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The most important factor in setting up and operating a successful business is recognizing your ideal clients within your specific niche. For clarity sake, your target audience is the group of people who fall within a similar demographic with shared interests, values and beliefs. When you are clear about your specific niche, it will be much simpler to know your target audience. Once you know who your target audience is, you will then be able to deploy your marketing, including the process of your content and product development. Therefore, choosing a niche should never be underestimated. In this article, I will show you 5 proven steps towards discovering your niche and target market. Step 1: Identify Your Passion And Skills. The first and foremost step to take in discovering your niche is to identify what you are passionate about or the skill you possess. According to Henry Ford, a man who is passionate about his business will never have to work for a day. By identifying your passion and skill, you can easily monetize them. With these two keys combined, you will be able to build a solid foundation for your business. Doing something that you are enthusiastic about will keep you inspired and motivated in the long run, because you are doing something that you love. This will be the main drive that keeps you going whenever you feel like giving up. If you are doing something that you don’t enjoy, you have a higher chance of quitting as it will be more difficult to stay motivated. When you also choose something that you love, you’ll naturally be good at it. When you’re good at what you love to do, you will have the ability to solve problems in that particular market, because you are using a skillset that you already have. Step 2: Identify The Problems Of Your Target Audience. The next step is to identify the problems of your target audience. To build a profitable business, you need to understand the desires of your target audience to bridge the gap to help them get to where they want to be. To solve their problems, you will first need to be knowledgeable of the problems that they are facing. Therefore, how can you go about discovering the problems of your target market? With the internet at our fingertips, you can easily search for keywords on Google to find out what pain points our potential customers are facing. Facebook groups and Quora are great platforms to discover the questions that people are asking. They are also ideal places for market research. Take a look at the discussions that are taking place and try to notice what questions they are asking, along with what problems they are facing.
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Step 3: Research Your Competition. This is a pivotal point in your niche discovery journey. Knowing your competition can give you insights into what they are doing and what they aren’t so that you can know what new ideas you can bring to the market or the areas to improve on. Understanding your competitors will enable you to identify market gaps and fill their gap. You can get to ascertain your unique value proposition and determine whether the market is oversaturated or not. Knowing your competitors will give you an idea of how to overshadow them by exploring their strengths and weaknesses. Competitor research and monitoring your performance will help you be well-equipped with making improvements along the way. Step 4: Determine Possible Profitability. In conducting your market research, you should have an idea of the profitability of your niche as you gather data. Choosing an evergreen industry is one way to ensure that your business will be in a profitable market. Some markets tend to perform better than others because they are evergreen, which means that there is always a need in those markets. You can conduct market research using Google Trends to find trending topics and keywords that are highly searched. It is important to deduce whether the niche you have chosen has a need and whether people are willing to pay for what you have to offer. Step 5: Promote Your Idea. This is another important step you must take, which is promoting your idea. There are various ways to do this. Promoting your idea is a way to test run your idea to see if it is marketable. You can use crowdfunding websites like Kickstarter to build a crowded audience around your idea and raise funds in the process. You can also create a landing page on MailChimp and start collecting leads just to see how well the promotion goes and whether the niche that you choose has any demand. One of the fastest ways to do that is by running a few paid ads to direct users to your landing page and measure the performance of your ads. The unfortunate thing that can happen is choosing a niche with low demand, registering your company, and having your website up and running, only to realize that nobody wants your products or services. These are mistakes that you can avoid if you execute all these steps before finalizing your niche and getting things up and running. Featured image source: PinnacleCart
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