Three ways to help better position your business for market success

Finding your business niche is the first step in defining your brand. If you don’t understand how to market your business or know what you’re selling and why, then you won’t be able to market your business effectively.

It is important to find your business niche so that you can:

• Differentiate yourself from your competitors;

• Optimize your website for the right keywords;

• Have a clear message in all marketing materials;

• Develop new ideas or products that appeal to your target market.

Here are 3 ways to make finding your business niche easier:

1. Limit your focus.

Have you heard the saying “Go big or go home?” Not in this case. To differentiate yourself from the competition and attract more visitors to your website, you need to be very specific about what you offer.

For example, companies can offer a variety of marketing services. However, they wouldn’t get very far if we just used the keyword “marketing services” on their website or put that term on their business cards.

Instead, they promote a number of different services on their website, marketing materials, and in the real world, such as brand and marketing consulting, website development, and SEO.

Concentrate and you will find your niche or business niches.

2. Define your target market.

You’ll hear this over and over in marketing tips – finding the right audience to target is crucial.

Many business owners make the mistake of trying to be everything to everyone, or launching a website full of content that doesn’t speak clearly to the people they want to reach.

Think about who wants what you sell. Are they entrepreneurs? HR professionals? Stay home, dads? Tech-savvy Millennials?

Once you’ve found your target audience, you can narrow down and define your business niche even further. In addition, you will be able to create search engine optimized content that will attract and inform exactly who you want to buy your products or services.

3. Know the competition.

It is essential to know what kind of competition you face when you are defining your business niche. Get started with Google.

Search for keywords that people might use to find your business. If you see pages and pages of results and a lot of PPC ads (those are the paid ads that appear on the right and sometimes above the organic results), the competition is high for that keyword or keywords.

You probably want to narrow down your niche further or find another niche to target. For example, if your niche is corporate fitness training but there is a lot of competition, think of other keywords to optimize your site, perhaps corporate office training, executive fitness training, and corporate weight training.

The trick is to find the balance between low competition keywords that have decent search volume. If you’re the only one using a specific keyword but no one searches for it, you won’t get the results you want.

Once you have defined your business niche, you will be able to market your products or services more effectively.

You’ll know your focus, target market, and competition, which will make differentiating your brand and defining your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) much simpler.

A good branding strategy takes time and ideally professional help to make sure you have everything you need for a clear, concise and compelling brand message.