Niche or No Niche?

The question has to be asked when it comes to promoting your business: are you going to be focusing on a niche market or not?

What kind of difference will it make to focus on one or the other? In some ways it really will not make much of a difference at all. You can use many of the exact same marketing platforms for both niche and non-niche markets. Postcard marketing is quite effective with both.

Some marketing will be more effective depending on which you choose. Given how important location is to poster printing, it becomes particularly effective with a niche market. After all, the smaller your market is the easier it is to find locations that will appeal to a wide part of your desired audience.

But let us look at this in basic terms for those who do not know as much about what exactly makes something a niche market.

These kinds of markets are naturally smaller and usually centered around a single type of business or interest. One example is a company a friend of mine used to work for who sold database software.

Now, many different companies can make use of good database software. Instead of trying to target every market that could use them, they instead centered their attention entirely on school administrations. By doing so they could focus their marketing in a way they would have never been able to had they gone for a broader market.

However, by default they now have a smaller pool of customers to choose from, and since new schools are not exactly popping up left and right, they also limited their ability to grow unless they expanded beyond that initial market.

Some niche markets are naturally growing, and because of that, allow you to keep the same kind of focus in your advertising while continuously increasing the size of your customers.

Remember that computers were once a niche market. Today they are about as mainstream as you can get. This was a market that continued to grow so much the first companies who focused on what had been a niche were able to be seen as the original champions of the industry, and reaped the benefits because of it.

Back to the original question: should you go for a niche market? That is not something easy to answer, and each market will have its own strengths and benefits.

Rather then say exactly what a company should do, instead you need to be aware of the impact choosing to focus on a niche will have on your approach to marketing. Will you go for poster printing over brochures? Will you create a very specific message with your marketing meant for a small audience or try for a broad approach to target as many people as you can?

The decision is yours. Just be sure you know all the facts before you make one.

Author: Lynne Saarte