or accessories to dress like in the Victorian era.
- The chinchilla which is a small rodent that few people have and that they love to pamper.
- Zippo lighters sold with class.
- Vegan food, especially breakfasts and cakes.
- Electric scooters for sale to businessmen and city dwellers in a hurry!
- Board games dating back to the Middle Ages or even older.
- Lego game pieces that no one can find and buy.
- Divination card games for psychics or people interested in spirituality.
You see, there’s a nice list of niche ideas for selling on the internet. You just have to ask yourself the right questions and succeed in finding the product that will make you a little bit richer than yesterday 🙂 With our marketing trainings, you’ll blow your scores anyway! What about you, what areas and niches do you want to get into?
